Marion Montgomery

The Integrity of the Pilgrim Scholar

The primary responsibility of the young scholar is to an integrity as person—that is, to a fulfillment of his gifts as this person, limited in gifts but sharing with humanity a nature as intellectual soul incarnate...

The Scholar as Borrower & Lender of the Truth of Things

The "Conservative Scholar" of the next century will engage a most formidable responsibility as scholar, as a borrower and lender of truth in the interest of community. He must struggle to recover, to clarify, terms in relation to the reality of existential creation itself: positive law, natural...

The Violent Assault Upon Imagination

How fallen we are, from Dante and Beatrice to John Hinckley and Jodie Foster. "We did the best job with what we had to work with," the twenty-two-year-old jury foreman said after the unanimous decision that Hinckley was...

How Should We Treat the Evil of Flannery O’Connor’s Misfits?

It is well to be reminded again and again that, though we like to think ourselves advance agents of such progress, the strategy of gnostic manipulation of being is very ancient. John Milton suggests the point: Satan's...

The Violent Assault upon Virtue

It is possible to imagine a purple cow, but only after one has some experience of "cows" and ''purple." When one dares to enter the country of other men's souls in quest of understanding...

M.E. Bradford & the Intoxicated Air of the Modernist Moment

IV M.E. Bradford The principle underlying the Agrarian­-New Critic's position as literary critic, shared generally in the New Critical move­ment at large, may be simply put: Some poems are better than other...

M.E. Bradford: Traditionalist as Rememberer

We spoke of much else besides : of friends and mentors and the tumors of both—their fortunes and misfortunes, their origins and our own; of illustrative stories, many...

T.S. Eliot: The Recovery of the Permanent Things

T.S. Eliot The use of criticism as T.S. Eliot sees that use in his Harvard lectures in 1932-1933 is to discover the degree of a proper accommodation of the poet as a person to...

The Truth of Things

Even "academic" specialization might be recovered as desirable, but desirable as a means to a higher end in service to the body of community, not merely servicing the appetitive order of individuals collectively called society, but in service...

Marion Montgomery: Prophet Philosopher

Marion Montgomery The Prophetic Poet and the Spirit of the Age by Marion Montgomery (in three volumes): Why Flannery O'Connor Stayed Home (1981), Why Poe Drank Liquor (1983), Why Hawthorne Was Melancholy...

Liberal Education: Alive and Well

An essay written by John von Heyking, entitled “Top 5 Books on Liberal Education Published in the Last 35 years” is a good read and moves one to think about the texts...