We spoke of much else besides [our business of the day]: of friends and mentors and the tumors of both—their fortunes and misfortunes, their origins and our own; of illustrative stories, many of them drawn from outside the narrow confines of the academy; of adversaries ancient and modern; of our delight in the progress of [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Lee Cheek as he examines the importance of agrarianism in American life and the necessity of restoring its place within our culture. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher Among the contributions to I’ll Take My Stand, Allen Tate’s “Remarks on the Southern Religion” [...]
The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate edited by John Tyree Fain and Thomas Daniel Young. Of those sources ordinarily consulted by literary historians and critics, letters are surely among the most suspect. In the first place, we all write lines that are no more than the accepted conventions of social intercourse: “I apologize [...]
M.E. Bradford Ideas about property, language, and memory established the contours and parameters of M.E. Bradford’s Southern inheritance. In Bradford’s thought, property, language, and memory were linked in defense of what his mentor, Donald Davidson, characterized as “the great vital continuum of human experience to which we apply the inadequate term ‘tradition’….”[1] The [...]
Russell Kirk gave southern conservatives a larger canvas by which to imagine the conservative tradition. One could be southern, conservative, and yet reject the ancient racial evils of the South. When Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind in 1953, he included among the pantheon of conservatives in the United States John C. Calhoun and John [...]
Wendell Berry addressed faith, agrarianism, and why he hates “environmentalism” in a ninety minute conversation with Centre College Professor Eric Mount. The two men sat in angled wingback chairs before a crowd of more than two hundred listeners in the sumptuous surroundings of Louisville’s Crescent Hill Baptist Church. In true professorial fashion, Mount made sure [...]
The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, Mark T. Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, eds., ISI Books. A year ago, when my wife and I were waiting for a flight out of Logan Airport, a roughhewn man of about 60 was sitting a few seats away from us reading a book I would have been surprised [...]
Wendell Berry is a philosopher, and an important one in this postmodern era, who utilizes the essay, the poem, and, most importantly, the novel, to express his observations of concrete human beings and their life in community. It is in his novels, purposefully located in an agrarian setting, that he depicts the intrinsic interdependency of the [...]
Years ago, perhaps when I was still in graduate school, I stopped at a Chattanooga used bookshop when passing through. One has a mental list of authors to check, and I happened to find an uncommon thing: a hardcover first edition of Wendell Berry’s 1970 book on race and the South, The Hidden Wound. The disappointment [...]
M.E. Bradford was was truly one of the giants of the postwar conservative intellectual movement. A Southerner first, he was naturally both an agrarian and a conservative. The late M.E. (“Mel”) Bradford (1934-1993) was truly one of the giants of the postwar conservative intellectual movement. A Texan (born in Fort Worth), Bradford earned his B.A. [...]
Donald Davidson Confident that industrial prosperity would create the material foundations for a vigorous, democratic civilization in the South, southern liberals since the 1880s had repudiated much of their heritage and embraced science and industry as the salvation of mankind. Liberal educators, journalists, and social scientists of the immediate postwar era, such as [...]
The rise of techno-capitalism has signaled the triumph of the “bourgeois family” and the demise of the “traditional” family. Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas said that economist Adam Smith was well aware that the “weakening of familial ties would increase the necessity of sympathy between strangers and result in cooperative forms of behavior that had not [...]
Berry’s economic program, what he calls the “little economy,” is a smaller wheel in the larger motion of the “Great Economy.” To understand the former, it is vital to grasp the latter. In the following, then, Berry’s vision of the broader drama of human action is set forth, followed by a presentation of his narrower [...]
A Better Guide Than Reason: Studies in the American Revolution. (La Salle, IL: Sherwood Sugden & Company Publishers, 1979). Cited in the text as Guide. Remembering Who We Are: Observations of a Southern Conservative. (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1985). Cited in the text as Remembering. A Worthy Company: The Dramatic Story of [...]