Lord Acton believed that the wrong side won the American Civil War. Such a judgment could hardly be said to be a minor detail of someone’s historical worldview, yet this judgment has somehow been obscured. “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Among Catholic students of political thought, few figures are more liable to [...]
As one reads What Are People For?, an important underlying and unifying theme—the struggle to avoid abstraction—emerges, a theme which reveals perhaps Wendell Berry’s greatest concern about modern life... What Are People For? by Wendell Berry (224 pages, North Point Press, 1990) “We should love life,” Dostoyevski once said, “more than the idea of life.” It is [...]
The South’s combination of architectural preservation with genealogy and with the documentation of human toil has often resulted in a much richer testament of the past and a more balanced view of the region’s history… In the film version of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, after Atlanta has been burned and Scarlett O’Hara is fleeing [...]
M.E. Bradford did not write a lot about the agrarian life per se. His interest was in defending the South in which the agrarian way was taken for granted… M.E. Bradford I have called M.E. Bradford the Agrarian Aquinas. He did not write a Summa, but his work as a whole enriched and carried [...]
History is the “remembered past,” remembered according to values and virtues that are the inheritance of a particular people. The story as told gives meaning to the “facts,” and the story must be told to be remembered. “Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will [...]
Though he passed away in 1968, Donald Davidson’s efforts and criticisms continue to deserve much attention, since the South has become more decadent in its disregard for the past since his death… Mel Bradford has argued that no individual has exerted more influence upon the development of a profession of letters this century in the [...]
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 [...]
Ambiguities and contradictions aside, the Southern conservative tradition, by a heroic act of mind, may yet be summoned against the distortions of modernity, and, in particular, against the alluring gnostic supposition, now so prevalent, that men can alter the nature of existence and transmute the substance of being. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, [...]
The masters of slaves, it turned out, were themselves neither independent nor self-sufficient, but were bound to, and reliant upon, their slaves both for their welfare and their identity. This vague recognition in part accounts for the grim tone that Thomas Jefferson adopted in his analysis of slavery: He had to confront the prospect that [...]
Gene Kizer’s practical advice and his notations of political correctness and anti-Southern bias make The Elements of Academic Success an ideal purchase for any current or potential college student, especially those of a conservative and pro-Southern bent… The Elements of Academic Success by Gene Kizer, Jr. (364 pages, Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2014) I wish I had read [...]
Thomas Jefferson had hardly been exposed to the scientific and literary talents of black people except, to some extent, Phyllis Wheatley and Benjamin Banneker. At the end of his life, blacks in America were at the portal of coming into their own and would flower in the pursuits he most admired by the mid-late-19th century [...]
Richard Weaver claimed his homeland was the “last nonmaterialistic civilization in the western world.” Modernity to him meant at bottom institutionalizing most of the Seven Deadly Sins… Though his worth and stature were early established among them, while yet living Richard M. Weaver was something of a puzzle for his friends within the American “conservative [...]
Liberalism is the refuge favored by intellectual cowardice, because the essence of the liberal’s position is that he has no position. There is a saying by William Butler Yeats that a man begins to understand the world by studying the cobwebs in his own corner. My experience has brought home to me the wisdom in [...]
The power of imagination is to see things whole, to see things clearly, to see things with sanctity, to see things with love… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Alan Cornett as he discusses Wendell Berry’s thoughts on environmentalism and climate change, wealth and the economy, hope and [...]