by Peter Blum
I have a small and secret desire, well-hid.
Secret from whom, you ask?
Secret from me, I suspect,
Or maybe I am a suspect, secretly,
Quietly desiring.
This is the week to bring a secret forth
Not by telling, no “big reveal”
But quietly, like the secret itself
Into the ashes of Wednesday morning.
Ashes of palms once waved aloft with lauds
Thrown beneath humility’s hooves
Shat upon by the donkey, perhaps
As I shall soon be shouting “Crucify!”
Royalty forgotten.
by Bruce Frohnen
In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government by Charles Murray
Throughout his long and highly productive career, Charles Murray has done the seemingly impossible. He has melded his strong libertarianism with respect for, and insights from, the work of Robert Nisbet and Russell Kirk. He has trained as a social scientist, worked for the Peace Corps, and written about the dangers of government intervention. He has fearlessly laid out arguments and data about intrinsic inequalities in an attempt to make social policy more truly compassionate and social structures more truly supportive of people with fewer life chances than the elites who make that policy. Most important, he has mastered social science data while concerning himself fundamentally with the nature of the human person. This, his deepest and most important if not his most appreciated work, encapsulates Murray’s essential viewpoint by setting forth the philosophical goals and implications of social science. [Read more...]
Gerhart Niemeyer
by Lee Trepanier
In my previous posts about teaching in an age of ideology, I had looked at two teachers – Eric Voegelin and Ellis Sandoz – who sought to clear the ideological rubble in the modern academia so students could study the true, the beautiful, and the good. In his accessible lectures about complicated philosophical topics, Eric Voegelin elicited an erotic restlessness in his students in order to prompt them in their own search for the true, the beautiful, and the good, while Ellis Sandoz asked his students to reflect upon their own experiences to see whether the subjects they were studying comported with their commonsensical understanding of reality. For both professors, teaching was not the mere recitation of facts and figures to be quickly remembered, recalled, and forgotten but rather it was the incarnation of thinking itself. To teach was to be the incarnation of what one sought, and what they sought was the true, the beautiful, and the good. [Read more...]
The conservative is concerned, first of all, with the regeneration of the spirit and character—with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest. - Russell Kirk
