The Middling Mind
The Politics of the Center: The Juste Milieu in Theory and Practice, France and England, 1815–1848, by Vincent E. Starzinger, with a new introduction by the author and a foreword by Russell Kirk. Transaction Books, 1991. Paperback, 181 pages, $19.95. Middlingness, the...Modesty Is the Best Policy
A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue by Wendy Shalit. The Free Press, 1999. Cloth, 291 pp., $24. What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman by Danielle Crittenden. Simon and Schuster, 1999. Cloth, 202 pp., $23.A recent spate of...Meeting Stalin’s Challenge
Kennan, Lippmann, Burnham, and the Great Strategy Debate in the Early Cold War YearsDuring the late 1940s and early 1950s, in response to repeated Soviet encroachments in the Eastern Mediterranean, Iran, Central Europe, and the Far East, the United States gradually...“The World’s Last Night”
Provocative titles are meant to, well, provoke. I have always considered C. S. Lewis’s little 1952 book of essays entitled The World’s Last Night (Harcourt) to be one difficult to forget. It takes its title from the last essay in the book, itself redolent of Christian...Caesar, princeps, Augustus, god
The shifting identities of Rome’s first emperorOn the Ides of March, 44 BC, Julius Caesar’s great-nephew, Octavius, the future Augustus and first emperor of Rome, was eighteen years of age and a newly arrived student in the Roman province of Illyricum, modern Albania....Anti-Catholicism and Manifest Destiny
Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War by John C. Pinheiro. Oxford University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 256 pages, $45.Missionaries of Republicanism, a volume in Oxford University Press’s prestigious Religion in America series,...Homo Economicus, Absurdus, or Viator?
A Brief Philosophical Journey into Modernity.Wavering between the profit and the loss In this brief transit where the dreams cross The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying (Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things From the wide window...Why the Exorcist Endures
Mark Judge They’re still there almost every day. At the corner of 36th and Prospect Streets in Georgetown. More than forty years later, tourists and even locals arrive at the stairs where the film The Exorcist was shot in the early 1970s. They take pictures, talk...Time and Permanence in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets
Pedro Blas González In my beginning is my end…. … to be restored, our sickness must grow worse. —T. S. Eliot, Four QuartetsT. S. Eliot begins Burnt Norton with a reflection of time as cyclical. Because time-past and present are enveloped by time-future, Eliot...
There are metaphorical hills on which I would be willing to die. The Oxford comma is one of them.
So easy to forget that the best way to educate yourself is to read great works of literature and philosophy, then talk about them. Bring back the salon!