Through the Tea Club he formed with his young classmates, J.R.R. Tolkien felt his first comradery among friends dedicated to something higher than themselves… Long before Tolkien began his own personal mythology, he had already lived a rather full life. Joy as well as tragedy had filled it. His father had passed away while Tolkien, [...]
Religion shaped the Inklings as much or even more than did whatever generational zeitgeist one might want to attribute to the group… Though not the best-known Inkling, Adam Fox had the privilege of being the first of the group to arrive in this world. Through no choice of his own, he appeared on July 13, [...]
C.S. Lewis’ assent and ascent to Christianity would be laborious and always deeply intellectual, guided and influenced by Catholicism even as the Romanists repulsed him. “Outside a life of literary study, life has no meaning or attraction for him,” W. T. Kirkpatrick, C.S. Lewis’s tutor, informed his father. “He is adapted for nothing else. You [...]
Thomas Paine and others charged that Edmund Burke unhesitatingly defended the French monarchy, monarchy in general, corruption in the Church, and oppressive governments, as long as they provided stability. But is this true? When challenging the “coffee-house” radicals who were so gleefully leading the French into generations of ruin through their mad abstractions, Edmund Burke [...]
Rather gruff and rumpled-looking, Peter Lawler was absolutely and always his own man. Not from an elite or Ivy League background, Peter nevertheless could have, and often did, run complete circles around his intellectual opponents, many of whom thought themselves superior. An American original and an anti-individualist individual, he was the very personification of a healthy [...]
The primary purpose of the university is to preserve the great ideas of the past and to introduce the present generation to timeless conversations, thus preserving such wisdom for countless and unknown future generations… Conservatives rarely remember the profound influence Robert A. Nisbet (1913-1996) had on the press, academia, and the public at large in [...]
Friedrich Hayek believed that the very institutions of liberalism and republicanism, when misused, can foster the totalitarianism of democracy… The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek (University of Chicago Press, 1944) Professor Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992) wrote The Road to Serfdom while a professor at the London School of Economics as the allied war [...]
Star Trek is a modern allegory and mythology for late Western Civilization. The series worked best when Captain Kirk stood for willful impulse; Mr. Spock for aristocratic reason; and Dr. McCoy for democratic passions… The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman (St. Martin’s, 2016) As [...]
Russell Kirk’s life and labors can offer a potential salve to the recent struggles of American conservatism, which is threatened by a pall of superficiality and cynicism. Russell Kirk: American Conservative by Bradley Birzer (University Press of Kentucky, 2015) In the two decades since the death of Russell Amos Augustine Kirk, American conservatism has struggled. National [...]
In a certain sense, Thomas Jefferson’s allies and enemies invented him in the years following his resignation from the Washington Administration. To the former, he became something akin to a Second Coming of the Savior, while to the latter, he seemed nothing less than a version of the Anti-Christ… Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson’s Image in [...]
For the “hive” that is the democratic mindset, the very spirit of democracy pushes its adherents to surmount limits, and to behave as one man with the will of a god. Writing of France in 1790, Edmund Burke asked exactly how one might categorize the revolutionary government. Is it a monarchy of the democracy, a [...]
In 1962, a little-known professor of English published an important book that demonstrated how the experience of the twentieth century gave the lie to the misplaced optimism of the nineteenth century… From Utopia to Nightmare by Chad Walsh (Harper Collins, 1962) Almost no one remembers Chad Walsh anymore. Our loss. A professor of English at Beloit [...]
In addition to the brilliance of his thought, Friedrich Hayek left us the lesson of his example: to search using our imagination, but always to know that what we find we find in humility, thereby recognizing our limits as one life in the long life of man, one mind in the long line of minds… Hayek [...]
Friedrich Hayek’s individualism is not the Rousseauian individualism of the person stripped naked of all his relations and his history, but rather that of Edmund Burke, with each person both encumbered and liberated by the little platoons to which we all belong… Sometime during the early to mid-1980s, I encountered the work of Friedrich August von [...]