Hearing T.S. Eliot's poems read brings us back to the haunting beauty of the words themselves, and hearing the words unlocks Eliot’s powerful imagery, just as he would have wanted. Jeremy Irons' classic rendition empowers this strange transaction, and through the words we are taken beyond the words to...
Christopher Dawson believed that history, far from being cyclical, was instead a particular manifestation of God’s will, and thus was “moving towards a great consummation, the revelation of the power and glory of Yahweh through his servant Israel”…
An understanding of progress and its adherents was not just of academic curiosity to Christopher Dawson. It was central to understanding the good life and preventing those who misunderstood history from gaining control and imposing the will of man upon the creation of God...
If culture is simply a matter of private enthusiasms and hobbies, of small details and specialties, then what of a common culture? What about the collective project and shared sense of purpose that built Western civilization?
“The...
Despite all Christopher Dawson's quirks and social fears, friends flocked to him; together, they read poetry, discussed philosophy, farmed, and made crafts. Would there have been a European renaissance of Christian Humanism without this friendship centered around "Tiger Dawson"? Almost certainly not...
T.S. Eliot reminds us that the answers to our soul’s depravity are all around us, in our collective culture—the books we read, the places we inhabit, the music we listen to—but also that culture can only survive if we remember it and keep it alive...
Today’s offering in...
Through T.S. Eliot’s use of symbolism in "The Journey of the Magi" there is a call to a world beyond words—just as the mystics of historic Christianity beckoned to Eliot from the beginning of his journey...
Though a classic in its own right, and arguably the first book on conservatism in the modern world, Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France of 1790 is inconsistent as a coherent work. And, yet, even in its unevenness,...
As Edmund Burke began to wind down his very long letter—that which would become 1790’s Reflections on the Revolution in France—he returned to the question of first principles and right reason, especially in regard to the nature of...
What ought to take primacy when carrying out research and interpreting seminal books: the text itself, or the context?
A known critic of historicism and contextualism, Leo Strauss published his seminal essay, ‘What is Political Philosophy?’ in...
There are several attitudes towards Christmas,
Some of which we may disregard:
The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,
The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),
And the childish — which is not that of the child
For whom the candle is a star,...
Eric Voegelin
No matter how conservative intellectuals try, they just do not seem able to escape John Locke.
Jonah Goldberg’s well-received Suicide of the West proudly called America’s Declaration of Independence “echoes of” the great...
The transcendent ‘overcoming’ or reconciliation of the Fall of Man—that symbol of the cause of the disorder that we would wish re-ordered, of the return to the garden—is what great poetry graciously asks of us...
“An intermediate...
Russell Kirk offers us a rich legacy in words and deeds. If we heed them we may yet play our part in preserving our Republic’s ordered liberty...
The thought of Dr. Russell Kirk has inspired many people and many...
