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? [...]
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. [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 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, [...]
The kinship between the Nashville Agrarians and Whittaker Chambers is seen in three main ways: the farming life itself, the concept of private property, and the religious dimension of human existence. Chambers emerges as a singular figure who, more so than the Nashville group, provides a model for those who are called to live a [...]
It may be true that Donald Davidson went too far in his concern for art’s effect on the community. Given the decadence of much popular and highbrow art in our time, perhaps other readers of Davidson’s verse find themselves in a curious predicament. Like me, they may find fault with the principles of his poetic; [...]
Neither the leftist Marxist multiculturalists nor the Neoconservatives reflect the genuine beliefs or inheritance left to us by those who came to these shores centuries ago. Both reject the historic conservatism of the South, which embodied that inheritance and the vision of the Founders… No discussion of Southern conservatism, its history and its relationship to [...]
Americans have tried the Hamiltonian experiment of centralized government, usury, and gigantism long enough. Surely it is time, somewhere, for the Jeffersonian vision to begin to reappear. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Arthur J. Versluis as he explores the Jeffersonian vision for America and how we may [...]
The literature of the American West embodies a clear perception of the frailty of corporate freedom and of the importance of men who have learned on their own to face down the barbarian, even though no one backs their play. There are two important corporate myths that shaped the life of eighteenth and nineteenth century America. [...]