There is a divine order of being of which we must be a part. To reject this order and our part therein is to choose madness and make any decent life impossible. As a literary critic, George Panichas shed great light on the relationship between this recognition of the order of being and our ability [...]
Even when addressing non-Christians, Christian humanism’s willing receptiveness of the supernatural opens itself to the truths of revelation and of the human religious experience, allowing it to speak intimately and truthfully to the whole person… The Return of Christian Humanism: Chesterton, Eliot, Tolkien, and the Romance of History by Lee Oser (University of Missouri Press, [...]
Christianity is expected to reach, through the human and divine agency of its members, each human being at the core reality in his soul, at the reality of the choice where each person makes himself to be what he chooses to be within the initial givenness of his being… It was God who reconciled us [...]
George Gissing found himself more intensely conservative than the Tory politicians of his time, a lover of old ways and old towns, a champion of the countryside, a man who distrusted innovation and spoke for the permanent things. The Collected Letters of George Gissing, Volume Three, 1886-1888, edited by Paul Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young, and Pierre [...]
The classical curriculum remained the educational gold standard in nineteenth-century America. In fact, its influence grew, as women’s academies with a classical curriculum were founded all over the expanding nation… The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States by Carl J. Richard (Harvard University Press, 2009) With The [...]
The task of the conservative intellectual remains the same as it has always been, though acquiring new urgency. That task is to keep alive the wisdom that we are heir to and must keep and hand on… Carlyle defined history as ”the essence of innumerable biographies.” This is only one of the many inadequate but [...]
There is something more dangerous than secularism, and that is a nation-state masquerading as God incarnate… Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion, by David Gelernter (Doubleday, 2007) Midway through a century battered by ideological warfare, C.S. Lewis thought it unnecessary to remind anyone that “love of one’s country… becomes a demon when it becomes a [...]
To understand Winston Churchill’s policy of aid to Joseph Stalin, one must look back upon what it was that Britain and the free world faced prior to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union… Mr. Henry Regnery is a wise and good man. But as Aristotle observes, no man can be wise in all things. [...]
What is new about our era, as opposed to the Christianity of an Augustine, of an Aquinas, or of a Shakespeare, is that now we actually see Christians themselves betraying their own traditions of political limitations… Shakespeare as Political Thinker, edited by John Alvis and Thomas G. West (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1981) For some [...]
Only with a conservatism anchored in the presumptions and principles of the Founders, in their understanding of constitutionalism and in the proper functions of each of the branches, are we prepared to do battle with the children of the Enlightenment… The most notable change in the American Republic over the last forty years has been [...]
The kind of freedom people speak of today is more likely than not something more than emancipation from political tyranny. It is freedom from social custom, from tradition, from the created order, freedom from God. And for this troubling illusion, we may in part thank James Joyce… The plight of the artist in the modern [...]
Conservatives of every persuasion who are sincerely interested in the truth are in Forrest McDonald‘s debt. If we are to understand the Founders, we should follow McDonald’s example and strive to study our heritage as dispassionately and as reflectively as possible. Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution, by Forrest McDonald (University Press [...]
To revive American constitutionalism would require not more people who talk about “justice,” “the common good,” and “the best regime,” but people who are able to shoulder concrete responsibilities, so that the reconstruction of society could begin where it matters most, in the personal lives of the citizens… Discriminating observers recognize that political practice in [...]
The Politics of Prudence, by Russell Kirk (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1993) Dr. Russell Kirk observes in this book that “the greatest works of politics are poetic.” The rationalistic formulae set forth by most contemporary philosophers will not endure because they are not poetic; they divorce politics from religion, from imaginative literature, and from tradition, and [...]