The Chairman smiled even though the meeting had run too long already. He asked gently, “Is that all for today, Rocky?” He used a favourite nickname for the elderly manager who had long been as dependable as a rock. “One more thing, Lord,” mumbled Saint Peter, shuffling through his notes. God stroked His beard patiently. [...]
Mitt Romney A group of top economists, among them any number of Nobel laureates, signed a letter endorsing Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s economic plan. These economists indicated that as president, Romney would do six salutary things. Romney would reduce taxes, control spending, limit and improve regulation, make social security and Medicare sustainable, [...]
The New Jacobinism: America as Revolutionary State (2d expanded ed.) by Claes G. Ryn. National Humanities Institute, 2011. Near the end of his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke praised what he called the “combining mind” as indispensable to the sort of constitutional government Britain had inherited and France was busy squandering. Erecting any sort [...]
There comes a time in every year when I find myself saying to a friend or a prospective student that this is a very musical College [Ed., Convocation, St. John’s College, 2011]. After 20 years of speaking this way, I thought I should ask myself just what I mean by this statement, and so I will [...]
Apart from political maps of mankind, there are natural maps of mankind. …One of the first laws of political stability is to draw your political boundaries along the lines of the natural map of mankind. So wrote H.G. Wells in “What Is Coming: A Forecast of Things to Come After the War” in the year [...]
At the level of political theory and commitment to the Constitution, both modern American parties are both thoroughly statist, and are thoroughly committed to a revolutionary and illegal concentration and use of power. It will take a lot of hard work and reading for Christians—and everyone else—to come to terms with how this situation came [...]
[My recent book, Beauty in the Word, a sequel to Beauty for Truth’s Sake, is quite dense and complicated, so I thought it would be helpful to readers if I produced a “study guide”. So, in a series of posts, I look at some of the key themes and ideas in the book.] IV. The Mother of [...]
As American conservatism sifts its soul regarding political economy, scrutiny of the economic thought of Dr. Russell Kirk, who more than anyone else gave post-war conservatism coherence and intellectual respectability, is appropriate and timely. Kirk’s economics, and its treatment by modern conservatives, afford an invaluable perspective on this controversy. Kirk believed that economics has been [...]
“Where,” asks the editor, “will your town get the money to build new school rooms, and pay better salaries to more teachers? Thousands of communities are wrestling with this problem, or will soon be faced with it. We offer a suggestion.” It is really quite simple. Everyone, from the PTA to the local Rotarians, should [...]
Western culture itself has served as an anamnesis, an event that brings us back to right reason and reminds us of the sovereignty of the Transcendent. With the ideological assault in full force in the twentieth century, and the blood of the killing fields spreading darkly across the once varied landscapes, Kirk argued that only [...]
We live in mean times. While many of us do not daily experience the kind of civic ugliness featured on the evening news, or common place in Op ed sections of national newspapers, if we simply look and listen, we catch the mean spirited discourse all too common. Forget that this is even an election [...]
The Spiral Curriculum. The liberal arts, of course, are not everything. They were not the whole of ancient education either. For Plato a rounded education would begin with “gymnastics”, meaning physical education and training in various kinds of skills, and “music”, meaning all kinds of mental and artistic training. In the Laws (795e) he describes these as physical [...]
The continued prevalence of the materialist superstition was manifest in a recent issue of Time magazine titled “In Search of the Mind.”[1] The cover story for the issue authoritatively declaimed that “consciousness may be nothing more than an evanescent by-product of more mundane, wholly physical processes.” According to one medical school neuroscientist cited in the [...]
A review of Richard M. Gamble, In Search of the City on a Hill: The Making and Unmaking of an American Myth. New York: Continuum/Bloomsbury Academic, 2012. Mythology, n. The body of a primitive people’s beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents [...]