Returning to Reality

And Jesus answering said unto them,
Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,
and to God the things that are God’s.

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost . . .

On February 28, 2013, as Pope Benedict XVI was leaving office, the magician Penn Jillette was interviewed on CNN by Piers Morgan, a nominal Catholic. Morgan, a critic of Benedict, thought he would have a sympathetic ear in Jillette, an outspoken atheist, but the interview quickly took an amusing turn as Jillette began lecturing Morgan on the teachings of the Catholic Church, which Jillette got (mostly) right. Morgan pushed back, but in the process only revealed his own ignorance of why the Church teaches what She teaches. Jillette made short work of him, as would anyone even modestly versed in Catholic theology.

Catholic commentators, especially those who are politically conservative and thus despised Piers Morgan for other reasons, enjoyed a bit of Schadenfreude at Morgan’s expense. One obvious lesson—which many of the commentators drew—is that Catholics of Morgan’s generation (he is 48) were poorly catechized.  If an atheist can beat a reasonably intelligent Catholic not just in technique but in the substance of a debate over Catholic theology, something is wrong.

There were less obvious lessons to be learned. The first is that American Catholics are just as enamored of celebrities as Americans of other stripes are. Not a few of the Catholic commentariat jumped to the conclusion that Jillette was ripe for conversion. (Many of the same commentators had declared Christopher Hitchens another Augustine or Saint Paul in the making, and had not only hoped for—a good thing—but expected his deathbed conversion, no matter how often Hitchens assured them it would never come. Which it didn’t.) Just as Kourtney Kardashian was lauded as a pro-life hero back in 2009 when she revealed in an interview that she could not bring herself to abort her unborn child, conceived out of wedlock, so Jillette became, for a moment, the potential new face of the Catholic Church in America. And as prolifers had made excuses for Kardashian, when in that same interview she had made it clear that she thought it perfectly fine for other mothers to kill their unborn children even if she could not personally do so, Jillette’s admirers tried to explain away the actions of this militant atheist who has used his stage act and his television show, Bullsh-t!, to launch a series of nasty attacks on the Catholic Church, the Eucharist, and the priesthood.

Which brings us to a second, less obvious lesson: The Devil knows not only Latin but Christian theology. And he can use that knowledge in more than one way: to try to undermine the faith of those who are weak, by instilling doubts in their minds; but also to mislead others through a form of spiritual pride, by convincing them that saying the right thing is necessarily the same thing as believing the right thing. If the Devil can convince people that the Faith is simply a checklist of propositions to which we must give assent rather than a lived relationship with the Risen Christ from which those doctrines flow, his work is mostly done.

Faith is, among other things, the perfection of reason, but that does not mean that reason alone can lead us to faith. Penn Jillette may know all the right things to say, but Morgan, despite his dissent from Church teaching, has the benefit of baptism and membership in the Church, while Jillette not only rejects both for himself but has made it perfectly clear that he despises those who choose them for themselves (and even more so for their children). Jillette was not, as so many seemed to assume, urging Morgan on to deepen his faith (or even simply “keeping him honest”); he was ridiculing him for being less knowledgeable than a man who rejects Jesus Christ, and all His works, and all of His salvific promises.

Put this way, this all seems rather obvious; so why did so many miss what Jillette was up to? Part of the problem is that, in the United States, Christianity has all too often become a surface phenomenon. Doctrine has become a substitute for the substance of the Faith, rather than a catechetical tool that is meant to help us understand what we, as Christians, experience. To put it in stark terms: Which came first, the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Christ, or the dogmatic councils? As Harold O.J. Brown, the longtime religion editor for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, explained in his greatest work, Heresies: The Image of Christ in the Mirror of Heresy and Orthodoxy From the Apostles to the Present, Christian doctrine developed from the lived experience of the Church, the Body of Christ, not the other way around. A credo is a distillation of what Christians believe because they know it to be true, rather than a list of propositions to which they give assent, and thus come to believe. The convert recites the Creed at his baptism not as a test of his orthodoxy but to affirm what he already knows, through his experience, to be true.

Many factors have contributed to the distortion of Christian doctrine from a distillation of the Christian experience into an abstraction, even an ideology. In the United States in the 20th century, a certain neo-Thomism played an important role, beginning in the Catholic Church but with its effects spilling out into other Christian denominations. Thomistic theology is not the problem; the problem, as Owen Barfield demonstrated in Saving the Appearances, comes when that theology is treated as an end in itself, and the experience that underlies it and which it encapsulates becomes attenuated or even lost. Recover that experience, and Christian doctrine takes on a new life that can deepen our faith; the works of Thomas become as fresh as if they were written yesterday. But without that experience, we become caricatures of Penn Jillette—functional atheists who, unlike Jillette, are convinced that we have the fullness of the Faith.

The problem, though, runs much deeper than modern neo-Thomism. It extends back to the beginning of the modern age and the rise of the modern state, as the realm of politics, previously limited, began to encroach upon more and more areas of everyday life.  And it has reached its apotheosis in 21st-century America, where even so-called conservatives no longer believe that there are no political solutions to cultural problems, but that all cultural problems are at base political and can only be solved through elections and legislation and court decisions.

In a society with a strong common culture, the encroachment of politics into more and more areas of human life may not initially seem to pose a problem. Indeed, to the extent that legislation, for instance, is seen as supporting what is good in human life against external threats to the common culture, such encroachment may even be welcomed. But as the common culture breaks down, the increased power of the state over culture becomes a battering ram that accelerates that destruction.

So, for instance, state laws against abortion before 1973 largely represented the common moral sense of the people. But Roe v. Wade, while imposed from the top down, did not come out of nowhere. The moral consensus on abortion had been eroding for decades, and it reflected a more advanced erosion within the Christian churches on contraception, which itself reflected a loss within those churches not simply of the Christian understanding of the sacredness of life but, more importantly, of the experience that gave life to that understanding.

Jump forward to today, and for any person under the age of 40 in the United States, abortion has always been a part of the fabric of his or her life, and the battle over abortion, while framed in moral terms, has always been a political one. Those who believe that abortion is wrong wish to see Roe v. Wade overturned and new laws passed banning abortion; those who think otherwise work hard to maintain a pro-Roe majority on the Supreme Court.

The latter are winning, and will keep winning, until the former recognize that the only way to win the battle is to reassert the primacy of culture over politics. To put it in explicitly Christian terms, in order to save the lives of unborn children, Christians must first set about saving the souls of their fathers and mothers. And that means not simply preaching to those mothers and fathers about the Christian moral tradition concerning the sacredness of human life but leading them to the salvific relationship with Christ that underlies and gives life to that tradition. Disconnected from that experience, especially in a society in which politics claims for itself the ultimate moral authority, the Christian moral tradition becomes ossified, at best, and at worst takes on the character of an ideology, both adversary to, and counterpart of, the ideology of individualistic liberalism.

The problem, as I have made clear, is nothing new, finding its roots in the rise of the modern world five centuries ago; and it was accurately diagnosed almost half a century ago by Josef Pieper, who also pointed toward its only possible solution in his short but indispensable work Tradition: Concept and Claim (translated from the German in 2008 by E. Christian Kopff and published that same year by ISI Books). Tradition, in both the secular usage and the capital-T of Christian Sacred Tradition, is not merely a collection of things worth preserving, as both political and religious “conservatives” today treat it, but the means by which the most important of all experiences is handed down. As Pieper writes,

There is really nothing praiseworthy in the mere fact that something which has been thought, said, or done “since forever” will continue to be thought, said, and done. The praise due the act of tradition only makes sense when what is preserved and will continue to be preserved through the generations is what is truly worth preserving. That is the point of young people’s doubting question. Why is it, they ask, that a duty has been violated, if we simply let what has been handed down rest on its laurels, so that we can say, think, and do something totally different? We can only hope that someone hears this radical question and gives an existentially believable and equally radical answer, “the” answer that goes to the heart of things: that among the many things that are more or less worth preserving and may have been accumulated as “tradition,” there is in the last analysis only one traditional good that it is absolutely necessary to preserve unchanged, namely the gift that is received and handed on in the sacred tradition. I say “necessary” because this tradition comes from a divine source; because each generation needs it for a truly human existence; because no people and no brilliant individual can replace it on their own or even add anything valid to it.

It should be obvious that Pieper is speaking here not of external forms, but of that which gave them life, and which may require those external forms to change over time so that what is truly worth preserving may continue to be passed on. This is the problem faced by modern conservatives, who primarily seek to defend what they respected and loved when they were young, rather than what is necessarily worth preserving. Pieper contrasts “Tradition (singular)” with these “traditions,” which may start out supporting a healthy culture but ultimately have the potential to do more harm than good:

Genuine consciousness of tradition makes one positively free and independent in the face of conservatisms, which worry obsessively about the cultivation of the “traditions.” Certainly, a “cultivation of tradition” that attaches itself to a historically accidental external image of what has been handed down becomes a positive hindrance to a real transmission of what is truly worth conserving, which perhaps can occur only under changed historical forms. It is possible to imagine a real transmission of what is in the last analysis worth handing down, which a dogmatic conservatism could not even recognize.

This is the problem faced also by the Church, and here I speak broadly, and not just of the Catholic Church of which I am a member. Even under the best of circumstances, in a healthy culture in which the structures of society and of politics are not antagonistic toward the Christian Faith, the Church must be a countercultural institution.  That is the only way in which She can be certain to be able to hand down the ultimate Truth of the Faith, and not let it become obscured or deformed by an “historically accidental external image” that may have arisen from that Truth but has since become abstracted from it.

We are always in danger of turning the traditions of Christianity—the rituals and doctrines, the moral teachings and institutions—into ends in themselves, rather than means to the true end, “the gift that is received and handed on.” Or rather, we should use the Gift (singular), Who gave Himself to save our souls, and Who continues, in every age until the end of time, to give man what he needs “for a truly human existence.”

American conservatives of a certain generation summed up the insight of a different German philosopher in the catchphrase “Don’t immanentize the eschaton!” And yet, while warning against the dangers of trying to bring about heaven on earth, they themselves, through their obsession with elections and legislation, did much to subjugate culture to politics and to make Christian moral teaching a means to a political end, rather than a means of transmitting the Truth of the Faith. The fruit of their efforts can be seen today in the lost battles of the Culture War, and in entire generations that have sought salvation not in the sacraments of Christian churches but in the squabbles of “the public square.”

All is not lost, however, so long as “the gift that is received and handed on” continues to be received and handed on. But the locus of that transmission—that “Tradition (singular)”—has never been the polling place, but the Church, which guards that gift.

When we get that straight—when we recognize once again that the duty we owe to God is to pass on the Good News to our fellow man—only then shall we begin the process of returning to reality, revitalizing our culture, and putting politics back in its proper, limited space.

First published in the December 2013 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

An Historian and a Prophet →

For more than 60 years, from the mid-1950s on, John Lukacs wrote and spoke on the passing of the modern age. With his death on May 6, the end of that age has finally come to pass.

A Good and Faithful Servant

Pete MacKay. (Photo by Scott P. Richert)

“MacKay.”  I struggled for some time with how to render those six letters, in a vain attempt to convey some sense of what it was like to hear Pete pick up the other end of the phone line.  I could never do justice to the experience.  Somehow, Pete managed to stretch the two short syllables of his last name out over several seconds and to turn them into a summary of his whole being: from the low and humble muh to the crescendoing kAY, following by the falling Ay, which the person making the phone call might have mistaken for a syllable in itself, had he not known better.

His was a voice so deep and rich and, outside of the Winnebago County Board meeting room and other political venues, so soft-spoken that it was sometimes hard for me to make out what Pete was saying over the phone.  But I never had any trouble understanding his name.  If a man’s word is his bond, Pete’s family name was his honor.

Peter M. MacKay passed into eternal life on December 13, 2011, at the age of 78.  He was among the last of a certain generation of public servants—no politician, Pete—who were born early enough to remember the hardships of the Great Depression and the sacrifices of World War II, but late enough to come of age during the middle of the “American Century.”  Those experiences helped make him the man that he was: Frugal and patriotic were among the words that always sprang to mind when Pete’s name was mentioned.

There were other words as well: principled and loyal chief among them.  At Pete’s funeral on December 17 at Saint Edward’s Catholic Church in southeast Rockford, Frank Manzullo, one of Pete’s two oldest friends and brother of longtime U.S. Rep. Don Manzullo, read a letter that he had written to Pete during the final hours of Pete’s life.  (He wrote the last sentences after learning that Pete had passed away.)  In it, Frank recalled Pete’s first heart attack, on a day when Frank and Don were supposed to have dinner with then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.  Instead, Frank was there at the hospital when Pete arrived by ambulance, because, he said, “You taught me the value of loyalty.”

Pete was the kind of man who inspired loyalty, because he was so loyal himself.  First elected to the Winnebago County Board in 1978, he served his district until 2009, with only one interruption.  The voters of his district—even those who didn’t entirely agree with him—trusted Pete because they knew where he stood.  Too often politicians convince themselves that they need guile in order to advance their principles, and eventually end up full of guile and devoid of principle; but there was no guile in Pete MacKay.  He knew what he believed; he told the voters what he believed; and he voted his conscience, every single time.

Pete still believed in the Old America, and no amount of fancy talk could convince him that the country he knew and loved, at least as he knew and loved her, was gone for good.

With his handlebar mustache and his increasingly white beard, Pete looked like a man out of time—and, in a sense, he was.  He still believed in the Old America, and no amount of fancy talk could convince him that the country he knew and loved, at least as he knew and loved her, was gone for good.  For Pete, the Constitution didn’t require interpretation; it was perfectly clear, and anyone who couldn’t see that didn’t want to see it.  Not without reason was Pete occasionally called Winnebago County’s Ron Paul, and, indeed, Ron Paul was the public servant he admired the most (followed closely by Ronald Reagan).

But if he was a man out of time, Pete was never a man out of place.  He was born in Rockford and lived here all of his life, with the exception of a stint in the Army (where he rose to the rank of drill sergeant) and a few years as a police officer in Chicago.  Other local elected officials (especially Pete’s bête noire Kris Cohn) saw their offices as stepping stones to something greater.  But Pete was happy right where he was.  For him, politics wasn’t about promoting Pete MacKay; it was about advancing policies in the best interests of his constituents.

Pete wasn’t just the first winner of The Rockford Institute’s Good and Faithful Servant Award; he was the man for whom we created it.  The event caused a bit of a stir, because between the time that we had notified Pete of our desire to honor him with the award and the public announcement of the same, Pete had decided to jump into the Republican primary for Winnebago County Board chairman, in an attempt to unseat the incumbent Republican holder of the office, Kris Cohn.  A number of local dignitaries declined to attend the award ceremony, or even to send a note of congratulations to be read, ostensibly because they thought The Rockford Institute was trying to influence the race.  The chain of events was proof enough that we weren’t, though after Pete’s announcement, Aaron Wolf and I (in a personal capacity) worked hard on his campaign.  Though Pete lost (and by a fairly large margin), I never had so much fun working on an election.  Pete was a signmaker by trade (he took over his father’s business), and the one minor transgression of the law that he was willing to tolerate concerned the placement of campaign signs.  The night that a few shadowy figures nailed a four-foot by eight-foot MacKay yard sign to the wooden fence of a restaurant frequented by Kris Cohn and her cronies has become the stuff of legend.  The sign stayed up almost until the day of the primary, because Cohn and the other professional politicians approached the restaurant from the north—the side closest to the county administration building—while the sign was on a fence to the south side of the restaurant, a direction from which only normal people would approach.

The night that a few shadowy figures nailed a four-foot by eight-foot MacKay yard sign to the wooden fence of a restaurant frequented by Kris Cohn and her cronies has become the stuff of legend.

During his campaign for county-board chairman, Pete trusted me to write the text of his radio commercials, and a small band of happy warriors who have appeared in this column over the years, including Aaron Wolf, Mark Dahlgren, Mary Hitchcock, Ward Sterett, and Art Johnson, recorded them.  Pete insisted, though, on ending each with his own tagline: “I’m Pete MacKay, and when I’m elected county board chairman, I’ll drive my own car.”

Writers’ memories aren’t always the most reliable, because over time we tend to remake events as they should have been rather than exactly as they were, a tendency exaggerated when writing about Pete because his personality lent itself so easily to mythmaking.  Still, if Pete didn’t flub one of the takes of that tagline by saying, “ . . . I’ll drive my own damn car,” he should have.  The fact that the county provided Chairman Cohn with a tricked-out SUV was, for Pete, the perfect symbol of the corruption that had led to the creation of a separate elected county-board chairmanship to begin with.  (Most other county boards in Illinois elect their chairman from among the members of the board.)

Many years before, when the position was first created, Pete gave the voters of Winnebago County one last chance to undo the damage, by running for county-board chairman on a platform of abolishing the office as soon as he was sworn in.  Alas, after Pete lost that race, everything he predicted came true: County government (and, consequently, county taxes) increased dramatically under the elected county-board chairman, and the residents of Winnebago County lost a number of their freedoms—and too many lost their property, as the county (especially in the Kris Cohn years) aggressively used an especially virulent form of eminent domain known as “Quick Take” to pursue unnecessary public projects.

Pete was a man of few regrets.  The stupidity and mendacity of local politicians angered him, and he was disappointed when the voters rejected his attempts to do what he knew to be right on their behalf, but as much as he liked to recount the stories of past defeats (and occasional victories) Pete saw no sense in complaining about things that could not be undone.  He focused instead on what he could do, which led him, in the last phase of his public life, to combine his service on the county board with two terms as Rockford Township Highway Commissioner, where he lowered the road tax levy for four years straight, while providing the same level of service.

That Pete endorsed candidates he believed in regardless of party affiliation had always annoyed many local Republicans; that they supported a Democrat they did not believe in just to defeat Pete tells you everything you need to know about their commitment to principle and party loyalty.

Pete’s example of efficient local government was not appreciated by other local politicians, especially his fellow Republicans, who, in January 2009, while Pete’s beloved wife Rosie lay dying of cancer, held a caucus rather than a primary in order to try to deprive him of the Republican nomination for highway commissioner.  Even though Pete wasn’t at the caucus, his old friend Frank Manzullo placed his name in nomination, and Pete emerged victorious, on the saddest day of his life: Rosie had passed away while the caucus was taking place.

Foiled briefly, those same Republicans quietly threw their support behind the Democratic candidate in the general election, and Pete suffered his final defeat.  That Pete endorsed candidates he believed in regardless of party affiliation had always annoyed many local Republicans; that they supported a Democrat they did not believe in just to defeat Pete tells you everything you need to know about their commitment to principle and party loyalty.

The few things Pete did regret were those over which he had had some control.  He and Rosie had dated in the 1960’s, but they drifted apart only to reconnect in 1978 and get married in 1980.  They had two daughters, Margo and Meredith, in rapid succession (13 months apart), but age prevented them from expanding their family further.  Every time we spoke, no matter how recently we had previously talked, Pete asked about my children, and told me how blessed Amy and I were to have had such a large brood.  Similarly, when he finally entered Rosie’s Catholic Church in the last years of her life and they had their marriage blessed, his only regret was that he had waited so long.  He embraced the Faith with a joy reminiscent of St. John Chrysostom’s Easter Homily: “For the Lord, who is jealous of his honor, will accept the last even as the first.  He giveth rest unto him who cometh at the eleventh hour, even as unto him who hath wrought from the first hour.”

Well done, Pete, thou good and faithful servant.  May God grant you eternal rest. 

First published in the February 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

His Final Lesson

A friend of mine has expressed the devout hope that, upon his death, his wife and children will have the good sense to burn his papers. While his main desire is to prevent unfinished thoughts from seeing the light of day, there are other, equally important, concerns. Posthumously published works allow enemies to attack without fear of reprisal; even worse, they encourage excessive—and uncritical—adulation from friends. The Sword of Imagination has provoked both responses.

By the time of his death in 1994, Russell Kirk had generated an impressive body of work that included over 30 books and hundreds of articles and reviews. Departing from this vale of tears, he left behind his completed but unpublished memoirs, which appeared a year later as the current volume. In the preface. Kirk notes his peculiar (but for him characteristic) stylistic choice: “Emulating Julius Caesar, Henry Esmond, and Henry Adams, I express my memoirs, throughout the following chapters, in the third person—that mode being less embarrassing to authors who set at defiance the ravenous ego. Besides, when the man within . . . regards critically the life of the outer man, it may be possible to attain some degree of objectivity—using that word in its signification of detachment from strong emotion or personal prejudice.” Curiously, Kirk was too much of a Romantic not to know that “objectivity,” especially regarding oneself, is a fiction. Indeed, the pretense of objectivity often serves as cover for “the ravenous ego,” rather than setting it at defiance. Some readers, especially if they did not know Kirk, may suspect that to be true in this case.

The decision to write in the third person may be at once the book's strongest point and its weakest. It allows Kirk to put into writing emotions that he could never express in the first person, especially about his family life. On the other hand, portions of The Sword of Imagination (for instance, where the author discusses the importance of his own work, or its influence) read like the work of a biographer, even a hagiographer, rather than an autobiography. While he may have seen himself in the third person (and some who were close to him often suspected he did). Kirk might better have left an appraisal of his own work to others.

Forty years after the publication of a book is probably too soon to be able to gauge its long-term significance. Yet Kirk attributes the rightward drift of American politics in recent decades in no small part to the influence of The Conservative Mind: “So it was that The Conservative Mind—working through a kind of intellectual osmosis and popularized through newspapers and mass-audience magazines, radio and even television commentators, and other media of opinion—gradually helped to alter the climate of political and moral opinion. A generation later. Kirk's works would be cited and quoted by the president and the vice president of the United States.” Whether, a century from now, historians will draw such a connection is anybody's guess; but even if they should do so, what would it mean? Ronald Reagan quoted more often from Tom Paine, the intellectual enemy of Kirk's hero, Edmund Burke, than from any other political figure; and in his eight years in office, he enshrined as the centerpiece of conservatism those “dreams of avarice” that Kirk wanted to get beyond. Though Kirk writes of President Eisenhower that he “and his people did retard the advance of the welfare state in America but did little to give flesh to the conservative imagination,” Reagan and his people merely fed that imagination a steady diet of Hollywood-style celluloid, (Kirk admits as much: “Mr. Reagan was endowed with a certain power of imagination; successful actors almost necessarily have a talent for image-making.”) As for the Vice President who quoted from Kirk's works, when he ascended to the presidency Kirk found him “worse than unimaginative—merely silly, often,” and “would come to detest Bush for his carpet-bombing of the Cradle of Civilization with its taking of a quarter of a million lives in Iraq.” And “so in 1992 Kirk became general chairman of Patrick Buchanan's campaign in the Michigan primary.” If The Conservative Mind really led to Reagan and Bush, even Kirk might question the value of that accomplishment.

In an age of abstractions, in which “Efficiency and Progress and Equality” are seen as more real than “all those fascinating and lovable peculiarities of human nature and human society that are the products of prescription and tradition,” Kirk cultivated a sense of mystery and awe and wonder.

Unlike Eisenhower and Reagan, Kirk did help to “give flesh to the conservative imagination,” and the number of conservative luminaries who claim that his works played a role in their political and intellectual development is legion. But today, with the conservative movement in a shambles and the Republican Party headed for self-immolation in November, perhaps we can learn a final lesson from Russell Kirk. For unlike those who have succumbed to the siren song of Washington, D.C., Kirk realized that the lasting accomplishments of his life were not political, nor even intellectual. Rather, they surrounded him every day, and he presents them here in loving detail: a devoted wife, who still works tirelessly to keep his memory alive; four gracious daughters, who will raise their children well, as they were raised; a congeries of assistants, who planted trees and took long walks with Kirk, and came to see the woods and fields that surround Mecosta, and even the little village itself, through the lens of his Romantic imagination.

In an age of abstractions, in which “Efficiency and Progress and Equality” are seen as more real than “all those fascinating and lovable peculiarities of human nature and human society that are the products of prescription and tradition,” Kirk cultivated a sense of mystery and awe and wonder. To his eyes, Mecosta, shunned and despised by the commissars of big government, big business, and big culture, was a Brigadoon. As a business partner of Kirk's once remarked, “Russell, you are the last of the Romantics, and probably the greatest: for nobody else could make tales out of that God-forsaken Mecosta County.”

That Romantic imagination is Kirk's greatest legacy. If his influence should continue on into the next century, it will be because those who knew him had their imagination awakened to possibilities greater than those dreamed of in Washington, D.C., New York, and Los Angeles. Those possibilities are what make life worth living, and they—more so than Kirk's discussions of politics, or his portraits of famous acquaintances—are what make The Sword of Imagination worth reading.

[The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict, by Russell Kirk (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company) 497 pp., $35.00]

First published in the November 1996 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

An Oasis in an Arid Desert →

The seeds of postwar conservatism’s destruction were present in its inception. (A review of Paul Gottfried’s The Conservative Movement: Revised Edition.)

First published in Humanitas, Volume VII, No. 1, 1994.