The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal is a nonprofit educational institute based in Mecosta, Michigan, home of the American writer and thinker Russell Kirk (1918–1994).

Russell Kirk at his deskContinuing in the tradition of Dr. Kirk, the Center’s mission is to strengthen the foundations—cultural, economic, and religious—of Western civilization and the American experience within it. Its programs and publications have a particular focus on moral imagination and right reason. They celebrate and defend the “permanent things”—all that makes human life worth living, particularly the bedrock principles that have traditionally supported and maintained the health of society’s central institutions: family, church, and school.

The Center’s efforts are directed at students, business and religious leaders, policy makers, and the general public. It identifies, educates, and mentors thoughtful men and women, and develops and promotes the writing of both established and emerging thinkers.

The Center also seeks to further these aims through cooperation with people and groups worldwide that are committed to revitalizing our common cultural inheritance.

The University BookmanTo these ends the Center offers an unrivaled program of seminars and unique facilities for the support of undergraduate, graduate, and senior residential fellowships. It also has its own list of publications, which includes America’s oldest conservative quarterly review of books, The University Bookman.

We are grateful for your interest in the Russell Kirk Center and invite you to learn more about our mission and projects.

Companion Site

We also offer a companion site with video and audio archives by and about Dr. Kirk. It features video interviews with scholars, prominent persons in the conservative movement, and Kirk himself. The site is kirkcenter.wordpress.com.

Mere unthinking negative opposition to the current of events, clutching in despair at what we still retain, will not suffice in this age. A conservatism of instinct must be reinforced by a conservatism of thought and imagination.

Russell Kirk

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News and Events

First Principles of Leadership Lecture

Annette Kirk will be speaking on March 3 on “First Principles of Leadership” for the Leadership Academy of the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids. The assigned readings for students are (1) Annette Kirk’s lecture, “Life with Russell Kirk” as well as two readings from Dr. Kirk: (2) “May the Rising Generation Redeem the Time” and (3) “Can Virtue Be Taught?

Feb 2010

Kirk Center in Italy

Senior Fellow Marco Respinti announces progress on the web site for the Centro Studi Russell Kirk based in Milan, Italy. It is still under development, but you can visit at www.russellkirk.eu. We have also recently posted an updated bio for Marco.

Feb 2010

Permanent Things Newsletter

We are pleased to announce a new number of Permanent Things, the newsletter of the Russell Kirk Center, edited by Ben Lockerd. The Fall 2009 edition features a report on 2009 activities at the Center. You may download it at this link (PDF, 2.6MB).

Jan 2010

Online Support Opportunity

The Kirk Center now has a PayPal account which enables secure donations via credit or debit card. We appreciate any contribution you can make toward our publications and seminars to further the Permanent Things. You can make a gift from this page. Thank you!

Dec 2009

George Nash Interviewed

Senior Fellow George H. Nash has been interviewed for a new documentary on President Herbert Hoover. An edited transcript is available here.

Oct 2009

New Solzhenitsyn Edition

The Kirk Center knows of few better friends or champions of the moral imagination in humane letters than Edward E. Ericson Jr., Emeritus Professor of English at Calvin College. A distinguished authority on the life and works of the Russian man of letters Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and a longtime friend of the Center’s founder, he was distinctly influenced by the writings of Russell Kirk, who favorably reviewed Dr. Ericson’s seminal work, Solzhenitsyn: The Moral Vision (1980). The Kirk Center is proud to announce that the unexpurgated version of Solzhenitsyn’s first novel, In the First Circle, has been recently published by Harper Perennial, with an insightful foreword by Dr. Ericson. Readers of the foreword and of Solzhenitsyn’s long-anticipated novel of soul-trying spiritual struggle within the Soviet prison system will discover truths articulated by Kirk nearly thirty years ago: “Solzhenitsyn’s moral vision is what Eliot called the ‘high dream’ —the vision of Dante, the Christian extrasensory perception of true reality. Even more than Dante, Solzhenitsyn passed through the Inferno, and was purged of dross.”

Oct 2009