J.R.R. Tolkien connected me to a world beyond anything I had yet experienced in rather idyllic Kansas. I so desperately wanted to escape into his mountain scene, explore every nook and cranny of that invented world, and meet a God who sang the universe into existence. Though I have read The Hobbit, The Lord of [...]
I became a Catholic—after seven years of teenage atheism—because of the lyrics of the album, "The Colour of Spring," by the English band Talk Talk. I didn’t know Mark Hollis, the writer of those lyrics, and I don’t claim that he actually practiced what he preached. But preached he did! First, I should really cool [...]
The two principal writers (Jefferson the author and Adams the orator) of the Declaration died on its fiftieth anniversary. This has become a sort of cute, trivial point to us two hundred years later. But to the Americans of the day, it was astounding, surely confirmation that God smiled upon the Declaration and upon America. [...]
C.S. Lewis’s “Mere Christianity” is a model work in the muddled and subjective world of ideologies, state-led terrorisms, gulags, holocausts, and killing fields. Sprinkled with timeless wisdom and profound insights, it is about fundamental aspects of Christianity and seeks to go beyond denominational differences without creating yet another new denomination. After C.S. Lewis converted to [...]
As shocking as it might seem to those who knew Russell Kirk as a bad (in terms of practice) Catholic, he deserves sainthood. Here is my case for Saint Russell of Mecosta. When I first started reading the works of Russell Amos Augustine Kirk in the fall of 1989, that most joyously fateful of seasons, [...]
The novel "Salem’s Lot" proves that Stephen King is both a first-rate storyteller and a top-notch writer, who is especially good when describing the imagination of a child and the child’s ability to see things the adult no longer can. But is it a great work of horror? On November 17, 1979, two months after [...]
Russell Amos Augustine Kirk is one of America’s foremost and most important thinkers, especially in the desiccated and mutilated 20th century, an era of horrific inhumanities and incessant blood-letting. Kirk stood for a more humane age that valued the dignity and uniqueness of each human person and that unabashedly sought the good, the true, and [...]
Christopher Columbus is without a doubt responsible for the Columbian Exchange—which through human agency recreated the lost world of Pangea. But was Columbus the first to discover America? The memory—and especially the statues—of Christopher Columbus have taken quite the beating over the last half-century. The great Lakota activist, Russell Means, once called him worse than [...]
Christopher Dawson set himself the task of surveying the history of Western Civilization in the light of a master-idea: that religion is the dynamic force, the basic constituent and the inspiration of all higher human activity, and that therefore the culture of an era depends upon its religion. Looking back over the vast ruins and [...]
Arguably one of the finest stories in the Western Tradition, “Beowulf” concerns the advent of a hero and his timely end. Throughout, questions of fate, free will, good, and evil predominate. Most prominent, though, are the theological questions of will and grace, one pagan and the other Christian. In 1926, when merely a thirty-four year [...]
Unlike reality—which is infinitely and ultimately unknowable—Marxism as ideology pretends to understand the world, but, in reality, it offers only the merest shadow of true complexities. Though responsible—directly and indirectly—for the murder of nearly 150 million innocent children, women, and men in the previous century, Marxism is making a comeback in Western civilization. Not only [...]
As a person who has read and written about J.R.R. Tolkien for decades, I am often asked about his political views. In a sense, this is a funny question, as Tolkien really despised most politics. In fact, he really thought of himself as very anti-political. His few statements on the matter reveal just how unpolitical [...]
Was Albert Jay Nock correct in saying that the educated man is a superfluous man in modern society? One of the greatest intellectual pleasures of my summer has been the discovery of the writings of Albert Jay Nock. Well, really, the re-discovery. I had twice read Nock’s Our Enemy, the State, but I’d never found [...]
Since humanism has been the core of the Western tradition through the centuries, the emergence of anti-humanism and post-humanism represents an inflection point of our civilizational crisis. In confronting this crisis, conservative humanism aims not to erase the positive achievements of modern humanism, but to graft them back onto their roots where they can draw [...]