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 [...]
Trevor Colbourn considers the Declaration of Independence the highest expression of Anglo-Saxon thought and liberty. Not only did it draw upon the Whig traditions of natural rights and common law, but it identified the king as a traitor to his own office. The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American [...]
Friedrich Nietzche’s “Ecce Homo” lays waste to centuries of an ethic of inhibition and restraint. Intellectually brutalized, bloodied, and tortured, the nineteenth-century philosopher presented himself in his final and last words to a world he wanted to overthrow. Behold the man. To be more accurate, behold the demon. In his mockingly titled autobiography and final [...]
According to Tocqueville, a new political science must account for both the immediate and the universal, the moment and the eternal. When we fail to understand the choice that God has given us with democracy—that is, a science to guide, attenuate, and hone democracy—the baser instincts will rise to the fore. Tocqueville breaks his own [...]
I was deeply saddened to learn of the death of the greatest of "pirate scholars," Donald S. Lutz. As it turns out, he had actually passed away back in January of this year, but I only found out about it a week or so ago. I’ve loved the man’s work for a long time, and [...]
Cara Rogers Stevens has done the history profession proud with her new book, and we owe her a huge thanks for revising our understanding of Thomas Jefferson in terms of his lifelong opposition to slavery. Thomas Jefferson and the Fight Against Slavery, by Cara Rogers Stevens (400 pages, (University Press of Kansas, 2024) As I’ve [...]