Spring Newsletter
The Spring 2017 Permanent Things Newsletter is now available, featuring a fresh design and news about recent events and publications from the Kirk Center and other friends. Among the highlights is a lecture this spring by Sir Roger Scruton at Villanova University,...The Epistolary Petrarch
Selected Letters: Volumes I & II by Francesco Petrarca, translated and edited by Elaine Fantham. Harvard University Press, 2017. Hardcover, 800 + 816 pages, $30 + $30.Contemporary readers of poetry tend to underestimate the power and influence of the Canzoniere of...A New Look at Ransom’s ‘Land’
Land!: The Case for an Agrarian Economy by John Crowe Ransom. Edited by Jason Peters, with an Introduction by Jay T. Collier. University of Notre Dame Press, 2017. Cloth, 156 pages, $25. In Land!, his classic statement of agrarian economic thought, John Crowe Ransom...Constitutionalism, Both Good and Horrid
Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America’s Origins to the Twenty-First Century by Geoffrey R. Stone. Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017. Cloth, 669 pages, $35.Geoffrey Stone is very like the proverbial little girl with the curl in the middle...Novak’s ‘Moral Clarity’ Revisited
Michael Novak, the brilliant scholar and Catholic theologian, died on February 17, 2017 at the age of 83. A liberal turned conservative, Novak, who had earlier studied for the priesthood, authored more than twenty books, represented the United States on the United...In the Ruins, Hope
The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation by Rod Dreher. Sentinel, 2017. Hardcover, 272 pages, $25.Rod Dreher has been calling for Christians to heal themselves, their churches, and their communities, for most of his adult life. One...Elites and the Future of France
Le crépuscule de la France d’en haut by Christophe Guilluy. Flammarion, 2016. Paper, 253 pages, $45. Reviewed by Eamon Moynihan The year 2017 is the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of the classic work by British financier David Ricardo, On the Principles...
Peter Augustine Lawler, RIP
Peter Lawler was not a Southern Gentleman. But he was a southerner and he was, in every important respect, a gentleman. Kind, courteous, and insistent that public discourse and private interactions both be conducted with decency and civility, he earned many friends in...Wilmer Mills: The Poet as Maker
An introduction to and appreciation of the work of the modern agrarian poet Wilmer Mills (1968–2011). By Steven Knepper B. H. Fairchild says it is good for poets to “come from people who make things.” Poets from a crafting background have rich subject matter for...
For America250, @lsheahan enters the fray:
What the American Revolution Secured: Order, Justice, and Freedom
A "revolution not made, but prevented.” Russell Kirk fondly and frequently quoted E. J. Payne’s pithy summary of Burke’s view of the Glorious Revolution.
"So yes, Lord Alfred, perhaps you are right after all. ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world! Perhaps one last Ulyssean adventure remains beyond the sunset, and perhaps some work of noble note may yet be done."