Roger Scruton on America, the Nation-State, & the Responsibility of Intellectuals

By |2024-02-26T21:20:43-06:00February 26th, 2024|Categories: Community, Nationalism, Roger Scruton, Timeless Essays|

It is hard to imagine how this country will recover from the hostility and political polarization that now define it without rediscovering a “pre-political loyalty," as Sir Roger Scruton called it, "towards something higher, something that is shared between all the citizens, regardless of their political beliefs and inclinations: the nation." With Roger Scruton’s passing [...]

Men in Hats: An Endangered Species

By |2024-01-13T16:23:29-06:00January 12th, 2024|Categories: Community, Culture, Dwight Longenecker, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

When will men in hats come back? When men come back. When we push back from our desks and laptops, turn off the television and go back outdoors where we belong, we will start to need hats again. Whatever happened to the hat? Whither the fedora? Where have they stashed the Stetsons? Who has banished [...]

Christopher Lasch on the Elites’ Betrayal of Democracy

By |2024-01-09T18:06:27-06:00January 9th, 2024|Categories: American Republic, Books, Community, Liberalism, Politics, Populism|

Though a self-described "man of the left," Christopher Lasch was once and always a populist. By the end of his life, he was concerned with the rise to power of American elites who, as of the mid-1990s, were already alien to—and divorced from—the masses of ordinary American citizens. The Revolt of the Elites and the [...]

The Common Good

By |2023-09-26T18:20:16-05:00September 26th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Community, David Deavel, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Far from the common good requiring persons to enter into the kind of voluntary slavery talked about by Rousseau, it requires a recognition of certain rights and the making possible of a number of freedoms, most important of which is the right of conscience. True religious liberty is one of the main conditions for the [...]

Edmund Burke & the English Revolution

By |2023-08-15T18:01:08-05:00August 15th, 2023|Categories: Community, Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Revolution, Timeless Essays|Tags: , |

In his “Reflections,” Edmund Burke constructs a powerful myth of English history, defending the consolidated results of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century. In his poem “Blood and the Moon,” Yeats writes of “haughtier-headed Burke that proved the state a tree.” Edmund Burke would have relished the line, having proved nothing of the sort. [...]

Patrick Deneen on the Need for Regime Change

By |2023-08-01T15:47:15-05:00August 1st, 2023|Categories: American Republic, Books, Community, Liberalism, Politics|

Political philosopher that he is, Patrick Deneen is preoccupied with the eternal question of the few versus the many. How to balance their interests? How to reconcile their differences? He hopes that a “mixed regime” will force the few and the many to learn from each other, while correcting the abuses and excesses of each [...]

Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” & the Good Society

By |2023-07-25T17:03:52-05:00July 25th, 2023|Categories: Community, Conservatism, Culture, Order, Permanent Things, Poetry, Timeless Essays|Tags: , |

Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” has received very little attention, no doubt because of the well known circumstance that Jonson himself is more honored than read. Yet “To Penshurst” is a memorable poem, and perhaps a great one. Civilization is memory. –Hugh Kenner I cannot do my duty as a true modern, by cursing everybody who [...]

Democracy Is Beautiful: Conservatism as if the People Matter

By |2023-07-02T20:55:56-05:00July 2nd, 2023|Categories: American Republic, Community, Conservatism, Democracy, Film, Populism, Willmoore Kendall|

To rebuild their movement and society, and to rebuild a viable culture, conservatives must embrace the conservative populism championed by two men: filmmaker Frank Capra and scholar Willmoore Kendall. Pursuing this path will be challenging, for populism has become a bogeyman for the powers that be. Last December, my wife and I motored a couple [...]

How Modernity Diminishes the Human Person

By |2023-06-22T17:04:34-05:00June 22nd, 2023|Categories: Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Apple, Capitalism, Community, Democracy, Democracy in America, Featured, George Stanciu, St. John's College, Technology, Timeless Essays|

Because of the strong secular faith instilled in us by education, most of us trust that science and technology, democracy, and capitalism, the three legs of Modernity, can bring about only good ends and fail to see that these three triumphs of humankind can diminish the human person. With the publication of the book The [...]

Individual & Community in “The Scarlet Letter”

By |2023-06-09T15:36:51-05:00June 8th, 2023|Categories: Alexis de Tocqueville, Community, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

Nathaniel Hawthorne does not furnish a plan for reorganizing society according to Scripture or enlightened reason or sociological research, so that all strife will be eliminated. His tale suggests, to the contrary, that tension between the individual and the community can never be resolved, nor should it be. Alexis de Toqueville, a friendlier Frenchman than [...]

Building Communities With Music

By |2023-06-06T13:49:46-05:00May 11th, 2023|Categories: Beauty, Community, Culture, Music, Timeless Essays|

Classical music must find its place in love—love of home, of community, of neighbor, and of the culture that binds all these things together. In all but the most exceptional cases, our orchestras won’t survive if they don’t get this part right. Editor’s Note: This essay was presented as the opening address at the Future [...]

Integralism and the Common Good

By |2023-01-16T15:28:46-06:00January 16th, 2023|Categories: Books, Catholicism, Christianity, Civil Society, Civilization, Community, Politics|

Just as in the case of the head of a household, the heads of localities and nations must direct their minds first and foremost toward the common good of some specific, limited group of people. Integralism and the Common Good, Volume One:  Family, City, and State, edited by Edmund Waldstein & Peter Kwasniewski (356 pages, [...]

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