Bradley J. Birzer’s definitive biography is clearly a victory for old-school conservatism and the imagination. Old friends of Kirk and new ones alike will benefit from this work, and hopefully, even optimistically, will do so for generations to come. A few years ago I had the honor and pleasure of visiting Piety Hill, the familial home [...]
Even though President James Monroe could not fix the economy or dismiss the Missouri question, he could certainly distract the nation from its problems. In his second inaugural address, he gleefully announced a new target for American anger: The British were not allowing free trade between the United States and the English-occupied West Indies. Whatever [...]
Even though President Andrew Jackson’s announcement that he was the embodiment of the American people was populist, demagogic, authoritarian, and absolutely in violation of the spirit of the U.S. Constitution, his views on the Second Bank of the United States most certainly embodied the views of the average American. By the end of 1819, so [...]
Across the mighty Potomac sits the capital of our once noble and humane republic, founded upon the idea that all men are created equal, endowed with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What do the women and men who occupy the innumerable office buildings on either of the Potomac think about [...]
Sir Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill, knew J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and the Inklings personally. At one memorable lunch, Sir Martin gave me his impressions of these great men and of the Oxford of their day. During my time at Hillsdale College—having arrived in the fall of 1999—the college hired a number [...]
As did St. Augustine as the barbarians tore through Rome’s gate on August 24, 410, at midnight, J.R.R. Tolkien looked out over a ruined world: a world on one side controlled by ideologues, and, consequently, a world of the Gulag, the Holocaust camps, the Killing fields, and total war; on the other: a world of [...]
Nearly three decades after the Reagan administration ended, several views of the fortieth president—all conflicting—have taken hold in the American popular mind. One is that Reagan was an “amiable dunce,” who was “sleepwalking through history.” Luck and circumstances made him a successful president, but he should be remembered today only as an oaf, simply being in [...]
Going back to the first principles of the Founding, one finds that the Founders talked unceasingly about rights. Rights language became a critical part of the cultural landscape when James Otis delivered his oration on the nature of rights, the common law, and the natural law. Feel free to call me a conservative (I won’t [...]
It is critical to remember that the meeting times as well as the membership of the Inklings were always and ever fluid. The group of friends never pretended to be a formal club, and they never desired it to exist as a sort of ideological cell. Over the years from roughly 1931 to 1949, the [...]
Myth, J.R.R. Tolkien thought, can convey the sort of profound truth that is intransigent to description or analysis in terms of facts and figures. But, Tolkien admitted, myth can be dangerous if it remains pagan. Therefore, one must sanctify it. To enter faerie—that is, a sacramental and liturgical understanding of creation—is to open oneself to [...]
The Mother of my Lord has never appeared to me and offered me a helmet of faith or a sword of unity, or divine or mundane origins. But, I have seen Mary many times, and, most likely, you have as well. Faith has always been a struggle for me. Indeed, throughout my forty-six years of [...]
Since the Renaissance, Christopher Dawson feared, Western culture and society had embraced an arrogant form of humanism, one that places too much emphasis on the goodness of the human person. With the loss of the Medieval beliefs in the Economy of Grace and the Great Chain of Being, culture had adopted two radically dangerous institutions: [...]
Socialism did not kill merely the body—it sought to extinguish the soul and all belief in anything transcendent in the human person. As we celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is time to remember and reclaim man’s oldest faith, a faith in one Almighty God who make each of us [...]
For me, the Teton Range of the American West will always be the best America has to offer: huge spaces, demanding spires, and painful beauty. This past summer, I had the high privilege of traveling into the great American West several times. Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. Frankly, there’s nothing quite like massive, wide-open [...]