Today the gospel crosses every border / All tongues are loosened by the Prince of Peace / Today the lost are found in His translation. / Whose mother-tongue is Love, in every nation. Drawn from Sounding the Seasons, my cycle of sonnets for the Church Year, this is a sonnet reflecting on and celebrating the themes [...]
Glaucon’s story is part of a well-known political tragedy that swept up many of Plato’s friends and fellow citizens, including Socrates. The evidence for his personal tragedy, however, is deeply embedded in the text. Like a three-dimensional image hidden within a two-dimensional picture, it requires a special adjustment of the eyes to perceive. Perhaps the [...]
Nathaniel Hawthorne held this resolute conviction: that moral reformation is the only real reformation; that sin will always corrupt the projects of enthusiasts who leave it out of account; that progress is a delusion, except for the infinitely slow progress of conscience. Conservatism in America, though so often defeated at the polls, always has held [...]
Under Louis Napoleon III, the Second French Empire was more successful than the first, and more successful than any political administration in France up to that point. An Empire focused on domestic order and growth had finally brought the liberty and prosperity that Republics and Monarchies had failed to achieve. How could such a successful [...]
Historical novelists can tell us not only about the past, but also about our present in a manner that keeps our interest, and helps us reflect on our own existence as historical beings. This notion is important for our understanding of George Gissing’s great novel, “Veranilda.” When George Gissing died in December 1903, he was [...]
Emily Dickinson creates a simple buffet for our imagination in her nature and summer poems, but most especially in "I taste a liquor never brewed." And rather than being appalled by her celebration of “drunkenness,” I embrace her abandoned delight in the essence of summer. I taste a liquor never brewed – From Tankards scooped [...]
The sharp focus on Mrs. Verhagen gives “The Winged Watchman,” Hilda van Stockum’s novel about a Dutch family during World War II, such power. The close-up tasks of the women are just as heroic as the tasks of the men who often fought to protect their loved ones. Who knew a great war story would [...]
In “The Conservative Mind,” Russell Kirk sought to identify, elucidate, and cultivate the best of the Western tradition as the West itself weathered, rather roughly at times, the storms of ideologies. Conserve the past, yes, but Kirk also wanted us to rally to the standards of the past to leave an inheritance for our children. [...]
I rarely have any trouble finding available in the stacks works by and about the major conservative writers whom I esteem. Am I truly the only reader of Kirk, Weaver, and Voegelin in a town with a university of 30,000 students? I often reserve my Sunday afternoons for trips to the local university library. These [...]
Both free thinking and innovation depend on having the imagination to see alternate ways of being, to envision worlds that we do not yet see before us, to reconsider what is there, and to conceive what could be there in its place. As the president of an American college with a distinctive approach to liberal [...]
Literature is so effective in giving us a foundational understanding of ourselves, our neighbours, and our shared human existence throughout history because it shows us the way of virtue, the truth of reason, and the beauty of the cosmos and our place within it. Jared Zimmerer interviews Joseph Pearce. Jared Zimmerer: Throughout your collection of [...]
In his many works, W.H. Mallock successfully developed a science of conservatism based upon an affirmation of personal restraint, aristocratic rule, and market economics. To challenge the prevailing social and political orthodoxies of one’s time and place often encourages recrimination and eventual neglect. Such has been the fate of William Hurrell Mallock (1849-1923), a seminal [...]
Justice is that which breaks us out of the cycle of vengeance. It achieves a higher vision that considers motives (and not just actions), causes (and not just effects), purposes (and not just naked facts). The triumph of justice does not signify the total defeat of vengeance, but its transformation into something beneficent. Author’s Introduction: [...]
True unity among men must have its roots in that common participation in the holy tradition reaching back to an utterance of God Himself. One wonders whether tradition is not actually anti-historical. It stands in stark contrast to the most impressive and most visible strand of the historical process, namely, the ever-advancing scientific investigation of [...]