Featured Book: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization by Anthony Esolen Christianity. Judaism. Dead white males. Old-fashioned morality. The traditional family. Tradition itself. These are the bêtes noires of the elites.They are the pillars of political incorrectness. Together, they constitute that thing called Western civilization. Political correctness, at its heart, is the effort to dissolve the [...]
The foolishness of various historical readings of our constitutional tradition as a story of oppression must be combated with truth. As with so much else, we have a great deal of work to do before we can recover the knowledge, let alone the wisdom, of the forebears who built the edifice we have spent generations [...]
Radical egalitarianism in a democracy leads to mob rule, which leads to tyranny. So it happened in Ancient Athens, and so might it happen in America today. Most Americans take for granted that democracy is an absolute good. If it can be said of an idea or a program that it promotes equality, Americans, whatever [...]
Students of Western cultural decline may find parallels in the aesthetic decay of Japan starting in the mid-nineteenth century. These four elements seem to have debased the graphic arts especially: technology, political reform and equality, industrialisation and wealth, and reduced popular support for traditional culture among new elites. In both places these factors overturned venerable [...]
Look Homeward, America, by Bill Kauffman Bill Kauffman is not ashamed to be an American. In fact, he loves his country, though he is also at pains to explain precisely what “America” it is that he loves: There are two Americas: the televised America, known and hated by the world, and the rest of us. [...]
Featured Book: The Quest For Community, by Robert Nisbet, ranks high among the foundational works of post-war American conservatism. In it, Nisbet argued that the emergence of the “centralized territorial State” in the wake of the Middle Ages decisively impacted Western social organization. Nisbet was particularly sensitive to the rise of the “national community,” the total political [...]
It is mistakenly thought by many that the great books are recommended for reading and study because they are a repository of truth. On all the fundamental subjects and ideas with which the great books deal, some truths will be found in them, but on these very same subjects and ideas, many more errors or [...]
If a conservative order is indeed to return, we ought to know the tradition which is attached to it, so that we may rebuild society; if it is not to be restored, still we ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes what scorched fragments of civilization escape the conflagration [...]
Daniel McInerny Maybe nothing. Maybe the novel of belief is perfectly alive and well, though of a different character than the kinds of novel produced, inter alia, by Waugh, Greene, Percy and O’Connor in the last century. Or maybe it has all but disappeared from the literary landscape and is sorely in need of [...]
The dollar—that thing the Federal Reserve has been printing like mad the last few years—is in one of the worst spells in its history, short, medium, and long-term. Against the world’s major currencies, the dollar’s rate of exchange is down 5% since the Great Recession started, 32% from the 2001 peak, and 15% from the [...]
A colleague in our Great Books program shared an article with me over the Christmas break, and as I was buried in reading some of the Great Books and a few seasonal works, I was hard pressed to read this article. The article, by Patrick Deneen, was published in First Things and entitled, Against Great Books Questioning [...]
Some of us remember Democrats’ claim during the Obamacare debate that “if you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it.” The claim was made as part of a “compromise” position in which the Democrats gave up on a “single payer system.” That is, in order to get enough votes to pass their program, [...]
Whit Stillman’s films, which he both writes and directs, are rather Socratic, Christian, and at least ambiguously conservative. For an audience that for the most part possesses none of those qualities, he presents his insight lightly and indirectly. Only occasionally does he allow us to glimpse the extent of his ambition. He told a Psychology [...]
Featured Book: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. For all bibliovores, regardless of age, this book is for you. It is beautiful in form and content, it is good in form and content, and it is true in form and content. Rarely does one find a children’s picture book that so throughly celebrates a bookish life, [...]