A friend of mine, whom we shall call Miss Worth, fell into a conversation with a neighbor—Mrs. Williams, let us say—who, the day before, had sold a fine old building, long in her family, to be demolished that a lot for used-automobile sales might take its place. Mrs. Williams had certain regrets; but, said she [...]
I have written here about the salvation to be found in an English tea ceremony. Coffee on the other hand, I have always thought of as an American drink. I was introduced to great-tasting coffee a long time ago in Vermont, by a man who brewed it in test-tubes and fed it through an enormous [...]
Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One is tasteless, irreverent, perverse, and merciless. These qualities, however, are the source of a strange sanity because they are the means by which we can all have a good laugh. Not only is it quite alright to take things lightly, it is a good habit. It is even advisable to laugh [...]
If you would wish for your children to garner a love and fascination for the good things of God’s Creation, if you would have them embrace adventure, cherish what is noble, honor the poor, and attain to a sincere civility and gentleness, let them read from the works of Sir Walter Scott. Born in 1771 in [...]
There is something about the call of a bird from the peak of a mountain or the top branches of a tree or the heights of the sky that makes my soul cry out with longing. There is something in the sight of a bird soaring weightlessly above the ground, just beneath the clouds, or [...]
The word “tyranny” has a long history in American political discourse. Since at least the American Revolution, Americans have used the word to describe political actions they find distasteful. But what is tyranny? Some have defined tyranny to be identical with monarchy; others identify it with any form of government which is not democratic, or [...]
“I have left behind illusion,” I said to myself. “Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions – with the aid of my five senses.” I have since learned that there is no such world; but then, as the car turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but [...]
There is a book that caught my attention and may well hold it to the end of my life. Written by an English hermit—Priest-Monk Silouan, a convert to Orthodoxy now living in a retreat on the Shropshire hills—Wisdom Songs is a collection of “Centuries”, chapters of a hundred meditations each, on a series of spiritual [...]
Yesterday we were thankful for the harvest, now we reward our year’s successes. I know how so many of you ladies get all warm and fuzzy inside, putting on your Christmassy sweaters, listening to Christmas music while driving to the mall with your sisters and besties to see it all decked out in decorations and [...]
A friend once described conservatives as people who agreed about one important thing–that at some point in the past, something went terribly wrong. After that, conservatives splinter into untold numbers of camps, since they disagree ferociously about the date of the catastrophe. Most conservatives today agree that America has taken a terrible turn–that something went [...]
In 2012 Thomas Kinkade, “America’s Painter of Light” died in his sleep at his home in California. He was fifty-four. Three years earlier another American realist painter–Andrew Wyeth–died in his sleep in his Pennsylvania home. He was ninety-one. Both men worked hard and established popular reputations for their realistic renditions of American landscapes and homespun [...]
I must admit, I always have mixed feelings about celebrating Thanksgiving. It’s not that I don’t love giving thanks—in fact, I really do love it. And, I especially love how we Americans do it. If I had my way, we’d have cranberry relish, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie, and turkey five times to six times to [...]
The sixty-year anniversary of The Conservative Mind is an opportunity to reflect on Russell Kirk’s achievement in shaping perceptions of conservatism. The book places conservatism in the larger tradition of Western civilization. It also connects it to particular thinkers who embodied the canons of conservatism Kirk describes in the first chapter. The canons intend to [...]
More than twenty-five years ago, in The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom pointed out that college students in the United States had become very “nice.” Students in general did not want to offend anyone and there was a constant concern to protect one another’s feelings. Bloom meant this as a half-hearted, even backhanded [...]