I can think of few men of the twentieth century who thought more deeply about the nature and meaning and definition of conservatism than did Russell Kirk. We can accept, reject, or take in partial form what he said, but we’re fools if we don’t take him seriously, especially as we think about the present, [...]
In addition to his appearances before the British armed services and on the BBC, C.S. Lewis also gave a number of lay sermons during World War II. One of his most famous (among several that achieved real success) was one preached in December 1939 entitled “Learning in Wartime.” One witness, Erik Routley, remembered seeing the [...]
On November 29, 1954, C.S. Lewis offered his inaugural address at Cambridge, one of his finest writings or speeches in his professional career, “De Descriptione Temporum.”[1] In the speech, probably somewhat jarring to his listeners, Lewis claimed that one could divide the history of Europe into three periods: the pre-Christian; the Christian; and the post-Christian. [...]
Most of the Inklings had already gone through one world war, and when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, they knew that their children—especially J.R.R. Tolkien’s sons—would have to go through a second one. It was all quite depressing. In September 1939, war descended upon Europe as the National Socialists of Germany and the international [...]
In his own day, George Washington served as a pillar of Atlantis, recognized not only for his willingness to sacrifice his life for the great Republic, but also as the founder of the first serious Republic a weary world had witnessed in centuries. He deserves the title “the American Marcus Aurelius.” In his own day [...]
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 [...]
Why are the American people so ready to give themselves over to an emperor? Why do they want a god-king? I would suggest that our very loss of the classical world—especially in education—has led us to forget the great lessons of Western civilization. For what it’s worth, I do not consider myself a political person, [...]
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, [...]
Though we often associate the Greeks with the “order of the mind,” we should note that Socrates had a deeply spiritual and theological side, which embraced divine reason as the language of the living and the dead. When someone—and, in 2022, it’s likely nearly everyone in the world of academia and in the world at [...]
The best way to understand the Constitutional Convention and the original intent of the Founders is not by studying The Federalist Papers, but by examining the various notes recorded by James Madison. For fifteen years now, I’ve had the rather grand and humbling privilege of teaching the entirety of the U.S. Constitution to freshmen each [...]
Throughout "History in English Words," Owen Barfield discusses the influences of every possible cultural encounter on the English language. Language, he demonstrates, never stops in its evolution, moving from one point, one thought, one epoch to another, always shifting, always changing, but also always honoring. An extraordinary man by any measure, Owen Barfield (1898-1997), one [...]
Yellowstone National Park is something truly special. Everywhere you look, you see an abundance of nature—God’s creation at its most glorious: mountain ranges, vast meadows, deep canyons, pine tree forests, dynamic rivers and waterfalls, boiling and steaming geysers, petrified trees. President Ulysses S. Grant, former general of the Union Army in the American Civil War, [...]
Seeing himself and his allies on the losing side of the war against the modern spirit, Irving Babbitt made a fierce call to arms, advocating the need for a “remnant” to preserve all that is good, true, and beautiful. Irving Babbitt In his own day and age, Irving Babbitt’s (1865-1933) many opponents—from Ernest [...]
Even mainstream liberals today accept as fact that America is and always has been a racist system, built upon the backs of slaves. Yet American history itself was deeply divisive and extremely complicated, and after all, there is a finality to the subject: In the end, the United States abolished slavery, ending the scourge forever [...]