Sadly, very few Americans remember Canon Bernard Iddings Bell (1886-1958)—this, despite the excellent work done by Cicero Bruce and Lee Cheek in his name. And, in his own day and age, Bell served as one of the leading scholars of what would eventually be called conservatism. He relentlessly defended the western canon and the liberal [...]
Bernard Iddings Bell Bernard Iddings Bell (1886-1958) wrote several controversial books examining the American way of life. These fine little books attracted considerable attention, many of them beginning as articles in the New York Times Magazine, Commonweal, and the Atlantic Monthly. By 1950 Bell, an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, was known [...]
Clergyman, educator and social critic, Bernard Iddings Bell (October 13, 1886-September 5, 1958) was born in Dayton, Ohio, and educated at the University of Chicago (B.A., 1907), Western Theological Seminary (S.T.B., 1912), The University of the South (S.T.D., 1923), and he also received numerous honorary degrees. In college Bell temporarily rejected his Episcopal Church upbringing. Under the [...]
“What the university of today tends to forget is that man has other hungers which the lower animals do not possess and that, if he is not taught how to satisfy those hungers too, he remains individually distrait, socially dangerous, and disruptive, no matter how well he has learned to sate and does sate his [...]
Despite a lip service to the importance of creative thinking and moral discrimination and to the necessity of a critical estimate of current patterns of behavior, those who direct the universities care for none of these things. Their chief aim is to turn out graduates who can fit comfortably, if possible eruditely, into the current [...]
Crowd Culture: An Examination of the American Way of Life by Bernard Iddings Bell. Americans watching the political upheavals in Egypt and elsewhere feel a variety of emotions, ranging from excitement about potential reform to fear of political regression. Both instincts revolve around the image of crowds in the streets—their promise and their peril. While [...]
While wealth accumulates in the United States, man seems to decay. In our private lives a pervading relativism, in absence of conviction about what is the good life, a willingness to seek the easy way rather than the way of integrity, blunts the prodding of conscience, takes the zest out of living, creates a general [...]