The other day, I had the occasion to look over some of my past essays at The Imaginative Conservative. Much to my surprise, I’m quickly approaching my 250th essay. I might actually have reached and passed this number. Because I’ve failed to label my essays correctly, I am probably over 250 essays. Officially, though, Google [...]
Like all great nations through history, America borrows freely, adopting and adapting. Her Pilgrim Fathers included parlous few, say, Jews or Italians or Africans, yet look at how they later added to American culture and her living traditions. When America borrows some aspect of another culture she often gains a perspective of something that [...]
Russell Kirk What is this “moral imagination”? The phrase is Edmund Burke’s, and it occurs in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke describes the destruction of civilizing manners by the revolutionaries: In the franchise bookshops the shelves are crowded with the prickly pears and the Dead Sea fruit of literary decadence. [...]
“There’ll never be another Camelot,” said Mrs. John F. Kennedy forty-nine years ago this week, in the wake of her husband’s assassination in late autumn, 1963. “Camelot,” of Knights of the Round Table fame, was a Broadway hit at the time, and Jackie saw in all the genius advisors surrounding Kennedy another mythical fraternity the [...]
Who remembers John Witherspoon? Although he was one of the most influential Americans of the eighteenth century, Witherspoon has been overlooked by subsequent generations of historian. John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic, by Jeffry H. Morrison (220 pages, University of Notre Dame Press, 2003) Who now remembers John Witherspoon? Despite his many [...]
The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things Are Written on the Sky by Russell Kirk. Although Dr. Kirk knows how hard the tempest of our time really rages, he has not fled or been driven to the heath like Lear or Lear’s fool. His insight is abundantly apparent in his new volume of lectures, which [...]
As the recent petitions to the White House confirm, secession is an idea that never goes away. The verb “secede” is derived from the Latin “secessio,” meaning any act of withdrawal. Originally introduced in the seventeenth century as a concept of ecclesiastical discourse and political theory, secession assumes the existence of the modern state, as [...]
Patricia Christine Jellicoe Christmastime is fast upon us, and for many Americans it is an opportunity for spirituality and merriment, family, tradition and fret. Especially fret. No sooner have Black Friday and Cyber Monday unleashed their discounts, no sooner have what John Willson calls the “walmartians” beamed down to smite one another over [...]
It has now been several weeks since we imaginative conservatives woke up to the nightmare that President Obama had been reelected. It is time we wake from our delusional daydream for a future conservative order. It’s time we realize it’s morning in America again and that we have been blind to the glaring truth that [...]
Among my many failings as a teacher is my refusal to indulge students’ persistent use of the word “democracy” to mean “all good things.” Particularly when I am teaching about constitutionalism and what a constitution is supposed to do, the constant refrain is that a constitution must establish, protect, further, or just “be” democratic. And [...]
Digory by Scott Dodge Flying on the back of Fledge (formerly known as Strawberry, the used up cab-pulling horse), on assignment from Aslan, over the newly-created land of Narnia, Digory said to Polly, “I wish we had someone to tell us what all those places are.” Polly responded, “I don’t suppose they’re anywhere [...]
There are currently 50 petitions for secession from the United States, one from each state, that have been registered with the federal government. It goes without saying that not one of them has any prospect of being acted upon. It is therefore tempting to dismiss these petitions as expressions of sour grapes on the part [...]
Nearly 30 years before he shocked National Review by endorsing Barack Obama for president, senior editor Jeffery Hart announced a divorce of a different kind from the American right. With “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to a Modern American Conservatism”—published in The New Right Papers in 1982 and previewed in NR a few months earlier—Hart split [...]
Peter Lawler on conservatism So David Brooks’s article is interesting more for its listing of various young conservatives than its actual content. I just don’t have time to comment much right now, but I thought I’d get it out there for your consideration. My talking points for now are pretty random: Pete Spiliakos [...]