After returning home from 20 years of warring and wandering, the Greek hero Odysseus was confronted by his long-suffering wife, Penelope, who could not accept the homecoming of her husband without personal reassurance, so tested she had been by the gods and the years. So she called for their bed to be dragged from the [...]
To observe the decades-long paralysis of America’s political elite in controlling her borders calls to mind the insight of James Burnham in 1964 — “Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.” What the ex-Trotskyite turned Cold Warrior meant was that by faithfully following the tenets of liberalism, the West would embrace suicidal policies that would [...]
Pearl Street, Boulder, CO The beauty of Colorado’s Front Range continues to overwhelm me. I do not think it is a mere temporary giddiness as the Birzer family adjusts to its new home. Everything feels not only comfortable culturally for this writer raised in neighboring Kansas, but every varied environment as the Great [...]
A year ago, while on a panel with that extraordinary radio personality, Mike Church, and a few folks from another website, I think I caused a bit of a stir by arguing that a real man’s existence was about protecting one’s family from the world, conserving what little order could be found in the family [...]
Russell Kirk recognized that conservatism most closely honors the way men and women ought to act among their neighbors in community and in matters of transcendent faith. Rooted in the small community, conservatism is homely and humble, and it makes for respectful peace within families and among neighbors. It is brought about by example and [...]
Distributism is the name given to a socio-economic and political creed originally associated with G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Chesterton bowed to Belloc’s preeminence as a disseminator of the ideas of distributism, declaring Belloc the master in relation to whom he was merely a disciple. “You were the founder and father of this mission,’”Chesterton [...]
Now is the time of year when students finishing high school have to make a thrilling and at the same time daunting choice: Which college should I attend in the fall? Those who are lucky enough to have multiple options often must choose among schools that are quite different in character. The decisions are difficult [...]
I’m from Seattle (the area if you want to be picky). Now I know that everyone likes to brag about their city being a sports town, but Seattle takes the cake. How else do the Mariners continue to have fans? Why is soccer actually popular here? And why the heck won’t the NBA move back!? [...]
A Summer 2013 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, (“Saying No to Teach for America”) provides yet another indication of why our children are becoming ever-less educated despite the billions we put into their education. The story tells of Teach for America’s travails in the People’s Republic of Minnesota. Teach for America is a [...]
Professor Yasmin Chan Feldman scowled and handled the stack of papers as if they were mildly toxic. It was a conscious anachronism; the historian printed them because she was proud of being both old and old-fashioned. “I’ll protect your anonymity,” she told her students tartly, “merely to save most of you from embarrassment. Your papers [...]
I was out driving this morning, doing some errands. A car ahead of me was going about 30 in a 55 speed limit zone, and as usual I was annoyed. Going so slow, I was forced to look around. I saw businesses working, signs that told me where I was. A man who recently bought [...]
The most obvious and important thing that must be said about Russell Kirk concerns the harmony that existed between his public and his private life. He was an integrated man who lived what he wrote. There were no disappointing disjunctions between the private and the public self. On the contrary, the happy domestic life at [...]
Featured Book: The Quest For Community, by Robert Nisbet, ranks high among the foundational works of post-war American conservatism. In it, Nisbet argued that the emergence of the “centralized territorial State” in the wake of the Middle Ages decisively impacted Western social organization. Nisbet was particularly sensitive to the rise of the “national community,” the total political [...]
The rise of techno-capitalism has signaled the triumph of the “bourgeois family” and the demise of the “traditional” family. Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas said that economist Adam Smith was well aware that the “weakening of familial ties would increase the necessity of sympathy between strangers and result in cooperative forms of behavior that had not [...]