The Lives of Others

The Lives of Others

“A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn, have changed the face of fortune, and almost of Nature.” These words of Edmund Burke, which Russell Kirk often invoked, bring home to us, in a set of striking images and historical allusions (the girl is Joan...

Recapturing the Moral Imagination through Scotland

The Sporran by G. L. Gregg (Butler Books, 2007, 275 pp.), $17.95.In his work, Russell Kirk stressed the overriding importance of the moral imagination. The moral imagination, the dynamic interplay of the mind where ideas about good and evil, right and wrong, form...

Capitalism, Socialism, and Beyond

Beyond Capitalism and Socialism: A New Statement of an Old Idea, Tobias Lanz, ed. (IHS Press, 2007, 234 pp.), $19.95. Catholic thinkers have been at the forefront of rethinking modern economics from the perspective of the human person. Beginning with Leo XIII’s...

Books in Little

Separating Fools from their Money: A History of American Financial Scandals, by Scott B. MacDonald and Jane E. Hughes (Transaction Publishers, 264 pp., 2007). In the early 2000s a series of corporate and financial scandals rocked the business world. For months...

Searching for a Usable Past

Of Time and Place: A Farm in Wisconsin by Richard Quinney. Ivan R. Dee (Chicago), 192 pp. $28.00 cloth, 2006. The American experience has always existed in tension with, if not outright hostility towards, the strictures of time and place. By the very nature of its...

Of the Soul and the Soil

Agrarianism and the Good Society by Eric T. Freyfogle. University Press of Kentucky (Lexington, Kentucky) 183 pp., $30.00 cloth, 2007. Wendell Berry: Life and Work edited by Jason Peters. University Press of Kentucky, 349 pp., $35.00 cloth, 2007. The Mother of All...