Highlights & News

The Kirk Center welcomed Acton Institute interns for their 2023 intellectual retreat, focusing on Russell Kirk’s best known work, The Conservative Mind, which turns seventy this year. To help the student participants deepen their understanding of the meaning of...

This July, the Kirk Center held its first conference focused on “Writing and the Moral Imagination" for a select group of young professionals. The program brings together two themes central to the life and work of Russell Kirk: character and composition. Participants...

An evening conversation with Mike Pence and Betsy DeVos On Wednesday, May 31, 2023, The Russell Kirk Center made institutional history by hosting nearly 300 leaders, students and educators, friends and supporters at an event featuring a conversation with former Vice...

Josh Lewis, host of Saving Elephants podcast, interviewed Kirk Center CEO Jeff Nelson on how he came to know and work for Russell Kirk and Kirk’s major contributions to articulating the American conservative tradition. In a wide-ranging conversation, they discuss the...

Bishop Robert Barron, founder of Word on Fire Ministries, delivered the 2023 Russell Kirk Lecture at the Heritage Foundation on "The Breakdown of the Tocquevillean Equilibrium." Saving Elephants podcast interviewed John Wood Jr. on finding commonality between Kirk and...

In a 1959 letter to Russell Kirk, Otto von Habsburg, Archduke of Austria-Hungary, wrote: “I am very much interested to learn from your letter that you devote so much attention to the development of [the journal] ‘Modern Age.’ I think that you do here a tremendously...

On The Great Books podcast, host John J. Miller was joined by Luke Sheahan, editor of The University Bookman, to discuss Robert Nisbet’s landmark book, The Quest for Community. Sheahan gives a wonderfully lucid presentation on Nisbet’s argument that the human drive...

On October 20-23, the Russell Kirk Center welcomed participants from The Fund for American Studies (TFAS) to its first program held at the Kirk Center in Mecosta. An impressive class of their Public Policy Fellows, most of whom are early career professionals working...

We hope you enjoy this essay from recent seminar participant, Bobby Miller: Kirk’s life was consumed with the recuperation and preservation of what he called ‘permanent things.’ As he put it: ‘There are certain permanent things in society: the health of the family,...

Interns from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy gathered at the Kirk Center on July 8, 2022, for a day-long seminar on “Dimensions of Contemporary Conservatism.” Faculty speakers included Dr. Glenn Moots from Northwood University and Dr. Sarah Estelle from Hope...