Our world drowns in information, facts, bites, noise, opinions, and other particulars. Yet, even the best of our students have the most difficult time connecting one thing to another. It is myth that allows us to transcend the immediate and the ephemeral... About ten years ago, I proposed a course of study for first-year college [...]
While explicating Russell Kirk, Dr. Birzer is drawing attention to a larger conservative intellectual tradition and inviting a reconsideration of what that tradition has to offer. Dr. Birzer is here not merely an erudite and perceptive historian but also a thinker in his own right... Russell Kirk: American Conservative by Bradley Birzer (574 pages, University Press [...]
Democracies were acutely problematic when they did not collectively comprehend the necessity of legitimate authority permeating the polis. Lacking this understanding, power was elevated in authority’s absence. Scrupulous fear of the gods is the very thing which keeps the Roman Commonwealth together. To such an extraordinary height is this carried among them, both in private [...]
Conservatism is a formal understanding of man. By understanding, I mean a verifiable truth, and by formal, I refer to a distinguishable methodology which permeated the celebrated thoughts of classical antiquity and scholastic medievalism. Conversely, Liberalism is an ideology for man. This is not to say that Conservatism is without its own prescriptions, but only [...]
Seventy-five years after the publication of C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man, it is safe to say that the scientists and technologists and state makers and educational institutions and corporations have continued on the deadly path of making man not in the image of God, as manifested in nature, but in the image of some [...]
Planter, statesman, orator, and diplomat, John Randolph of Roanoke stands out as one of the most fascinating characters ever to strut across the stage of American politics. Collected Letters of John Randolph of Roanoke to Dr. John Brockenbrough, 1812-1833, edited by Kenneth Shorey (157 pages, Transaction Books, 1988) Planter, statesman, orator, and diplomat, John Randolph [...]
Self-governance requires that those in positions of authority emphasize the importance of treating the Constitution as a "living document," in that phrase’s best sense—not as a surrender to expediency, but as a recognition that no nation can govern itself that fails to meet the responsibility of perpetually renewing the Constitution by living its constitution... Today’s [...]
Jesus saved a hurting T.S. Eliot. And Eliot, the greatest poet of the twentieth century, thought Jesus could save us as well. A person can hate the conclusion, but if English is your mother tongue, then you cannot ignore Eliot or his ideas. He shaped the twentieth-century imagination through his poetry and use of language. [...]
The subtext of YouTuber Richard Vobes’ journeys around England is that what is old, what has stood the test of time, deserves our veneration. In a throw-away culture when we are too distracted, too mesmerized by our technological gadgets to be able to engage in real wonder, Mr. Vobes provides us a means to move [...]
In the modern world, C.S. Lewis argues in "The Abolition of Man," we have trained the head and encouraged the heart, while neglecting the soul, the most important part of the person. As Lewis so scathingly puts it, we are producing men without chests. No one could rightly accuse C.S. Lewis, who was raised as [...]
The suspicion that Frank S. Meyer’s “autonomous” individuals are not only abstractions but meaningless abstractions grows when we consider his conception of freedom… In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo by Frank S. Meyer (179 pages, Regnery, 1962) In this book, Frank Meyer proposes to give us “a conservative criterion for a good society, a good [...]
The work of editors and commentators is not only an interesting historical curiosity. Though the task of liberating important texts—whether from the dustbin of history, the barricade of a foreign language, or both—goes on behind the scenes and is often thankless, it is indispensable. For without it, there is no tradition at all... In 1915, [...]
Moral imagination runs not incidentally but necessarily in tandem with a certain aspect of conservatism, what I think of as imaginative conservatism. The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling, by Gertrude Himmelfarb (259 pages, Ivan R. Dee, 2006) The Moral Imagination is a very engaging collection of a dozen essays on a dozen authors [...]
The Imaginative Conservative has never once proclaimed originality. Rather, it has proclaimed that true and abiding things exist, untouched by the mockery or ignorance of man. There are things that always exist, but are often forgotten… The Imaginative Conservative is eight years old today (July 10). A quick calculation shows that I’ve written roughly 416 [...]