Given that human beings’ aspirations are framed by limitations, there will always be a dynamic tension between God and man, faith and reason, the absolute and relative, the universal and the particular, unity and diversity, Jerusalem and Athens, liberty and order. Though the work is never finished, historian Stephen J. Tonsor III entered into this [...]
By using Google’s Ngram Viewer, we find that Russell Kirk’s reputation hit its highpoint in 1964, and then began a painful decline that remained unabated until his death in 1994. What does Ngram tell us about other conservative authors, like Robert Nisbet, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and Christopher Dawson? While I would never consider myself [...]
While Robert Kagan basically dismisses church and community in the development of liberalism, can there be any sadder but more important concession than his own admission that “liberalism has no particular answer” for what can legitimize its rights? An essay is meant to be very, very important when it consumes four giant pages in the [...]
The impetuous call to sack Roger Scruton shows those who clamored for the blade of the guillotine to fall on his head for what they are. His sacking also exposed the concerted effort to demonize and silence anyone outside the public orthodoxy of thought... Sir Roger Scruton is one of the preeminent conservative intellectuals in [...]
The West has been undone by consumerism, the Sexual Revolution, outsourcing, urbanization, and centralization—all defended by modern conservatives as “the price we must pay” to live in a free and prosperous country. They’re wrong. As Russell Kirk argued, the principal function of government is not to ensure the material security and comfort of its citizenry. [...]
President Trump recently took $60 million away from Planned Parenthood, the first president ever to do so. This and other unique pro-life initiatives of his turned my mind to certain claims made by the pro-life Smart Set back in those crazy days of the 2016 campaign. In March 2016, a group of old and very [...]
God suffers evil, in both senses of the word. He allows it in his sufferance and defeats it in his suffering. His eternal will is accomplished in the sufferance and suffering of the Cross, as he tells us in the words he himself utters from the Cross itself. We live in a world in which [...]
Those who make too much of Representative Ilhan Omar’s statement, and who are happy to gain some short-term win by conflating legitimate concern over Israeli influence with anti-Semitism, run the risk of permanently connecting the two terms... I was sitting under a huge oak tree on my college campus reading a political science textbook when [...]
While Tucker Carlson’s rhetorical reach may not stretch as far and wide as William F. Buckley’s, he evokes the same gaily combative spirit that young conservatives of the 1960s admired in the founder of National Review. The Bill Buckley of the paleoconservatives has arrived, and just in time for the Trump era. While Tucker Carlson’s [...]
This confused climate of massive global networks arrayed against isolated individuals favors the appearance of vague terms like nationalism and populism. People reason that if global networks and selfish, false elites are destroying the nation, they must naturally step back and restore the nation-state to its rightful place in the hearts and minds of citizens... [...]
The sirens tempted unwary sailors towards the rocks with their enchanting song and alluring loveliness. They often stand for the lusts of the flesh, but their destructive allure perhaps more powerfully stands for the seductive enchantment of primitivism, fundamentalism, and restorationism. […]
Latent in the seeds of all social movements, Charles Péguy asserted, are invariably good intentions: altruism, the common good, solidarity, or perhaps the search for truth. Why, then, must they all end in politics? One of the most influential public intellectuals of the French belle époque, Charles Péguy, had every reason to be weary of [...]
T.S. Eliot reminds us that the answers to our soul’s depravity are all around us, in our collective culture—the books we read, the places we inhabit, the music we listen to—but also that culture can only survive if we remember it and keep it alive... Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers [...]
The recent English controversy over the banning of fox hunting has ramifications that go to the heart of the future of the United States. If there are two Englands, rural and urban, there are two Americas also, the red heartland and the blue coastal fringes. The traditional heart of America is threatened by the radical fringe... [...]