Ruins of Coventry Cathedral after bombing by Germans during WWII. (Photo by Hans Wild/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)Sword of the Romantic Imagination: Kirk and Bradbury
A vision of the Gothic, dieKleinert (alamy.com)Joy’s Mysteries
Grasmere and Langdale, the Lake DistrictThe Gift of the Magi
Andrea Mantegna, Adoration of the Magi, 1495-1505Editor’s note: This piece was originally published December 23, 2016.
How much do we trust the mind? How much should we—when thoughts lead on to thoughts, conjectures build atop conjectures, hypotheses extend upon hypotheses until it all seems just . . . too . . . much, a daydream from which we shake ourselves awake?
After Administration
Do we need a theory of managerial class disintegration? Such an ambitious question can at the least be ventured given our headlines: Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, the European Union and the larger rise of the Euronationalist parties, and the questioning of postwar international institutions, to name a few.
When Words Are Weapons
Back in the 1950s, when Mario Vargas Llosa was a university student in Peru, the standards for great literature were clear. Cervantes, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and such key 20th century novelists as James Joyce and Thomas Mann, observes Vargas Llosa in Notes on the Death of Culture, “wrote books that looked to defeat death, outlive their authors and continue attracting and fascinating readers in the future.” Novels like Ulysses and The Magic Mountain, produced through “indefatigable efforts,” required of their readers “an intellectual concentration almost as great as that of their writers.” In fact culture itself, notes Vargas Llosa in this relatively…
The Conservative Imagination of Russell Kirk: A Conversation with Brad Birzer
Brad Birzer comes to Liberty Law Talk to discuss his upcoming biography of Russell Kirk entitled Russell Kirk: American Conservative. Our discussion focuses on the nature of Kirk’s conservatism and his place on the American Right. For example, many have prominently argued that Kirk’s conservatism is only strangely American. Birzer’s answer to this question will give these critics much to think about. We also discuss the influence of Edmund Burke and T. S. Eliot on Kirk, and we consider just what he meant by his invocation of the terms Moral Imagination and the Permanent Things.
Is Ours a “Post-Christian” Society? Should It Matter (to Readers of this Blog)?
It is often said, by both Christians and non-Christians, that we live in a “post-Christian” society. In many respects that seems a plausible assessment. In a lecture given at Cambridge University in 1939, however, T. S. Eliot offered a provocative contrary perspective. While acknowledging the weakness of Christianity in his own time, Eliot suggested that “a society has not ceased to be Christian until it has become positively something else.” And he contended that “[w]e have today a culture which is mainly negative, but which, so far as it is positive, is still Christian.” (T. S. Eliot, The Idea of…
Orwell in Letters
George Orwell is referred to throughout this review by his pen name rather than by his given name of Eric Blair for the sake of simplicity, though not perfect accuracy. He and his wife Eileen are referred to as “The Orwells” for the same reason. In the introduction to his new collection of Orwell’s correspondence, George Orwell: A Life in Letters, Peter Davison grieves that, “many of those who refer to Orwell seem not to have read much more than Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty-Four, if those. The millions who have heard of Big Brother and Room 101 know nothing of…
What Kind of Humanism Do We Need?
A recent study by the Pew Forum revealed in great detail what even casual observation makes plain: Americans, like their European counterparts, are increasingly less religious than they used to be. Moreover, religious diversity is on the rise. As Western culture becomes more secular and more religiously diverse, it is interesting to wonder what holds it together. Can secular conceptions of human meaning provide a sufficient foundation for social life and political affiliation? The challenge of modernity and liberalism specifically, at least beginning with Hobbes, has been how human beings who share little more than common fear and common natural…
