Welcome Home to the Russell Kirk Center
Strengthening America’s Tradition of Order, Justice & Freedom
The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal aims to recover, conserve, and enliven those enduring norms and principles that Russell Kirk (1918–1994) called the Permanent Things. Explore the Center’s programs, publications, and fellowships and join with us to continue Kirk’s work to renew our culture and redeem our time.
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At the Kirk Center
Highlights
New Book: Russell Kirk’s On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776
John Engler named as Chairman of the Kirk Center’s Board
Classic Kirk essay: On the Constitution: “A Revolution Not Made, But Prevented”
Visiting Scholar Daniel Pitt discusses Disraeli and the Conservative Tradition
Events
September 15, 22, 29: Russell Kirk on America Virtual Master Class — Apply Here
September 26: Public Conference in Grand Rapids — Reclaiming Authentic Conservatism: Russell Kirk and the Roots of American Order
Available now from Creed & Culture
Mecosta House Books
Explore Mecosta House
At Mecosta House, we aim to combine with the Kirk Center’s programs to foster an intellectual community dedicated to exploring the wisdom of our predecessors while forging a new conservative humanism.
We hope our readers will be edified by the titles we publish, and that they will strengthen the programs and the courses we will introduce at the Kirk Center as part of our School of Conservative Studies. David Hein’s Teaching the Virtues offers a fresh look at a perennial educational aim—encouraging virtue in the next generation, and we are proud to present it as our first book.
From the University Bookman
Techne and Themis in History
“The book explains what Western/European civilization is by telling the story of its birth, formation, evolution, and global influence. It ends with McDougall’s statement that from the perspective of the current times, ‘”Western civilization,” however defined, has become decadent, and is perhaps even dying.’”
Latest Pieces
Winston Churchill’s Path to Leadership
“He wrote of a vanished empire, of bygone comportment associated with society balls and faraway battlefields, and of a governing class that suddenly found themselves among the governed. As astonished as Churchill was at the pace of change during his lifetime, I think modern readers can perfectly relate to this sentiment. The pace of change has not diminished. Nor has the relatability of a young Winston Churchill.”
John Adams: Russell Kirk’s Founding Federalist
“…[Kirk] located the mainstream of the American Founding not with the Jeffersonian Republicans, but with their rivals in the Federalist party. Kirk admired them not only as practical statesmen, but also as anti-revolutionary thinkers in their own right. As he put it, the Constitution they supported was both ‘the most successful conservative device in the history of the world’ and a ‘great monument’ to the Federalists.”
The Patriotic Russell Kirk
“Taken together, the essays in this collection have a distinctly American air, but one spiced by the enlivening spirit of a much longer historical consciousness.”
Jesuits and Revolutions
“…these… reveal Carola’s gift as a novelist, reminding the reader that the great theological and ecclesiastical questions of the age were debated and decided by flesh-and-blood human beings with normal needs and emotions.”
Taking Movies Seriously, Perhaps Too Seriously
“Dalfonzo’s conception of film as a moral mirror that serves to reveal to us our lapses and failings is certainly founded on an honest and conscientious set of wishes—on that score I have no doubts. I nonetheless suspect that this hope emerges from a blurring of the formal and moral properties of art.”
About the Bookman
For six decades, the University Bookman, founded by Russell Kirk, has identified and discussed those books that diagnose the modern age and support the renewal of culture and the common good. Currently published online, the Bookman continues its mission of examining our times in light of the Permanent Things that make us human.
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