One of the reasons I sometimes wax nostalgic for the Middles Ages is for the religious spectacle. This was an age of the dramatic gesture: St. Francis standing barefoot in the snow or the penitent Henry IV crossing the Alps barefoot while wearing a hair shirt. It is the age of the passion and mystery [...]
Nowhere is the concern with the problem of community in Western society more intense than with respect to the family. The contemporary family, as countless books, articles, college courses, and marital clinics make plain, has become an obsessive problem. The family inspires a curious dualism of thought. We tend to regard it uneasily as a final manifestation of tribal society, [...]
An avowed socialist is running for the presidential nomination of one of the two dominant political parties. Same-sex marriage has been proclaimed the law of the land. Levels of church attendance and religious belief have dropped significantly. And political correctness has run amok on campus, on the net, and in the entertainment industry. One could [...]
In his novel Coningsby, the great British Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli noted that the first thing a conservative must ask himself is what it is he means to conserve. Observing many of the men and women in our current political arena who call themselves “conservative,” it is not clear to what sort of political philosophy [...]
American conservatives, when they have felt the need to establish their lineage, have accepted the rather conventional framework of liberalism-conservatism, already existing in American historiography and popular lore. But one possible tradition of American conservatism is the Jeffersonian tradition. As a movement of thought, the resurgent conservatism of twentieth century America cannot achieve maturity without [...]
Permanence is not merely a matter of taste—something to be embraced by the sedentary and eschewed by the restless—but a deep societal value. It is the guardian of family, tradition, practical wisdom, environment, and culture On the whole, it would appear to be for the best that the great majority of human beings should go [...]
(Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Mark Malvasi as he examines corruption and The Godfather trilogy. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher) America, that bright, shining land of freedom, opportunity, and progress, is irredeemably corrupt. It is in the hands of debased and hypocritical politicians, judges, businessmen, and their [...]
Ask yourself an odd question: “How conservative is my refrigerator?” Or, ask this of your car, your television, your tablet. Ask this of any number of things around the house. At first pass, this might sound unusual, if not ridiculous, because we generally don’t think of things as having behaviors or expressing particular ideas or [...]
Often on my day off, before a morning motorcycle ride in the mountains, I treat myself to breakfast at a Southern American institution: Waffle House. Waffle Houses are not luxurious. The box-like buildings are designed for cheerful efficiency, and cheerfully efficient they are. As soon as you walk through the door the staff call out [...]
I must confess that I dislike “Fiddler on the Roof.” I agree that the songs are cute and memorable and that it is wholesome entertainment. But as a story about tradition and the melancholy of cultural demise, it is vastly overrated. It is hard not to have seen the 1971 film adaptation of Fiddler on [...]
The twentieth century witnessed an assault on a number of once fine words, often hollowing out the traditional meanings and filling them with sheer refuse. Myth, in the twentieth century, became lie. Love became lust. Another such word, lost in the confusion of our present whirligig of post-modern life, is humanism. To even those who [...]
Tonight I want to state, and even to overstate, what I believe to be a truth about the Program of St. John’s College. What makes the truth worth considering is that it goes against the plain appearances and against what people, quite understandably, say about us. I want to state this truth especially for the [...]
James Kirke Paulding affirmed the preeminence of place, tradition, and orthodoxy in the antebellum North even as he forces of capitalism, Evangelicalism, and materialistic modernity eroded the gentrified and agrarian culture of the Hudson River Valley. Paulding never wavered from his belief in prescriptive truth and the transcendence of place. He derided American democracy, viewing [...]
The class of surplus things we might call meta-luxury because, though they represent luxuries in the sense that they exceed our basic needs, what we value in them lies beyond anything we could define as material luxury. Classical music is only one example of this special category. In the first part of this series, I [...]