A Message from the President

Welcome to the website of the Russell Kirk Center.

Russell and Annette Kirk

We hope that visitors to this site will be inspired to discover more about the life and thought of Russell Kirk and about the work of the Center that carries forward his legacy today. Russell believed deeply that civilization can only thrive when there is, in the words of Edmund Burke, a partnership of “those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born.”

Russell saw his mission as conveying to America’s rising generations an understanding of the process by which a healthy culture is transmitted from age to age. Today, this mission is continued in the work of the Russell Kirk Center, which promotes, through its publications, seminars, and fellowships, an appreciation of the “permanent things” that maintain and nurture our civil social order.

You will find on this website information about Russell’s life and writings and about the various projects that we administer here at the Center. There are links that will enable you to find and purchase books by Russell Kirk, subscribe to the Center’s publications, and learn more about our academic programs.

If you would like to support us in our work of intellectual and cultural renewal, please contact us for information on how to make a donation to the Center.

Sincerely,

Annette Y. Kirk

Imagination it is that shapes society—moral imagination, or idyllic imagination, or diabolic imagination.

Russell Kirk

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News and Events

First Principles of Leadership Lecture

Annette Kirk will be speaking on March 3 on “First Principles of Leadership” for the Leadership Academy of the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids. The assigned readings for students are (1) Annette Kirk’s lecture, “Life with Russell Kirk” as well as two readings from Dr. Kirk: (2) “May the Rising Generation Redeem the Time” and (3) “Can Virtue Be Taught?”

Feb 2010

Kirk Center in Italy

Senior Fellow Marco Respinti announces progress on the web site for the Centro Studi Russell Kirk based in Milan, Italy. It is still under development, but you can visit at www.russellkirk.eu. We have also recently posted an updated bio for Marco.

Feb 2010

Permanent Things Newsletter

We are pleased to announce a new number of Permanent Things, the newsletter of the Russell Kirk Center, edited by Ben Lockerd. The Fall 2009 edition features a report on 2009 activities at the Center. You may download it at this link (PDF, 2.6MB).

Jan 2010

Online Support Opportunity

The Kirk Center now has a PayPal account which enables secure donations via credit or debit card. We appreciate any contribution you can make toward our publications and seminars to further the Permanent Things. You can make a gift from this page. Thank you!

Dec 2009

George Nash Interviewed

Senior Fellow George H. Nash has been interviewed for a new documentary on President Herbert Hoover. An edited transcript is available here.

Oct 2009

New Solzhenitsyn Edition

The Kirk Center knows of few better friends or champions of the moral imagination in humane letters than Edward E. Ericson Jr., Emeritus Professor of English at Calvin College. A distinguished authority on the life and works of the Russian man of letters Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and a longtime friend of the Center’s founder, he was distinctly influenced by the writings of Russell Kirk, who favorably reviewed Dr. Ericson’s seminal work, Solzhenitsyn: The Moral Vision (1980). The Kirk Center is proud to announce that the unexpurgated version of Solzhenitsyn’s first novel, In the First Circle, has been recently published by Harper Perennial, with an insightful foreword by Dr. Ericson. Readers of the foreword and of Solzhenitsyn’s long-anticipated novel of soul-trying spiritual struggle within the Soviet prison system will discover truths articulated by Kirk nearly thirty years ago: “Solzhenitsyn’s moral vision is what Eliot called the ‘high dream’ —the vision of Dante, the Christian extrasensory perception of true reality. Even more than Dante, Solzhenitsyn passed through the Inferno, and was purged of dross.”

Oct 2009