After the War Between the States, there was a conscious effort at reconciliation on the part of many in both North and South. This postbellum reconciliation has mostly unraveled, in no small part thanks to conservative establishmentarians who for years have refused to raise a peep—or, in many cases, collaborated—during the leftist campaign against Southern [...]
Richard Weaver’s book “Ideas Have Consequences” presents the harmful effects of nominalism on Western civilization since it gained prominence in the Late Middle Ages. Many of our modern woes stem from the acceptance of nominalism and the rejection of philosophical realism back in the fourteenth century. By the time of his untimely death in 1963 [...]
Part of the South’s charm is an ability to recognize the good, true, and beautiful in traditions other than its principally Protestant identity and heritage. And Kevin Starr’s excellent history reveals that American Catholic identity is deeply Southern. Continental Achievement: Roman Catholics in the United States, by Kevin Starr (330 pages, Ignatius Press, 2020) When [...]
My experience of Southern Catholics is that they are like fried chicken: They may be spicy and crunchy on the outside—living from hand to mouth, building new churches and schools, and raising money for pet projects, realizing they are somewhat suspect and on the edge—but they are warm and tender on the inside. The other [...]
“Good Things Out of Nazareth: The Uncollected Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Friends” is the epistolary record of Flannery O’Connor’s other life, the life lived behind the printed page in small-town Georgia. This life is not nearly as “large and startling” as her fiction, but it is unforgettable all the same. Good Things Out of [...]
On that summer-hot afternoon at Gettysburg, after two days of fighting in the summer-lush Pennsylvania countryside, the fate of two nations still hung in the balance. General Robert E. Lee intended to tip the scales. Just before 3 o’clock on the morning of July 3, 1863, Robert E. Lee rose by starlight, ate a spartan [...]
For some time I had puzzled over a discrepancy or inconsistency between two of Richard Weaver’s essays which treat of Lincoln to one degree or another. In his “Abraham Lincoln and the Argument from Definition” (1953), Weaver praises Lincoln as a “conservative” by virtue of his employment of the argument from definition on such issues [...]
Nostalgia for the smaller face-to-face societies of the past is common to both progressives and conservatives. There was a time, whether it was 100 years ago or 10,000, when relationships between people were more meaningful, families lived more in harmony with nature, and communities worked together to care for the young and the needy. The [...]
Perhaps no American thinker has suffered more from a scholarly hegemony of discourse than John C. Calhoun, whose work and personage are often dismissed by his critics for a single phrase attributed to him, diminishing the careful and complicated analysis he deserves. The careful reader does not have to be a devotee of Jürgen Habermas [...]
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; [...]
It may be justly said that the past, if it is to live, must live in us; the corollary is that if it does not, then we perforce participate, to one degree or another, in a kind of living death. This is the heart of Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” Then Lytle asked: [...]
History is complex, messy, and unyielding to our dearest wishes for easy categorization. That Alexander Stephens understood the Confederacy through its cornerstone of slavery is plainly true and explained in his own words. But the “Cornerstone Speech” goes further, planting the other corners of the Confederate state in concerns over federalism and sovereignty. Anxious onlookers [...]
Under advanced liberalism there is an expectation that anybody who so much as dares to speak civilly to or about any figure associated with the Confederacy is to be deemed persona non grata. For Catholics as Catholics, such sweeping and absolutist expectations are simply unacceptable. Forth from its scabbard, high in the air Beneath Virginia’s [...]
Glenn Arbery’s “Bearings and Distances” shuttles back and forth between two eras, weaving, careening, towards an inexorable revelation of truth. The plot is rich and complex, and its world is both fertile and elusive in meaning, expanding through time and culture, expressing a deeply Catholic view of the cosmos. Bearings and Distances, by Glenn Arbery [...]