The central myth of the sixties was that [its] wretched excess was really a serious quest for new values.–George Will I. The Tragic Vision of Life I confess to believing at one time or another nearly all the pervasive and persistent fantasies of the sixties. In the words of Joni Mitchell's anthem for the Woodstock [...]
Admirers of C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (of which I am one–it is, for me, Lewis’s most compelling work of non-fiction), will remember that the inciting incident of his argument is a school textbook he calls, in order to save its authors from embarrassment, The Green Book. The moral theory Lewis discovers lying like a [...]
Walk beside the Liffey in Dublin, a trifle west of the dome of the Four Courts, and you come to Number 12, Arran Quay. This is a brick building of three stories, which began as a gentleman’s residence, some time since became a shop, and now is a governmental office of the meaner sort—symbolic of [...]
That Lena Dunham commercial might have made a real contribution to enhancing the president’s turnout, for all I know. Certainly it was consistent with the Democratic convention’s insistent appeal to women’s rights, especially the rights of single women. But there’s at least one irony: Dunham is a genuine defender of women’s right to choose, but [...]
Those of us who identify in various ways as “conservative,” especially in academic settings, have a story that we like to tell. It is a story wherein we are the heroes, and the villain bears the name “relativism.” We all believe in truth, while it seems like a great many scholars nowadays do not, at [...]
Russell Kirk What is this “moral imagination”? The phrase is Edmund Burke’s, and it occurs in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke describes the destruction of civilizing manners by the revolutionaries: In the franchise bookshops the shelves are crowded with the prickly pears and the Dead Sea fruit of literary decadence. [...]
“Nobody can make a tradition,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote; “it takes a century to make it.” There are American traditions, because there have been three centuries of American history; yet this is a brief period of time, when one remembers that some of the traditions of Europe and Asia and Africa have their roots in a [...]
After convincing my fiance that it would be so much better to watch the life of Margaret Thatcher than a movie involving aliens attacking the Earth (will they never cease?!), I suffered one of the greatest cinematic disappointments of my life. The Iron Lady taught me three things: A) It’s more important to focus on [...]
Ultimately in Russell Kirk’s thinking one is confronted with the fundamental differences between the pridefulness of secularism and the transcendent, enduring, and sacrificial love of the biblical view. This accounts for his powerful dissent on any proposition that conservatism and libertarianism are theoretically compatible. Born on October 19, 1918, in Plymouth, Michigan, the son of [...]
Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong. -1 Corinthians 16:13 Sobering voices tell us nowadays that the civilization in which we participate is not long for this world. Many countries have fallen under the domination of squalid oligarchs; other lands are reduced to anarchy. “Cultural revolution,” rejecting our patrimony [...]
The Silver Surfer was one of Jack Kirby’s inventions for Stan Lee's Marvel Comics, a silver-skinned alien on a flying surfboard endowed with the “Power Cosmic” (the ability to play around with–reshape and transform–matter and energy). This meant he could generate really big explosions if needed, and was basically much more powerful than most other [...]
The massacre at a cinema in Colorado where audiences were enjoying The Dark Knight Rises—the culmination of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movie trilogy—seems to have provoked only a feeble discussion of gun control that is going nowhere, and very little on the showing of extreme violence in movies. The contrast with an earlier superhero film [...]
[Excerpt from: William F. Byrne, Edmund Burke for Our Time: Moral Imagination, Meaning, and Politics (De Kalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011).] To the extent that there is such a thing as “Burkean conservatism,” we can get a glimpse of its true nature from a passage in the unfinished English History, a writing project [...]
Michael O’Brien’s “A Landscape with Dragons” is a study of the shaping of a child’s imagination. More than that, it’s an exploration of how stories and their use of images and universal symbols shape a child’s spiritual sensitivity and moral compass. A waist-high stack of liquor boxes runs the length of my dining room wall. [...]