In no society in the world, Robert Nisbet believed, has any people become so remote from nature as have Americans. As technology allowed him to dominate or ignore nature, the American became detached from place, having neither loyalty nor respect for the land that once nourished him… After the rather massive and—at least to the [...]
Robert Nisbet, in direct contrast to Russell Kirk, argued that conservatism was purely a modern ideology. For Nisbet, the entire history of conservatism began as a reaction to the French Revolution… When it came to the history of conservatism, the grand sociologist and man of letters, Robert Nisbet, disagreed with the mighty founder of modern [...]
When we begin to refashion things in our image rather than in God’s, we ourselves become displaced and disjointed. Strangely enough, by asserting only our humanity, we lose what makes us essentially and beautifully human… In truth, nature begins to relate to us only when we begin to indwell it, when culture begins in it. [...]
English musician Steven Wilson’s "Hand. Cannot. Erase" is extraordinary by the standards of any genre. His subject matter is the uniqueness of each human person, and he focuses on the life of one lost soul. An Incarnational Whole One of the greatest things in this whirligig of a world—however fraught with a string of perilous [...]
Lee Edwards has not just known the greats of post-World War II conservatism, but he has also lived with them, and as one of them… Celebrating his eighty-fifth year on this earth, Lee Edwards is a remarkable cultural treasure, a man’s man, a gentleman’s gentleman, and a conservative’s conservative. Biographer of Ronald Reagan and of [...]
Progressives lack imagination, and, in their desire to create a world made in their image, they can only mimic what they see with straight, sterile lines. When considering that Thomas Jefferson delivered his first inaugural address in 1801—perhaps the finest statement up to that point in history on the dignity of the Western and Socratic [...]
Exactly how the Roman republic came into existence remains shrouded in mystery. Critically so. As with our tradition of English common law and the necessity of knowing that its origins are “beyond the memory of man,” from “time immemorial,” “ancient beyond memory or record,” and “time out of mind,” so it is with the best [...]
Habits, mores, manners, and customs should prove more important in a republic than the law… “With Cicero fell the republic.”—Russell Kirk As one of my grand Hillsdale colleagues, Dr. Stephen Smith, once said to me, there has never been a serious reform or renaissance in Western Civilization since the fall of the Roman Republic without [...]
The desire to belong to something greater than one’s self is simply human, transcending time, place, and space. It’s as natural as our need to breathe. In this sense, Aristotle put it correctly when he noted that man is meant to live in community… When the polis of classical Greece collapsed brutally in the final [...]
If there is a grand lesson to be found in Genesis, amidst its horrors and atrocities, it is that God continually calls His people back to Him… One would not be unjust in noting how unrelentingly violent and sexual the human person had become after the Fall in Eden. When God forces Adam and Eve [...]
What matters most profoundly to the student of history is the revelations about God (sovereign), the created order (good), and humanity (fallen). If a person knows nothing but the first three chapters of Genesis, he will have, at least, a semblance of understanding of the human condition… While the ancient Hebrews were not the first [...]
When I finished The Conservative Mind for the first time, I remember thinking quite clearly that Russell Kirk had gotten so close to truth, but, then, just when he had the chance, he failed to promote freedom—the proper answer to every single thing. I often look at, hold, and peruse my first (first to me, [...]
Irving Babbitt believed that man defined himself not by his rights, but by his duties, and particularly how willing he was to restrain his darker impulses and sacrifice himself for another… Famously, when Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt were debating one another while on a walk, the former, exasperated, asked: “Good God, man. Are [...]
The dismantling of the idea of the West unwittingly wrought massive damage upon the very ways in which Western citizens viewed themselves, disconnecting them not only from other cultures and peoples but also from one another. The dismantling of the idea of the West began when medieval philosophers began re-introducing the Sophist notions reduced to [...]