American culture is surely decadent. Its decay is palpable to any sensitive observer who reads the feuilleton section of the local newspaper or attends a university. But is our decadence terminal? Is our civilization on a collision course with extinction? The Culture We Deserve by Jacques Barzun (200 pages, Wesleyan University Press, 1989) Politically America [...]
When a lover of poetry as sensitive and intelligent as C.S. Lewis provides us a translation of Virgil’s “Aeneid,” we should pay attention. C.S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile, edited by A.T. Reyes (184 pages, Yale University Press, 2011) Every poetic translator worth our attention is, as it were, a secondary artist, one [...]
Our civilization has danced on the edge of the volcano for so many years now, recklessly testing its footing in ever more vulgar and precarious ways, defying the moral interdictions of the past and gradually losing a sense of its own fragility and vulnerability, that it is hard to imagine that we will survive our [...]
The modern secularist, T.S. Eliot argued, finds meaning either in the brute forces of the physical world or the arbitrary freeplay of the mind or the passing consensus of the human tribe. Looking for meaning in these places has not only led individuals to a sense of nihilism but has led whole nations to slaughter [...]
T.S. Eliot certainly possessed creative courage, but he also possessed, as Russell Kirk demonstrates better than any other commentator, a consummate spiritual courage. This confluence of creative and spiritual courage finally permits Eliot to attain his greatest visionary moment in his composition of "Four Quartets." Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in [...]
The pursuit of the truth as revealed in Jesus Christ, not the building of a philosophical or moral system, has animated the theology of Joseph Ratzinger from the beginning. For this reason, author Tracey Rowland concludes “that even though he is probably one of the most intellectual popes in history, for him Christianity is above [...]
Russell Kirk shows that the United States was a new thing built upon a number of very old things, and these are the roots which give it life today: the English common law, the English language, the English Reformation, the English Parliament; the Roman order and the Greek intellect, Montesquieu’s “depositary” of justice, and Edmund [...]
The Common Good of Constitutional Democracy: Essays in Political Philosophy and on Catholic Social Teaching by Martin Rhonheimer, edited by William F. Murphy, Jr. (Catholic University of America Press, 2013) This collection of essays is billed as a defense of “constitutional democracy” or, in a more exact translation from the German, “the democratic constitutional state.” That [...]
Rousseau and Romanticism by Irving Babbitt (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991) This reprint of the best-known work by Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) is a sturdy addition to Transaction’s Library of Conservative Thought. When it was initially published in 1919, it was recognized by discerning readers as the landmark it has since become. The New York Evening Post [...]
After Tocqueville: The Promise and Failure of Democracy, by Chilton Williamson, Jr. (ISI Books, 2012) Twenty years ago, as the Cold War ended with the triumph of the West over Communism, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “end of history,” by which he meant that human political community had reached its final and best stage of development [...]
“Your total ignorance of that which you profess to teach merits the death penalty. I doubt whether you would know that St. Cassian of Imola was stabbed to death by his students with their styli. His death, a martyr’s honorable one, made him a patron saint of teachers.” —Ignatius Reilly, in John Kennedy Toole’s, A [...]
Jonathan Swift In a letter of Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) addressed to the poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744), dated September 29, 1725, Swift spoke of returning to the grand monde of Dublin to deal with various curates and vicars, and to “correct all corruptions crept in relating to the weights of bread and butter throughout those [...]
The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate edited by John Tyree Fain and Thomas Daniel Young. Of those sources ordinarily consulted by literary historians and critics, letters are surely among the most suspect. In the first place, we all write lines that are no more than the accepted conventions of social intercourse: “I apologize [...]
Russell Kirk’s Redeeming the Time was published posthumously in 1996. And as its title suggests, it is a book about thinking and acting in light of moral constraints that demand something of us. In fact, if we boil the book down to its bedrock message, it is a book about morality and order—how the state [...]