The Imaginative Conservative’s co-founder and editor-at-large, Bradley J. Birzer, has received another award for his outstanding, new biography of seminal conservative thinker, Russell Kirk. Following on the heels of The Imaginative Conservative’s own 2015 Book of the Year Award, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) has announced that Dr. Birzer has won the 2016 Henry and Anne [...]
Undoubtedly trying to shock many of his readers—most of whom understandably associated him with radicalism in poetry and the Bloomsbury group in London—T.S. Eliot exclaimed rather baldly in the late 1920s, “I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.” […]
If I had to use a single word to describe what is fundamentally wrong with government today, I would use the word fraud. Certainly nowadays—perhaps in every age—government is not what it claims to be (competent, protective, and just), and it is what it claims not to be (bungling, menacing, and unjust). In actuality, it [...]
A brief examination of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon, Watchmen (DC/Warner Brothers, 1986); The Art of the Film: Watchmen (Titan Books, 2009); and Zack Snyder, Watchmen (Ultimate Cut; Warner Brothers, 2009) Who watches the watchmen, who guards the guardians? […]
In my adult life, I have never witnessed such a randomly violent spring and summer as we have had this year: priests murdered while saying Mass; Turkish troops surrounding U.S. military bases; police being executed while on duty; police reacting to stresses (too often poorly) beyond the imagination of most of us; trucks driving through [...]
Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis: An Intimate Portrait of C.S. Lewis, edited by Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982) A few weeks ago, I had the misfortune of discovering what an unattractive person Joy Davidman, C.S. “Jack” Lewis’s wife, was in real life. She [...]
Of all Russell Kirk’s books, Enemies of the Permanent Things has the oddest history. Its origins were in the Darcy Lectures that Kirk delivered at Alabama College in 1958. Over the eleven years until its final publication, it evolved significantly, reflecting the evolution of Kirk’s own ideas, especially regarding T.S. Eliot. First appearing in print [...]
A little more than a year ago, I had the chance to talk with an extremely intelligent and talented scholar, one who had justly won a number of major awards. As we began to talk rather civilly over coffee and tea about our understandings of modern academia, this person said with some exasperation after I told [...]
A few years ago, I was witness to a lecture in which the lecturer claimed that those who voted against the Constitution in the ratification process should no longer be considered American. In other words, only those who supported the vote in favor of the Constitution by actually casting a vote are legitimate. Needless to [...]
Joy Davidman is such an unsympathetic figure that one must question the judgment and goodness of C.S. Lewis in choosing to marry her. Out of My Bone: The Letters of Joy Davidman, ed. by Don W. King (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009) I’ve spent the better part of my career as a historian and a [...]
Harry Earhart In the summer of 1998, I had a wonderful phone call, mostly by accident. The University of Texas-San Antonio needed a historian immediately. They actually called my wife to ask her, and we were in between our wedding and our honeymoon. Actually, it was the day—yes, I mean the actual day—immediately [...]
Major Robert Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter, was a virtuous man caught in a terrible spot. While his personal but generally private loyalties lay with the South, his duty as he saw it was to the United States government. In the early evening of December 26, 1860, at Fort Moultrie, Charleston, South Carolina, Captain [...]
Abraham Lincoln reflected the worst of northern excesses, South Carolinians believed. His election, one Charlestonian averred, “was simply a sign to us that we are in danger, and must provide for our own safety.” The finest of gentlemen founded South Carolina, informants assured the famous London Times correspondent, William Howard Russell, upon his arrival in [...]
James R. Otteson, the Thomas W. Smith Presidential Chair in Business Ethics at Wake Forest University, possesses one of the greatest minds in defense of classical liberalism in the modern era. He has authored two definitive works on Adam Smith, a clear rebuttal of the ethics of Peter Singer, and now a crucial attack on [...]