The Bible as Agrarian Textbook

By |2024-02-27T20:06:17-06:00February 27th, 2024|Categories: Agrarianism, Bible, Economics, Political Economy, Ralph Ancil, Timeless Essays, Wilhelm Roepke|

Whether Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox or orthodox Protestant, the Bible is the basic book of the Christian faith. One may well ask if it has anything to say about how we should live, not only about the fruits of salvation, but about what kind of government we are to have or what kind of economy? [...]

Intrascendence, Myth, & the Southern Agrarian Legacy

By |2024-01-10T19:08:48-06:00January 10th, 2024|Categories: Agrarianism, Allen Tate, American Republic, Books, South|

There is more to Southern life than moonlight and magnolia. It presumed, in fact, an affection for the literal world justified by its origin, history, and destiny, infused with its own providentially given meaning and value. It was not a perfect society, to be sure. But it had at its core something which deserves respect. [...]

The Stand of Allen Tate

By |2023-10-06T06:40:58-05:00October 5th, 2023|Categories: Agrarianism, Allen Tate, South, Southern Agrarians|

“No society is worth ‘saving’ as such,” wrote Allen Tate (1899–1979). “What we must save is the truth of God and man, and the right society follows.”1 Such words are anathema to the secularists whose “progressive” theories have intoxicated the modern mind. Words of this kind are neither popular nor politically expedient in an age [...]

Wendell Berry’s “The Need to Be Whole”

By |2023-08-21T18:18:51-05:00August 21st, 2023|Categories: Agrarianism, Books, Civil War, South, Southern Agrarians, Wendell Berry|

More than ever, America is split between populist nationalism and left-wing internationalism, with little room in either ideology for anything like Wendell Berry's vision of local patriotic devotion. Whatever we make of his ruminations, with respect to this subject it is obviously the culture which has changed over the past few years, not him. The [...]

John Randolph of Roanoke & the Formation of a Southern Conservatism

By |2023-05-23T17:50:16-05:00May 23rd, 2023|Categories: American Founding, Civil Society, Conservatism, Economics, History, John Randolph of Roanoke, South, Timeless Essays|

John Randolph of Roanoke, one of the great exponents of the Southern political tradition, knew that what was proper to any state government was the preservation of the received order. The duty of the citizen of the commonwealth was to resist any legislative or constitutional changes to the received order, and to grant a broad [...]

“I’ll Take My Stand” as Southern Epic

By |2023-05-17T19:10:34-05:00May 17th, 2023|Categories: Agrarianism, Books, South, Timeless Essays|

Ever since the first stir they created in the early 1930s the Southern Agrarians have been difficult to assess. How serious, politically and economically, were they in what they advocated? How much agreement was there among them? The four collected above papers point up and even accentuate their divergence, investigating wide-ranging and, at least on [...]

M.E. Bradford’s Revolutionary “A Better Guide Than Reason”

By |2023-03-22T18:33:40-05:00March 22nd, 2023|Categories: Agrarianism, American Founding, American Republic, Books, John Dickinson, M. E. Bradford, Patrick Henry, South, Southern Agrarians, Thomas Jefferson, Timeless Essays|

No one who reads and digests “A Better Guide Than Reason” can fail to be revolutionized. We had thought that the great Southern political tradition—that of Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, John C. Calhoun, and the agrarians—was dead. Not so. A Better Guide Than Reason: Studies in the American Revolution by M.E. Bradford (241 pages, Sherwood Sugden [...]

Choosing Southernness, Choosing My Father’s Way

By |2023-07-31T23:58:42-05:00February 12th, 2023|Categories: Conservatism, Featured, Mark Malvasi, South, Timeless Essays, Tradition|

Southern ways are held up to ridicule, and Southern virtues are out of fashion. But because Southerners think, believe, live and act within an inheritance, they enjoy a sense of confidence, faith and stability that may prove an invaluable asset as the foundations of our society begin to collapse. Late in August 1965, a young [...]

The Tragic South

By |2023-01-24T17:43:07-06:00January 24th, 2023|Categories: Civil War, Joseph Pearce, South, Timeless Essays, Tragedy|

The tragedy is that the South’s tragic flaw—its defense of slavery—led to the defeat of its just demand for states’ rights and the consequent rise of the Federal Government, so that the original concept of the nation has been entirely lost. Recently, whilst staying with friends in Dickson, Tennessee, I came across an article in [...]

Southern Life, Agrarian Vision: The Apprenticeship of Andrew Lytle

By |2023-01-17T16:25:33-06:00January 17th, 2023|Categories: Agrarianism, Andrew Lytle, History, Literature, Mark Malvasi, Senior Contributors, South, Southern Agrarians, Timeless Essays|

The South, Andrew Lytle feared, had been poor and virtuous for too long and now found the temptations of industry and commerce too alluring to resist. Material prosperity weakened family, community, and tradition and deprived rural southern life of its vitality, rendering it both tumultuous and desolate. Born in Mufreesboro, Tennessee on the day after [...]

Russell Kirk’s “Southern Valor”

By |2022-07-02T21:16:23-05:00July 2nd, 2022|Categories: Clyde Wilson, Conservatism, John Randolph of Roanoke, Russell Kirk, South, Timeless Essays|Tags: , |

American culture and public life are in a perilously low state, but how much worse off we would be if it had not been for Russell Kirk and his valorous life in behalf of the moral imagination that is the essence of our civilization. We have no better example of resourceful defense of unchanging principle, [...]

Andrew Lytle & the Politics of Agrarianism

By |2022-02-07T16:01:13-06:00February 7th, 2022|Categories: Agrarianism, Andrew Lytle, History, Literature, Mark Malvasi, Senior Contributors, South, Southern Agrarians|

Automated and impersonal, American society, Andrew Lytle feared, was coming to be peopled by the rootless masses ensnared in dreary, routine, unimaginative, and irrelevant occupations—a society of interchangeable parts and interchangeable men. This condition was the very antithesis of the Christian economy. I. By the 1930s, Andrew Lytle thought the signs of impending disaster everywhere [...]

Andrew Lytle and the Order of the Family

By |2022-02-07T15:58:47-06:00November 14th, 2021|Categories: Agrarianism, Andrew Lytle, Family, History, Literature, Mark Malvasi, Senior Contributors, South, Southern Agrarians|

Andrew Nelson Lytle—novelist, dramatist, essayist, and professor of literature—extolled the order of the family, which by the 1930s he thought all but spent, precisely because it was rooted in the very concept of divine order that the modern world had decried and rejected. As patriarchy deteriorated, as acceptance of divine supremacy vanished, the family languished, [...]

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