Nicholas Berdyaev stressed the primacy of culture and theological issues over politics and economics as truer forms of reality. He argued that only when society has realigned itself, individual by individual and community by community, “towards divine objects” could humanity save itself. One kind of weird but enticing academic puzzle for me is discovering and [...]
This is not a trick question. Britain is of course comprised of four ancient kingdoms united since 1707; Wales, Scotland, England and (now Northern) Ireland. But in a far more meaningful and dangerous sense it contains only three and America may suffer from the same problem. Bear with me, please, for gay marriage is only [...]
What do matchmakers know that eludes the common man? What does the common man know that escapes the matchmakers? Austen’s novel Emma shows that true romance originates from equality of social background and education, compatibility of temperaments, similarity of moral ideals and manners, natural attraction based on reason and feeling, and mutual admiration. Matchmaking ignores [...]
In a recent editorial in the New York Times, Louis Michael Seidman, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown Law School, argues that our political system is broken because of “our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.” Dr. Seidman asks why anyone should care about procedural provisions [...]
The American Cause by Russell Kirk Henry Regnery, publisher of Kirk's magnum opus, The Conservative Mind and friend of his, urged him to write a short book easily understood by the average person, setting forth the foundational spiritual, moral, social, political, and economic principles of the United States. Initially Kirk demurred, having other projects in [...]
Much of Britain’s literary heritage may be found in America, from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C, to the manuscripts and letters of famous authors housed in wealthy universities from coast to coast. Not so for G. K. Chesterton’s own collection of his books and periodicals, and personal effects down to his hat, pince-nez [...]
Steven Mazie does well to criticize the complacency of Stephen Asma. Asma, citing obvious facts of evolutionary psychology, observes that our natural powers of knowing and loving are limited. So “universal love” is impossible. Our “empathy” extends with any significant force only to our family, friends, and “tribe.” According to the evolutionary psychologist, we are [...]
by Edmund Burke To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind; indeed the necessary effects of the ignorance and levity of the vulgar. Such complaints and [...]
Getting up in recent months an anthology of conservative writing, The Portable Conservative Reader, I had reason to reread much of Burke. More than ever before, I was impressed with how relevant Burke’s thoughts - and, indeed, Burke’s actions - remain to our present discontents. (It is with some reluctance I employ that word “relevant,” [...]
Edmund Burke: Volume 1, 1730-1784 by F. P. Lock, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Thomas Copeland, the editor of The Correspondence of Edmund Burke and a central figure in Burke’s twentieth-century revival, once observed that of all the books written about Burke the most important was the work never written: his “official biography.” Unfortunately for posterity, Burke’s literary [...]
The most recent one, from James Kurth, we at The Imaginative Conservative must take seriously. Dr. Kurth is a veteran teacher and writer, not about the ephemera of American politics (aren’t you sick to death of “pundits” and other self-important journalists?), but about serious matters of national defense, military and strategic affairs, international politics, always [...]
Those of us who identify in various ways as “conservative,” especially in academic settings, have a story that we like to tell. It is a story wherein we are the heroes, and the villain bears the name “relativism.” We all believe in truth, while it seems like a great many scholars nowadays do not, at [...]
William F. Buckley, Jr., Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater (Basic Books, 2008). Buckley’s book, Flying High, is much more a memoir of the conservative movement in the early 1960s than it is a biography of Goldwater. Indeed, without the subtitle and the book dust jacket bearing a picture of Goldwater campaigning in 1964, this might very well have [...]
It is “dearest to my heart and dearest in my convictions,” the dying James Madison said, “that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated.” It was this Union, conceived, framed, ratified, explained, implemented, defended, and cherished by Madison, that Kevin Gutzman cogently and rightly sees as the essential “making of America.” James Madison [...]