John C. Calhoun Last weekend, I had the grand privilege of working with Emily Corwin, Adam Tate, and Richard Brake at a co-sponsored ISI/Liberty Fund colloquium in Philadelphia. Held at the gorgeous Omni, we overlooked Independence Hall. Our topic: Union, republic, and nullification. As I have been so many times in my adult [...]
The Essential Calhoun: Selections from Writings, Speeches, and Letters. Edited with an Introduction by Clyde Wilson. Foreword by Russell Kirk. The contemporary academic interpretation of John Caldwell Calhoun is like the contemporary academic response to anything and anyone thoroughly and unmistakably Southern: a politically correct caricature, both as to motives and with regard to the meaning of [...]
Though he came out of the Southern Agrarian school, Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994) is now mostly remembered as the father of the literary “New Criticism.” Brooks studied at Vanderbilt, Tulane, and Oxford (at the latter, with J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis), and he spent the majority of his teaching career at Louisiana State and Yale. In [...]
The Southern Agrarians represent one of the most interesting movements of the first half of the twentieth century. Principled as well as intellectual, the Agrarians offered much for America to ponder. Sadly, however, it is quite possible the Southern Agrarians of the 1920s and 1930s will be remembered, if at all, as a footnote to [...]
Among the contributions to I’ll Take My Stand, Allen Tate’s “Remarks on the Southern Religion” is usually interpreted as the most acerbic, immoderate, and unusual essay in the collection. All too often the essay is read as an apologia for violence or an eccentric defense of tradition. In fact, Tate–like his fellow Agrarians–was seeking to [...]
I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling [...]
As I’m thinking about the various influences on Kirk (and, hence, the post-WWII American Right), I started thinking about the Southern Agrarians as well as the English Distributists. There are many who write for this blog who know far more about these groups than I do. But, from what I can tell, this American version [...]
Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, by Hugh Blair. Edited with a Critical Introduction by Harold F. Harding. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965. Two Vols., 496 and 566 pp. One of the most successful of all nineteenth-century textbooks was Hugh Blair’s weighty Rhetoric. Between 1783 (the date of their first publication) and 1911 (the [...]
At the double-digit Catholic high schools across Cincinnati, most of them participate in KAIROS, a spiritual retreat. Myself included, hundreds of students attend and have attended the retreats every year as juniors and/ or seniors. The motto of this retreat is “Live the Fourth,” which essentially means, live every day like it is the fourth day [...]
Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South by Ralph C. Wood. The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor by Christina Bieber Lake. Flannery O’Connor continues to interest many readers and critics. A slow and painstaking writer who died young (of lupus at age 39), she did not produce a large body of literature, but what she did produce (in [...]
In one of his syndicated columns published during the 1970s, the founder of The University Bookman famously wrote, “There is nothing more conservative than conservation.” Russell Kirk, considered one of the founders of post-war conservatism—that supposedly heartless, devil-catch-the-hindmost view of life that (again, supposedly) considers nature a nuisance to be tamed or destroyed—was a great admirer of [...]
In his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, Adams tells us that he was born into one world in the nineteenth century and lived on into another. Born in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1838, he lived to see a new world in the twentieth century–a world in which a secular Dynamo has replaced Venus and the [...]
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 that he names. But are there any others? I have read and am familiar with 4 of the 5 named books: I am looking [...]