The primary purpose of the university is to preserve the great ideas of the past and to introduce the present generation to timeless conversations, thus preserving such wisdom for countless and unknown future generations… Conservatives rarely remember the profound influence Robert A. Nisbet (1913-1996) had on the press, academia, and the public at large in [...]
The genuine conservative is not motivated by fear, avarice, or power. The very constitution of his being is directed toward the perfection of his soul. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Glen A. Sproviero as he explores the distinction between genuine conservatism and ideology. —W. Winston Elliott III, [...]
Other boys wanted to be football or basketball stars, millionaires, politicians, engineers, businessmen, lawyers, and doctors. My aim was to be an Anglican country parson. T.S. Eliot and George Herbert were my role models… From time to time, I am invited to speak to groups who want to hear my conversion story. The audiences are always [...]
Too often the public conversation about universal truths divides along rather sterile ideological lines. Russell Kirk’s great warning is that this is not really a battle of ideas, understood abstractly, but a battle of sentiments or affections… Since the nation’s founding, a salutary tension has informed American political thought—a tension between the abstract, universal truths [...]
Editor's Note: In his essay “Nietzsche, the Crisis, and the War,” Eric Voegelin summarizes Friedrich Nietzsche’s disturbing description of "The Last Man”: Zarathustra preaches the gospel of the superman to the people, and the people are silent. He then tries to arouse them by an appeal to their pride and draws the picture of the most contemptible, [...]
Russell Kirk’s life and labors can offer a potential salve to the recent struggles of American conservatism, which is threatened by a pall of superficiality and cynicism. Russell Kirk: American Conservative by Bradley Birzer (University Press of Kentucky, 2015) In the two decades since the death of Russell Amos Augustine Kirk, American conservatism has struggled. National [...]
Looking at the whole of the South’s promise and achievement, I would be unwilling to say that it offers a foundation, or, because of some accidents of history, even an example. The most that it offers is a challenge… History is a liberal art and one profits by studying the whole of it, including the [...]
Having cast off Christianity, Europe now lacks a spiritual identity and united purpose. Absent these essential characteristics, a culture becomes stale and decadent, and turns to political institutions as the sole guarantor of peace, welfare, and security… The British government’s invocation of Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty on March 29, formally began the United [...]
For the “hive” that is the democratic mindset, the very spirit of democracy pushes its adherents to surmount limits, and to behave as one man with the will of a god. Writing of France in 1790, Edmund Burke asked exactly how one might categorize the revolutionary government. Is it a monarchy of the democracy, a [...]
Christopher Dawson promoted an alternative, if tentative, vision that Christianity could make a comeback as the source of spiritual renewal for desiccated Eastern cultures. In preparation for a trip to the Asian countries of China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Singapore, I have been reading many books and essays on a wide variety of topics by a wide [...]
In addition to the brilliance of his thought, Friedrich Hayek left us the lesson of his example: to search using our imagination, but always to know that what we find we find in humility, thereby recognizing our limits as one life in the long life of man, one mind in the long line of minds… Hayek [...]
The best things are not the things we buy, but those we inherit. In what Burke calls the age of “sophisters, economists, and calculators,” I am struck again by the superb phrase he uses to summon up the nobility and beauty that characterize inheritance: “the unbought grace of life”… In the junior Humanities class this [...]
Who would have thought that Bob Jones III, chancellor and former president of Bob Jones University, could be such a great actor, sensitive to the work of Shakespeare and quite clearly a lover of beauty?… As a resident of Greenville, South Carolina, I have learned to live alongside an overbearing Protestant neighbor whose looming presence [...]
Friedrich Hayek’s individualism is not the Rousseauian individualism of the person stripped naked of all his relations and his history, but rather that of Edmund Burke, with each person both encumbered and liberated by the little platoons to which we all belong… Sometime during the early to mid-1980s, I encountered the work of Friedrich August von [...]