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 [...]
What has alarmed me most as I moved away from liberalism—or as it moved away from me—was how quick my liberal friends were to renounce and reject our delicate social fabric as oppressive, as exclusionary, or as just plain worthless. Churches? Schools? Communities? Not just anachronisms, according to the New Liberalism, but dangerous threats 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 “moral imagination” goes beyond our personal, individual experiences to help us fathom the depths of human dignity in light of God’s creation. In November 2013, my students and I had the honor of a visit from Annette Kirk, widow of Russell Kirk. Mrs. Kirk led us in a discussion of her husband’s classic essay “The Moral [...]
The sorriest aspect of the twentieth century has been the rallying of the intellectuals to the arrogant banner of nationalism, which rejects universal and eternal truth for the sake of national and passing advantage… Thirty years ago, a book was published about which a great many people talk, but which few have really read: La [...]
As revolutionary as they claimed to be, the French Revolutionaries were as old as sin, Edmund Burke assured his readers. “Trace them through all their artifices, frauds, and violences,” he argued, and “you can find nothing at all that is new.” Roughly four-fifths into his spectacular Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke paused. [...]
The spirit of the Gospel…gives, asking nothing in return, and spends itself for others. It is essentially hostile to the spirit of calculation, the spirit of worldly prudence and above all to the spirit of religious self-seeking and self-satisfaction. Even the sinner who possesses a seed of generosity, a faculty of self-surrender, and an openness [...]
The qualities that I would love most of all to see in all our students could not be better described than by Edmund Burke’s account of the chivalric demeanor: “that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom”… As a [...]
Stories of glass and stone—which told of the holy and sainted—convinced young Christopher Dawson that a saint was a saint not because of his or her individual talents, but as a continuation of the deepest longings and desires of the Church. In 1889, when Henry Christopher Dawson entered the world, he did so with style. [...]
It would be difficult to find a more beautiful republican thought in all of Edmund Burke’s writings than this: “A man full of warm speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the existing [...]
Since the present meaning of a word is often vaguely swayed by past meanings which have dropped into the subconscious, a knowledge of particular semantic histories can increase our facility and sometimes save us from an inadvertent error. Studies in Words by C.S. Lewis (352 pages, Cambridge University Press, 1960) Anyone reading the literature of modern semantics [...]
The bourgeois soul for Christopher Dawson is not found simply in support of the free market. The bourgeois soul is found when one puts money above God, in contrast to the religious man, who places God first. “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or [...]
The French Revolutionaries, Edmund Burke rightly understood, sought not just the overturning of the old, but, critically, they also desired the destruction of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Only by lying about the nature of the human person could they accomplish their goals… One of the most important duties of any good person, [...]
If we take a careful look at T.S. Eliot, we shall see a born conservative, attached to certain austere traditions of previous ages, and yet one who saw clearly that those traditions had worn thin—they had grown conventional and insincere because no one had bothered to establish convincingly why they were important… Today’s offering in [...]