Near the end of his recent book, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition (highly recommended), the English philosopher Roger Scruton makes a very interesting observation about what is possible in America but not in Europe. As he puts it, the burden of American conservatism has been to define the customs and traditions most in [...]
Notre Dame nearly burned to the ground, from neglect, and we can say the same thing about the Church in France, in Europe, and in the West as a whole. So, we can say the same thing about our culture. On Monday, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris caught fire and nearly burned to the ground. [...]
In a time of economic uncertainty, liberal education holds out the promise of joy in learning, contentment in contemplating truth, and satisfaction in community. These things are available to all people, rich or poor. Liberal education and the free society have always been intimately connected. A liberal education, an education which prepares one for freedom, [...]
I first came across Russell Kirk’s belief that academics must serve as guardians of “the Word” in his groundbreaking but now sadly-neglected book, Academic Freedom: An Essay in Definition (1955). “The principle support to academic freedom, in the classical world, the medieval world, and the American educational tradition, has been the conviction, among scholars and teachers, [...]
Advocates of the liberal arts include “heretical” books in the great conversation, whereas political liberals seek to silence them as dangerous. As we have seen in Nazi Germany and in communist countries, the banning of “heretical” books ends with the burning of “heretics.” Several years ago, I visited the two-room shack in Tupelo, Mississippi, in [...]
Christians invented the classical curriculum; it is as much part of the broader Western inheritance as it is specifically part of the Christian inheritance. Why study old books? How do dusty old books written by dead men and women thousands of years ago grow my faith? Such can be common thoughts when the Christian is [...]
Jonah Goldberg terms a “miracle” the great wealth that has been produced by the West since the middle of the eighteenth century. But will the miracle that is the West give way to the suicide of the West? Ah, that is the question he attempts to answer in his new book… Suicide of the West: How [...]
We should respond to the question of whether the West is worth defending by first asking the more important question of which West it is that we are being asked to defend… There are many people who will cite the West as something which is under threat and something for which we should be prepared [...]
Eric Voegelin’s philosophical framework attempted to break down the ideological barriers to the search for order and the recovery of transcendent consciousness… Eric Voegelin’s work is not well known outside a relatively small group of academics and their students. Yet within this domain Voegelin’s influence is impressive. His work has inspired a growing secondary literature and [...]
The great tradition of Western culture has proven peculiarly absorptive; it has brought influences from many disparate sources into a rich conversation. But it is Christianity that has for centuries formed its core. And it is, above all, this core to which “conservatism at its highest” remains faithful. The question before us is whether religious [...]
“There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken,” writes Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment. And such is the impression made upon us by Dosteovsky’s incredible psychological masterpiece… “Personally, I require a ceiling, although a high one. Yes, I like ceilings, and the high better than [...]
There is a way out of postmodernism: courage. You do not reason yourself out of the postmodern, you fight your way out. You realize that logic can only take you so far. Then you have a decision to make. And you make it. Western civilization is founded on this one faith, this one great volitional [...]
While the West has made more than its share of mistakes, it has also done some things better than any other civilization, or, at the very least, introduced things to the world that the world then claimed for all of humanity. For those of us who still love Western civilization and consider ourselves loyal patriots [...]
President Trump was right to defend the West, a civilization which goes back to the Homeric epic and the Hebrew prophets, and having been baptized by Christ, is “not the property of any particular race but the universal aspiration of humankind”… In an essay for The Atlantic earlier this month, Peter Beinart, an associate professor [...]