For Russell Kirk ghost stories were not mere exercises in gore or terror without purpose. A gulag-and-gas-chamber-infested twentieth century provides demonic fright enough. With scary stories he sought to reawaken a sense of a greater reality, of a world that touches the physical, in an age smothered by materialism and the decay of traditional religion [...]
Surprised by Beauty: A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music, Robert R. Reilly, Washington, D. C.: Morley Books, 2002. In his generous and beautifully written book, Robert Reilly leads us through the vast, largely unknown territory of twentieth-century music. The title recalls C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy and the poem of the [...]
Eric Voegelin A reflection on classical studies, their purpose and prospects, will properly start from Wolf’s definition of classic philology as the study of man’s nature as it has become manifest in the Greeks.[1] The conception sounds strangely anachronistic today, because it has been overtaken by the two closely related processes of the [...]
What Matthew Arnold called “an epoch of concentration” impends over the English-speaking nations. The revolutionary impulses and the social enthusiasms that dominated our century since their great explosion in Russia are now confronted by a countervailing physical and intellectual force. Fanatic ideology has been, in essence, rebellion against the old moral order of our civilization. [...]
Edmund Burke To resist the idyllic imagination and the diabolical imagination, we need to know the moral imagination of Edmund Burke. Cato the Elder told his friends, “I had rather that men should ask, ‘Why is there no monument to Cato?’ than that they should ask, ‘Why is there a monument to Cato?’” [...]
A quarter of a century ago Modern Age asked me to assess the state of American intellectual conservatism for its 25th anniversary issue.[1] I had been a student of the subject for twenty years. In 1971, five years before George Nash published The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, I and a co-author brought out a [...]
As some renditions of American history would have it, the conservative pedigree in the United States begins with, or at the very least includes, Alexander Hamilton and his followers. In fact, the typical lineages are given thus: Federalist-Whig-Republican on the one hand and Jeffersonian-Jacksonian-Populist-New Deal on the other. This breakdown of the American political tradition [...]
A long-time colleague of mine used to say, rather often, “John, you are so hopeful.” He didn’t mean it as a compliment. Another colleague once told me that he had just seen the ultimate conservative bumper-sticker: “LOSING SLOWLY.” The wickedly funny Ambrose Bierce (in The Devil’s Dictionary) defines “pessimism” as “The philosophy forced upon the convictions [...]
Dr. Kirk uses strong words to oppose a conservative alliance with libertarians. In light of the recent discussion of this issue on this online journal I think it may prove fruitful to let Dr. Kirk join the conversation by way of excerpts from his essay “Chirping Sectaries.” The entire essay is well worth reading. Is [...]