For a Thousand Memes to Sing

Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self by Marilynne Robinson. Yale University Press, 2010. 176 pages, $24.Marilynne Robinson is America’s leading literary Calvinist. This title may give her short shrift, for she is also a...

Liberal Idealism Critiqued

Cultural Conservatism, Political Liberalism: From Criticism to Cultural Studies by James Seaton. University of Michigan Press, 1996. 287 pp., $42.50 cloth.This wonderful book defends a tradition of American cultural self-criticism that includes Irving Babbitt, H. L....

Signs of Contradiction

The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature, 1850–2000 by Richard Griffiths. Continuum (London & New York) xii + 260 pp., $35 cloth, 2010.In 1989, Gregory Wolfe uttered a cri de coueur bemoaning academic neglect of the modern “Catholic Intellectual...

The Perceptivity of Isaac Hecker

Isaac T. Hecker, The Diary: Romantic Religion in Ante-Bellum America edited by John Farina. Paulist Press (“Sources of American Spirituality” Series) 1988, 456 pp., $14.95 cloth. Americans are an incorrigibly religious people. In spite of the predictions—primarily by...

A Necessary Symbiosis

America’s Spiritual Capital by Nicholas Capaldi and Theodore Roosevelt Malloch St Augustine’s Press (South Bend, Indiana), 2012. Paper, 176 pages, $17. Over the past thirty years, increasing numbers of social scientists and economists have invested more time in...

On the Depths of Villainy

On Essays and LettersProbably the most famous letter writer of the ancient world was Cicero. In 59 B.C., Cicero wrote to Gaius Scribonius: “There are many sorts of letters. But there is one unmistakable sort, which actually caused letter-writing to be invented in the...

Men with Lit Matches

Fahrenheit 451, The Fiftieth Anniversary Edition by Ray Bradbury. Simon & Schuster, 2003. 208 pages, hardcover, $23.In the spring of 1950, in the basement of the UCLA library, Ray Bradbury recorded the future on a coin-operated typewriter by typing out what would...
Ray Bradbury, In Memoriam

Ray Bradbury, In Memoriam

Ray Bradbury, a close friend of Russell Kirk, died on June 5, 2012 at age 91 in Los Angeles. He was the author of numerous novels and stories beloved by several generations of readers worldwide, especially The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine,...

‘Warm with Generous Impulse’: Ray Bradbury, In Memoriam

Russell Kirk on Ray Bradbury, on the occasion of the death of Bradbury.A close friend of Russell Kirk, Ray Bradbury died on June 5, 2012 at age 91 in Los Angeles. He was the author of numerous novels and stories beloved by several generations of readers worldwide,...

On Statesmanship: The Case of John Adams

This article is the second of two parts and is based on a talk delivered to a Colloquium on Statesmanship and the Constitution at the Rochester Institute of Technology, April 13–14, 2012. Part One is here.So now we come to the crux of the issue: statesmanship means...