Recent liberal successes, such as the ongoing redefinition of marriage to include same-sex relationships, dramatize the failure of social conservatism in public discussion. What is most striking to conservatives about the situation is the conviction among intelligent and influential people that conservative social views are altogether baseless, so that adherence to them is an intellectual [...]
Seeking for the roots of order, we are led to four cities: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London. In Washington or New York or Chicago or Los Angeles today, the order which Americans experience is derived from the experience of those four old cities. If our souls are disordered, we fall into abnormality, unable to control [...]
Conservatism prospered in the half-century following the Second World War, but following wide-spread rejection at the polls, substantial policy defeats, and ever-souring popularity, the time has come for conservatives to reexamine and reaffirm their first principles. In this year, which celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, conservatism faces an identity crisis [...]
Like honey on a ripened pear, a glow upon today remains. Let’s walk, not brace for winter yet. Each unkempt orchard row will stiffen, cold, the frost like sharpened lace on this Winchester farm. Now, littered on bent brown-tipped grass, lie unkept apples, warm, half brown, and sweet. Across this tangled lawn like blurry stars [...]
In Monty Python’s comic diner skit every dish came with Spam, either a little or a lot. Is America the same with ideology? Does Ideological America touch everything and corrupt everything it touches, and can it turn back? Or, in the words of President Obama’s periodic, and oftentimes unpleasant, Chicago preacher, have “the chickens come [...]
The reason Socrates banished laughter or comedy from the poetry of the just city is that comedians, at their best, remind us of what we all know: there is an inexpressible sadness just beneath the surface of all our happy talk, and that means there are limits to how much any of us can be [...]
On June 5, 1832, a young Victor Hugo unwittingly found himself in the crossfire between young revolutionary republicans and the French National Guard. He took shelter in a doorway and escaped unharmed but the experience must have made a lasting impression upon him. Thirty years later Hugo used the small and predictably brief uprising against [...]
I’m no Russell Kirk when it comes to television. The Birzers own one, and, as patriarch, I’ve yet to throw it out the window of any floor of our house. But, we haven’t had any cable or any channels–not a single one–since 2002. Our decision to cancel all TV had little to do with principle. [...]
Years ago, perhaps when I was still in graduate school, I stopped at a Chattanooga used bookshop when passing through. One has a mental list of authors to check, and I happened to find an uncommon thing: a hardcover first edition of Wendell Berry’s 1970 book on race and the South, The Hidden Wound. The disappointment [...]
Illustration by Michael Hogue The old kept us out of conflict; the new leads to empire. In 1765, John Adams unwittingly penned one of the proof texts of American exceptionalism. “I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder,” the young lawyer wrote in his diary, “as the opening of a [...]
Russell Kirk (This is one of a series The Imaginative Conservative is publishing in honor of the sixtieth anniversary of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. Essays in the series may be found here.) The Conservative Mind, by Russell Kirk It has been sixty years since The Conservative Mind burst onto the scene, garnering lengthy [...]
Will the world end with a bang, or just a whimper, as T.S. Eliot predicted? Or will nobody notice at all? An eerie silence, as everyone listens to an endless stream of digital music on their iPods. Gradually, step by step, with the advance of computer technology, real things are being replaced by images of [...]
Naïve. Imprudent. A “Jesuit.” Such are some of the negative attributes that have been imputed to Pope Francis in the worried emails and dismayed blog posts that have come across my laptop screen in the week since the English publication of the Holy Father’s interview with Antonio Spadaro, S.J. Why such consternation from those who number themselves [...]
California Governor Jerry Brown recently signed a new law allowing “transgender” students to choose between boys’ or girls’ sports teams, and use the school locker rooms and lavatories that best suit whatever sex they are or wish to be someday. For me it comes decades too late. […]