Rev. James Schall Probably the most famous letter writer of the ancient world was Cicero. In 59 B.C., Cicero wrote to Gaius Scribonius: “There are many sorts of letters. But there is one unmistakable sort, which actually caused letter-writing to be invented in the first place, namely the sort intended to give people [...]
Wealth, Poverty & Human Destiny edited by Doug Bandow and David Schindler For religious believers, the complicated issue of reconciling the free market with traditional morality is one of increasing importance as the ideology of capitalism gains unprecedented public support and globalization becomes unavoidable. The prospect of material triumph appears omnipresent, and the justifications for [...]
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. I have long resisted reading Kurt Vonnegut. In this life of finite time and seemingly infinite and ever expanding good things to read, his biography or writing just did not seem enough to clear the bar to justify pushing some other unread book aside. I am very glad, however, that [...]
Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts by Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner. These are dark days for American law. In June, Chief Justice John Roberts, in what was a stark betrayal of his oath to uphold the Constitution, upheld the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the “ACA” or “Obamacare”) as a valid [...]
In 1986, Russell Kirk gave a lecture titled “Ten Conservative Books” in which he identified ten important books that distilled or expressed conservative principles, from Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France to T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, the book Kirk pressed upon the hapless Richard Nixon. The essay is worth reading not only [...]
Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism: the Legacy of Burke and Tocqueville, by Bruce Frohnen. Conservatism lives. It continues to exercise its power over bright young minds. It also shows us a way of life, how to live. For these assertions there could be no better evidence than Bruce Frohnen’s Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism. Conceived [...]
What are the ends of education? We mean, of course, the ends for us, for us democratic Americans. So we begin with the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America—Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. America, Tocqueville noticed, is an overwhelmingly middle-class country. To be middle class, of [...]
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 [...]
There has been much commentary concerning a David Brooks editorial that in turn cites Rod Dreher’s article on what it means to be a conservative. Both Brooks and Dreher return to Russell Kirk and his ten principles of conservatism, to define what Brooks describes as the lost half of the “conservative mind.” That half is [...]
America’s British Culture by Russell Kirk The “identity crisis” is a relatively recent development of human psychology. Most people in history were what they were, and they didn’t bother overmuch to wonder what that was. Freud undermined this taken-for-grantedness when he taught that the Self was not a fixed essence but the mutable effect of [...]
Democracy and Leadership by Irving Babbitt. Foreword by Russell Kirk, Liberty Classics, 1979, 390 pp. The appearance of a new edition of Irving Babbitt’s Democracy and Leadership (first published in 1924) is one sign among many that interest in this controversial thinker is growing markedly. Several scholarly studies related to his work have been published [...]
Scalia Dissents: Writings of the Supreme Court’s Wittiest, Most Outspoken Justice edited and with commentary by Kevin A. Ring. The Opinions of Justice Antonin Scalia: The Caustic Conservative edited and with commentary by Paul I. Weizer. Justice Antonin Scalia has established himself as the foremost defender of the constitutional orthodoxy of originalism—in particular, of the [...]
The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders: Reason, Revelation, Revolution, by Gregg L. Frazer The religious views of America’s founders have been fiercely contested in the public arena for many years. The principal battle is between those who claim that most founders were devout Christians and those who assert that they were deists. This debate has important [...]
Redeeming the Time by Russell Kirk This posthumously published collection of Russell Kirk’s essays once again reminds us of the extent of our loss. For in addition to an enviable erudition and a penchant for identifying essential issues, theoretical and practical, he was a great teacher. Never talking down to his readers, he displayed a [...]