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 [...]
There is legitimate debate over whether “progressive liberalism” constitutes a radical departure from, and even betrayal of, the basic commitments of “classical liberalism,” or whether it represents the next logical step in liberalism’s development. Both positions have merit. Many of the original architects of “progressive liberalism” begin with an explicit rejection of several of the [...]
It is Dashain, the biggest, longest and most auspicious holiday in Nepal, so my young friend and neighbor is already growing edgy. Call him Krishna, his father is Nepal’s dean of civil engineers and his mother is a devout Hindu and a nationally respected short-story writer, so his creativity comes naturally. He was educated at [...]
In 1990 the American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre published Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, Tradition.[1] The last chapter of this book is titled “Reconceiving the university and the lecture,” and it ends with a proposition: in academic discourse we should “introduce” ourselves before we start speaking. The introduction should be a statement revealing [...]
We all know the traditional English rhyme of wedding day advice for women (and also useful for triggering the return of Time Lords wiped from history): Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Each item is intended as a token of good luck for the bride. But there is wisdom contained within those words [...]
When T.S. Eliot was lodging with his friend John Haward, the charwoman [the cleaning lady] was once asked about the famous man she worked for. Not knowing who Mr. Eliot was, she finally figured out who they were talking about and said, “Oh! you mean the holy man!” Mr. Eliot’s eleven years with Mr. Haward [...]