About Michael Jordan

Michael M. Jordan recently collected and edited Marion Montgomery’s Southern essays in the volume On Matters Southern: Essays About Literature and Culture, 1964-2000. Dr. Jordan is Professor of English and Chairman of the English Department at Hillsdale College.

Donald Davidson: The Poet as Citizen

By |2020-02-28T15:58:33-06:00February 28th, 2020|Categories: Agrarianism, Donald Davidson, Literature, Poetry, Politics, South, Southern Agrarians|

It may be true that Donald Davidson went too far in his concern for art’s effect on the community. Given the decadence of much popular and highbrow art in our time, perhaps other readers of Davidson’s verse find themselves in a curious predicament. Like me, they may find fault with the principles of his poetic; [...]

Great Books, Higher Education, and the Logos

By |2022-02-23T09:54:19-06:00November 4th, 2018|Categories: Christendom, Education, Great Books, Liberal Learning, Timeless Essays|

The ends of higher education are the acquisition of wisdom and virtue and the serious pursuit of knowledge and truth. Reading the Great Books helps us to get to these ends. Informed by the wisdom, the beauty, the goodness, and the truth we encounter in Great Books, we can responsibly and humanely practice our vocation [...]

How Can We Transmit the Permanent Things?

By |2018-12-18T15:10:45-06:00January 4th, 2016|Categories: Christian Humanism, Christianity, Education, Featured, Liberal Learning, Permanent Things, Russell Kirk, Timeless Essays|

Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to explore the nature of education and its relation to the permanent things, lest we become a class of barbarians. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher Education and the Permanent Things If we are going to transmit the permanent things, we will have to [...]

How Can We Transmit the Permanent Things?

By |2016-07-06T15:41:29-05:00October 16th, 2013|Categories: Permanent Things, Russell Kirk|Tags: |

Education and the Permanent Things If we are going to transmit the permanent things, we will have to put back into education the moral and metaphysical vision that is foundational to Western education and Western civilization. I hope to illustrate this thesis by discussing Russell Kirk’s vision of conservatism and the permanent things, by describing [...]

What Birth Rates Tell Us About the Traditional Family

By |2015-10-17T01:35:59-05:00August 31st, 2013|Categories: Family|Tags: , , |

Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873-1973 In philosophy, religion, politics, and other arenas of communal life, we are confronted with choices between radical contraries. We can choose between Aristotle and Nietzsche (according to Alasdair MacIntyre); we can choose between God and Mammon (as Jesus instructs in the Sermon on the Mount), or, as [...]

Marion Montgomery: Prophet Philosopher

By |2021-08-12T10:15:22-05:00June 19th, 2013|Categories: Books, Featured, Flannery O'Connor, Marion Montgomery, South|Tags: , |

The Prophetic Poet and the Spirit of the Age by Marion Montgomery (in three volumes): Why Flannery O’Connor Stayed Home (1981), Why Poe Drank Liquor (1983), Why Hawthorne Was Melancholy (1984) Marion Montgomery’s trilogy is an ambitious, indeed audacious, assessment of the social, political, literary, religions, and philosophical temper of the Western world since the [...]

Great Books, Higher Education, and the Logos

By |2018-10-20T10:01:25-05:00May 22nd, 2013|Categories: Christendom, Education, Featured, Liberal Learning|Tags: , |

Generally speaking, there are two major philosophies of education: an older model which addresses moral and spiritual concerns of the mind and heart of man, and a newer one which trains us to manipulate and control the material world for the good of the body. The older model prevailed in higher education from around 400 [...]

Rhetoric and Ranting: Inspired by Richard Weaver

By |2016-08-03T10:37:19-05:00January 8th, 2013|Categories: Christendom, Conservatism, Featured, Poetry, Rhetoric, Richard Weaver, South|Tags: , |

Richard Weaver In his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), Adams tells us that he was born into one world in the nineteenth century and lived on into another. Born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1838, he lived to see the emergent twentieth century—a world in which a secular Dynamo replaced Venus and the [...]

The Art of Flannery O’Connor

By |2015-11-10T17:57:04-06:00June 13th, 2011|Categories: Books, Featured, Flannery O'Connor, South|Tags: , |

Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South by Ralph C. Wood. The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor by Christina Bieber Lake. Flannery O’Connor continues to interest many readers and critics. A slow and painstaking writer who died young (of lupus at age 39), she did not produce a large body of literature, but what she did produce (in [...]

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