Calling All the Young Fogies

By |2023-09-21T15:22:05-05:00September 21st, 2023|Categories: Conservatism, Featured, Timeless Essays, Tradition|

In stressing the importance of beauty and formality, the young fogey movement provides an antidote to modernity’s utilitarianism and narcissistic childishness. Looking into the life of a contemporary English writer, I happened upon a reference to the “young fogies” of 1980s England, an assortment of men then in their first decade or two of adult life [...]

Andrew Senior on John Senior, Proponent of Beauty & Tradition

By |2023-07-14T11:07:34-05:00July 13th, 2023|Categories: Beauty, Catholicism, Christianity, John Senior, Liberal Learning, Tradition|

My father was first and foremost a true philosopher, a lover of wisdom, a student, a seeker of truth, and in addition to this and as a necessary result, he became a great teacher, and more than that, a converter. Everyone who ever met him, even briefly, was affected by his intense love of truth, [...]

Literature & the Foundations of the West

By |2023-06-21T12:49:41-05:00June 20th, 2023|Categories: Classical Education, Featured, Literature, Timeless Essays, Tradition, Western Civilization, Western Tradition|

The questions for the West have now become: What it is that we should remember and teach? What are the elements of Western civilization that might sustain what is left and reconstruct what has been damaged or destroyed? In the early twenty-first century, the liberal arts curriculum at our universities is in a peculiar condition [...]

Tolkien’s Traditionalism: Conveniently Forgotten?

By |2023-06-13T18:14:55-05:00June 13th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literature, Tradition|

J.R.R. Tolkien poured his heart and deepest sense of what “right” reality meant into his subcreative work. His world of Middle Earth is based on monarchy, tradition, obscure and yet profoundly meaningful rituals involving sacred and elevated languages. It is peopled by kings and peasants, wizards and sorcerers. Its economy is distributist. The men of [...]

Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”: Faith Triumphant

By |2023-05-25T17:03:36-05:00May 25th, 2023|Categories: Death, Faith, Fiction, Literature, Timeless Essays, Tradition|

It can be dangerous to depict evil. Accuracy might require getting too close to things best kept at bay. J.R.R. Tolkien once cautioned his friend, C.S. Lewis, concerning Mr. Lewis’ skill in depicting evil. Anyone familiar with Uncle Screwtape or Perelandra’s Un-man will know to what Mr. Tolkien alluded. There is an uncanny comprehension of [...]

Eating Alone: Aristotle & the Culture of the Meal

By |2023-02-26T17:46:43-06:00February 26th, 2023|Categories: Aristotle, Christian Living, Civilization, Family, Friendship, Paul Krause, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Tradition|

Eating together, as a social event, is meant to be time-consuming because it is meant to be an intimate experience where friendship—true friendship—is experienced, rekindled, and love stands at the center of the dinner table. It is, in its own way, a call to sacrifice. Aristotle identified man’s eating habits as one of the cornerstones of civilization—one [...]

Choosing Southernness, Choosing My Father’s Way

By |2023-07-31T23:58:42-05:00February 12th, 2023|Categories: Conservatism, Featured, Mark Malvasi, South, Timeless Essays, Tradition|

Southern ways are held up to ridicule, and Southern virtues are out of fashion. But because Southerners think, believe, live and act within an inheritance, they enjoy a sense of confidence, faith and stability that may prove an invaluable asset as the foundations of our society begin to collapse. Late in August 1965, a young [...]

The Democracy of the Unborn

By |2023-01-30T14:21:36-06:00January 30th, 2023|Categories: Abortion, Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Liberalism, Timeless Essays, Tradition|

Society has been reduced to those living in the present; but in being reduced, it has excluded the democracy of the dead and unborn. We, in the present, must fight for this most obscure of all classes. In the abortion debate, one of the pro-choice arguments is based on the idea of “personhood.” Personhood is [...]

On the Timelessness of the Tradition

By |2023-05-21T11:28:48-05:00September 9th, 2022|Categories: Conservatism, E.B., Eva Brann, Featured, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors, St. John's College, Timeless Essays, Tradition, Western Tradition|

None of the works of the Tradition are to be considered old, except insofar as in human works—not so much in human beings—old age often brings beauty. These works are hardly ever doctrinal catechisms or operational manuals but something in-between: places where incitements to ever-active questions and treasures of attempted answers are recorded. Editor’s Note: [...]

The Old-Fashioned Art of Visiting

By |2023-08-18T18:02:26-05:00September 6th, 2022|Categories: Civil Society, Culture, Literature, Mitchell Kalpakgian, Timeless Essays, Tradition|

Social visits are done for their own sake, for disinterested reasons, for the pleasure of others, and as a gracious act of thoughtfulness that dignifies both the visitor and the visited. In the novels of Louisa May Alcott, a time prior to the invention of the telephone, and even into the middle of the twentieth [...]

The Essence of Conservatism

By |2021-10-19T08:21:07-05:00October 18th, 2021|Categories: Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Essential, History, RAK, Russell Kirk, The Imaginative Conservative, Timeless Essays, Tradition|

Everything worth conserving is menaced in our generation. Mere unthinking negative opposition to the current of events, clutching in despair at what we still retain, will not suffice in this age. A conservatism of instinct must be reinforced by a conservatism of thought and imagination. A friend of mine, whom we shall call Miss Worth, fell [...]

Renewing and Rejecting: Comparing Architecture and Music

By |2020-11-23T17:14:43-06:00November 23rd, 2020|Categories: Architecture, Faith, Featured, Music, Roger Scruton, Timeless Essays, Tradition, Western Civilization|

At a certain stage and for no apparent reason, self-criticism among those of us in the West gave way to repudiation. Instead of subjecting our inheritance to a critical evaluation, seeking what is good in it and trying to understand and endorse the ties that binds us to it, a great many of those appointed [...]

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