Samuel Adams believed that men are ruled more by fear or other emotions than by reason. And Sam Adams knew how to generate anger and fear. Thus he kept up the flow of propaganda that followed from the town's versions of what had happened in the Boston Massacre. Samuel Adams (September 27, 1722-October 2, 1803), [...]
I urge “imaginative conservatives” to use their imagination in selecting what they choose to read. Instead of wasting time with the toxic triteness of New York Times bestsellers, we need to reward the courage that adventurous publishers are showing by buying and reading the new and adventurous works that they are publishing. For almost a [...]
We need to return to first principles and to the most important questions one could ever ask: What is man? What is God? And, what is man’s relationship to God and to one another? The Christian Humanist does not pretend to know the answer to each of these questions, but he knows the questions must [...]
The necessity of personal morality in a thriving community is denied by the enemies of the permanent things, who do not believe that there are permanent standards of behavior or indeed an unchanging human nature, and who seek to create political systems that will make everyone happy without much effort. Enemies of the Permanent Things: [...]
Many conservatives have assumed that Edmund Burke was opposed to the American Revolution. It is, to my mind, an erroneous assumption. “Burke broke his agentship and went publicly silent on the American cause once war broke out,” Robert Nisbet claimed in his most definitive analysis of Edmund Burke, written and published in 1985. His fellow [...]
Irving Babbitt wrestled with those fundamental life questions that relate to the fate of man in the modern world. What he chose to say about this world of increasing material organization continues to make Babbitt’s work and thought disturbing and unpalatable. Irving Babbitt (1865-1933) never wavered in what he viewed as being his commanding office [...]
***** Please join us by making your donation today in celebration of our 15th anniversary. Every contribution—whether $1500, $150, or $15—joins with our labor and prayer to restore the best of Christendom. —W. Winston Elliott, Publisher ***** An Electronic Inklings by Bradley Birzer I remember it well. Fifteen years ago, on a hot, humid summer afternoon [...]
The most interesting response from Parliament to the imperial crisis came, not surprisingly, from Edmund Burke. An Irishman by birth, Burke had been raised Church of England though his mother and sister were Roman Catholic. Crucially, this upbringing in a mixed family radically shaped Burke’s understanding of the world, he as always sided with the [...]
Pope St. John Paul II and Russell Kirk defended freedom within the limits of truth and its authentic or right use. They knew it was crucial to distinguish license and liberty. But they have different approaches to truth. As we discussed the work of Russell Kirk, written in 1954, revised in 1962 and 1988, I [...]
Hoffman Nickerson and a coterie of essayists in the 1920s and 1930s comprised the “Old Right,” a loose confederation of thinkers and writers animated by anti-modernism, suspicion of democracy, and worries over the debasement of Western culture. In 1934, the cartoonist David Low created the cartoon character of “Colonel Blimp,” an exaggerated caricature of older [...]
Whereas Chaucer had depicted April as the bringer of life that lifts the hearts of the faithful, T.S. Eliot curses April for its cruelty in bringing back to life things and thoughts that were best left dead and buried. April is the cruellest month…. The opening words of The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot are [...]
The purpose of education has not remained the same over the course of roughly four centuries. By the early 20th century, education for Protestantization and Americanization began to give way to something called "progressive education.” Not surprisingly, it is progressive education that Richard Weaver targets. Published in 1964, Richard Weaver’s Visions of Order: The Cultural [...]
T.S. Eliot’s “Ash-Wednesday” helps us to consider our earthly transience, just as Ash Wednesday reminds us of this same fact that our time on earth is passing. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita . . . There is something telling about man’s tendency to view his life as a journey, for journeys convey the [...]
Against a modern age that denied notions of meaning, purpose, and truth, Richard Weaver articulated a conservatism of hope and affirmation based on the Platonic-Christian heritage and its manifestation in the American South. Richard Weaver reasoned it was the emergence of nominalism, the departure from Platonism and Christianity, which produced the intellectual heresies leading to [...]