I’ve donned my boots and leggings, and done what I had no desire to do. I am examining, with tedious scrutiny, the so-called Common Core Curriculum for literature and English, a new’n’improved set of standards for reading and writing in our schools from kindergarten to twelfth grade. I have read the essays, written by students, which [...]
The Unbought Grace of Life: Essays in Honor of Russell Kirk, edited by James E. Person Jr. This Festschrift was in galleys when Russell Kirk‘s health began failing. On learning of Kirk‘s decline, Sherwood Sugden photocopied the galleys and mailed them to Mecosta. The editor, James Person, a close friend of the Kirks, made the long trek [...]
There is an open space in the human heart–a void that seeks fulfillment and a hunger that longs for satisfaction. For the progressive this longing looks to the future. A brave new world is envisioned, an ideology is espoused and an action plan that brooks no dissent is put into place. For the conservative that [...]
John Lukacs and Wendell Berry This is the best introduction to the historical craft of John Lukacs. History and the Human Condition does not replace the much longer Remembered Past, a wide-ranging selection of Lukacs’s works also published by ISI Books. But this work, a coda to the author’s career, contains just the right mixture of [...]
Orson Scott Card’s science fiction classic, Ender’s Game is defined by moral ambiguity. A book about children, it is no children’s book. In it, six-year-olds already find themselves in military schools, fighting for the chance to enter the off-planet Battle School where they will leave behind all thoughts of family and home for round-the-clock military [...]
Conservatism at bottom is resistance to the technocratic project, the modern attempt to turn the social world into a sort of universal machine for the maximum satisfaction of preferences. That project has been growing up for a long time. It comes out of an understanding of knowledge and the world with its roots in the early [...]
Dorian Gray and Raymond Fosca are famous fictional characters renowned for miraculously being granted their wish to live forever without aging. But, whereas the protagonist in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is a self-indulgent sensualist, Simone de Beauvoir’s novel All Men Are Mortal depicts Raymond Fosca as someone dedicated to bettering the lives of his countrymen. Raymond [...]
George Orwell’s delightful, brief narrative acts as a fable: its animal characters allow us to see afresh well-worn and conventional truths. The fable warns us of what we already know, but must learn again and again if we are not to be fooled into historical optimism. By the time George Orwell’s Animal Farm appeared in August [...]
To know The Conservative Mind is to know the mind of its remarkable author, Russell Kirk. He was an old-fashioned man—courtly, retiring, serene, formal in dress and manner—whose view of the world, proclaimed by every photograph, was traditional, anti-modern, even obscure. Captured in his study, his library, his home, surrounded by pens, books, family, and friends, he [...]
Is religious faith necessary for conservatism? A more basic question is whether it is necessary for good sense, since it is for the sake of good sense that we are conservative. If it were otherwise, conservatism would be a hobby or an ideology, and it is neither; it is simply the appearance good sense takes [...]
In one of the most iconic scenes in cinematic history, Alex DeLarge, a young, murderous convict, is strapped to a bed with his eyes propped open and forced to watch videos depicting horrific acts of violence. The sounds of his favorite musician, Beethoven, or “Ludwig van”, as Alex calls him, stream through the air. Part [...]
There is the desert that is a slow wick, and the cactus and the highway defiled in waves of heat. There is the desert of this blank page where waters freeze and are released at the first light. Water and salt water. When Hugo hit these shores people fled. Houses were torn like families, trees [...]
Susan Srigley brings to the fiction of Flannery O’Connor what others have not: a truly Catholic frame of reference informed by Thomas Aquinas. In her study of the South’s preeminent fictionist, Flannery O’Connor’s Sacramental Art, Susan Srigley reconsiders three of Flannery O’Connor’s most significant figures: Hazel Motes, Francis Tarwater, and Ruby Turpin. The former are, [...]
Scholarship on the political thought and career of James Madison is still dominated by a prevailing “Hamiltonian” interpretation.[1] Set forth by such prominent scholars as Irving Brant, Martin Diamond, and George Carey, the “Hamiltonian” interpretation views the years surrounding the formation of the Constitution as the most productive years of Madison’s career and argues that [...]