Will you join us in our mission to pursue Truth, Goodness, and Beauty by making a gift to us today? I am yearning for conservative voices offering great depth, thoughtfulness, and dare we say, grace. Is it possible to be strong in conservative principles and to present those principles in a manner which is attractive, [...]
This Advent season does not center on our achievement; it is not the time of puffing ourselves up, but of waiting for God to reveal, as only God can, the new thing under the sun that breaks the great cycle of vanity. The greatest things are born from humility. There is something essentially comic about [...]
If in fact the prudential, immediate goal of conservatives is simply to defend what remains of our heritage and forestall a slide into anarchy, then what is it conservatives can do to sustain our Republic of Hustlers? At our 2009 annual meeting, the Scholars Council of the Library of Congress was exposed to some surreal [...]
American conservatism is rooted in what it understands to be the principles which guided our Founders; principles which, in turn, it sees as rooted in the better part of Western civilization, though adapted to the peculiarities of the American condition. The chief difficulty in assessing the state of contemporary American conservatism is arriving at some [...]
Anger has come to characterize our polarized political environment. And in recent years, conservatives and Republicans have seemingly been injected with anger. But this angry identity is not compatible with the central meaning of conservatism. An admirable trait of conservatives is their willingness to openly reexamine their policies and prescriptions. Then again, the troubling trait [...]
Conservatism since Edmund Burke has been about the cultivation and protection of intermediary institutions, of local communities, and of families. Rarely, if ever, does the nation-state, known as The United States of America, serve to protect any of these things. Over the last few years, we’ve seen many divisive conversations about such things as “national [...]
Here are my ten recommendations for reading, from Augustine’s “Confessions,” to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, to Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” 1. The Bible. It is one of the first books I read (not cover-to-cover, at first, of course), and the first book I memorized passages from as a child. I cannot imagine trying to think about or comprehend the [...]
When it’s written, the history of our time won’t dwell long on the hardships of the recent past. But history will ask: Did a nation borne of hope lose hope? Did a people forged by courage find courage wanting? Did a generation steeled by hard war and a harsh peace forsake honor at the moment [...]
I take the blame for this idiosyncratic list. Since my betters have identified so many stellar choices, I propose the somewhat obscure: books (presented in no order) that may lead an already-humane human in the direction of the holy as unexpected and inspirational, maybe mischievous and mirthful. Great? Maybe not, but possible nectar for an [...]
With Aristotle and Moses, Russell Kirk believed that man could only live truly and freely in community, and only through community could one pursue the good, the true, and the beautiful. Community sharpens our best selves, while attenuating our selfish impulses. It gives order and context to our existence. Russell Kirk never liked the word individualism, [...]
This is a quirky list. I sit here with tattered old books, some new ones, and my Kindle, and love them all; and offer ten that I have read in the years since my retirement from full-time teaching. Each has given me joy, and each speaks to what Brad Birzer calls the “human condition.” Booth [...]
Today, conceptions of virtue are at open war, with Christian virtue being termed “bigoted” on account of its failure to abandon the family, the unborn, and our duty to serve our God, in the face of an alternate vision of virtue as autonomous action circumscribed by an all-encompassing toleration that equates indifference with caring. Believe [...]
The true historian attempts to recapture the past for its own sake. He goes about this goal intentionally, always resisting the temptation to eschew complexity for relatability. He is better able to get to the root of an inquiry, to discern what really happened from what we wanted to happen, to learn what past men [...]
It is the perennial task of the conservative to disentangle the truth from the weeds of confusion which keep growing up around it. Samuel Francis and Patrick Buchanan have greatly contributed to the present resurgence of conservative elements rising up in America. Whatever political victories may come of their work should certainly be celebrated. “Go [...]