The issues now being debated in the 2016 elections are framed as if the country revolved around a great big cookie jar. The benefits and promises candidates offer are like cookies that must be substantial, instantly gratifying, and abundant. All the problems the nation faces seem to be reduced to who has access to the [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to explore the nature of education and its relation to the permanent things, lest we become a class of barbarians. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher Education and the Permanent Things If we are going to transmit the permanent things, we will have to [...]
Permanence is not merely a matter of taste—something to be embraced by the sedentary and eschewed by the restless—but a deep societal value. It is the guardian of family, tradition, practical wisdom, environment, and culture On the whole, it would appear to be for the best that the great majority of human beings should go [...]
Education and the Permanent Things If we are going to transmit the permanent things, we will have to put back into education the moral and metaphysical vision that is foundational to Western education and Western civilization. I hope to illustrate this thesis by discussing Russell Kirk’s vision of conservatism and the permanent things, by describing [...]
In his State of the Union address President Obama proposed changes to preschool, high school, and college education, respectively. His proposals generated praise and condemnation from the predictable cheerleaders and naysayers. Some celebrated his efforts to expand early childhood education; others suggested that he should have focused more on the student loan crisis; still others, [...]
Recent posts on the St. Austin Review about the United States and England, and especially those concerned with the decline, decay and ultimate disintegration of England have prompted my musings on the mutability of nations and cultures. Is everything subject to change? If so, is there any permanent value attached to these mutable things? Why bother about [...]
What has been said of the Roman empire, is at least as true of the British constitution—“Octingentorum annorum fortuna, disciplinaque, compages haec coaluit; quae convelli sine convellentium exitio non potest. ”1 This British constitution has not been struck out at an heat by a set of presumptuous men, like the assembly of pettifoggers run mad [...]
Edmund Burke For the present is the point at which time touches eternity.-C.S. Lewis[1] It was in 1939, in The Idea of a Christian Society, that T.S. Eliot defended what he called “the permanent things” against a world that appeared drunk on the politics of revolution and “change.” Eliot’s purpose was not a [...]
T.S. Eliot By “the Permanent Things” [T. S. Eliot] meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in that continuity of belief and institution called the [...]
On Friday, November 22, 1963, at about the same time as President John F. Kennedy prepared to enter the black limousine that would take him through downtown Dallas to his violent death, another life was coming to a far less dramatic close across the Atlantic in England. It was late afternoon in the village of [...]
It seems everybody is looking for better answers to today’s problems; we want a revelation. But the problem is; we are reluctant to accept the superior answers and revelations which have already been ratified by the entire human experience. Although there are no shortcuts to wisdom, in this Information Age, the House of Wisdom is [...]
Russell Kirk at Piety Hill By ‘the Permanent Things’ [T.S. Eliot] meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in that continuity of belief [...]