How do we redeem the time? We start by "brightening the corner where we are," by improving ourselves, by helping our neighbors, by loving our families, by setting high standards for our students, and by exercising the inherited liberty bequeathed to us from the founders, responsibly, yet joyfully. With the Louisiana Purchase, the original republican [...]
The film “Nothing But the Truth” is a well-played, honest effort to flesh out First Amendment issues in a dangerous world of often divided loyalties. “I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” [...]
Throughout his works, Irving Babbitt addressed the continuing decline of the humanistic imagination, humanism constituting a tradition that had produced a leadership class of ladies and gentlemen. His educational theory was aimed at producing an elite, humanistic aristocracy that would lead responsibly and ethically. When Literature and the American College, Irving Babbitt’s critique of the [...]
I rarely have any trouble finding available in the stacks works by and about the major conservative writers whom I esteem. Am I truly the only reader of Kirk, Weaver, and Voegelin in a town with a university of 30,000 students? I often reserve my Sunday afternoons for trips to the local university library. These [...]
Like Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, conservatives must come up from politics and recognize that the roots of a truer just order are watered with the permanent ideals of truth, goodness, and beauty. The insights of the arts of life are vital to make life worth living. Readers of The Imaginative Conservative know well the phrase “beauty [...]
There is no escape from historical existence. With all its contingencies, unexpected happenings, and mysteries, historical existence offers opportunities for grasping the great drama of life. Conservative intellectuals have long been suspicious of the pressures that political ideologies place on the writing of history. Most famously, Herbert Butterfield, in his classic work, The Whig Interpretation [...]
Albert Jay Nock was one of the more eccentric grand old men of the nascent American conservative movement in the twentieth century. His opposition to corruption and malfeasance in the public realm was admirable; his tone of crankiness was, is, and will remain a matter of the reader’s individual taste. Episcopal priest, professional baseball player, [...]
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, by George Gissing The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home, by George Howe Colt To recommend a book is an ethical undertaking that reveals something about both the giver and the recipient. It is an act that says, “I believe you are a [...]
This is part 2 of this essay, for part 1 click here. Glenn Davis According to Nisbet, warfare seduces largely because acts of war demand certain qualities of character from its participants which the community values: valor, heroism, courage, and sacrifice. Individuals who are given the opportunity to manifest these moral qualities, often [...]
Robert Nisbet In a recent posting on The Imaginative Conservative, Bruce Frohnen laments the loss of civility and decency in present-day America. By looking at the roots of foul behavior (in this case, a group of middle school boys bullying an elderly school bus monitor), he finds fault in the “warehouse model” of [...]
There is no quicker way to get the blood up than to question the integrity of our nation’s war policies. Yet, on the political right, it used to be respectable, without being narrowly isolationist or pacifist, to examine and challenge the wisdom of military engagement, especially abroad. We need mention just a few names to [...]