Volume 34, Number 2 (Fall 1994)
Editor’s Note
A Tribute to Russell Kirk
The death of Russell Kirk is an irreplaceable loss not only to his family and friends but to this review as well. For over thirty-three years he edited this publication, reminding us that education has for its ultimate ends wisdom and virtue. We present this special tribute issue of The University Bookman in affirmation of, and thanksgiving for, the life and legacy of Russell Kirk.
Included in this memorial issue is a statement by the governor of Michigan and a resolution proposed by our state senator, as well as remarks made at the services held in Michigan and New York. Additionally, three of the many literary assistants Kirk mentored over the years, Andrew Shaughnessy, Jeffrey O. Nelson, and Matthew Davis, contribute warm and interesting looks at Kirk. Two longtime friends and colleagues, William Rusher and Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, place him in a historical context, while Cecilia Kirk Nelson outlines the literary patrimony Kirk bequeathed to his four daughters. We conclude this memorial issue with the epilogue from his unpublished memoir, The Sword of Imagination.
Because my husband and I believed that it was important to encourage discussions of fundamental questions, we hosted seminars for hundreds of students in our home for over three decades. This association with the rising generation introduced us to thoughtful young people, many of whom—now published authors or active in politics or the professions—are contributors to and readers of this quarterly review. Through the pages of this journal, the editorial staff plans to carry on Kirk’s work of publishing individuals of all generations concerned about the transmission of our cultural patrimony.
As a new era of editorship commences, we want to assure our readers that we are committed to a policy of continuity. We hope to build upon the foundation that has been set for us—reviewing books and publishing original essays on cultural history, literature, politics, economics, and education—adding something of our own along the way, but working always within the framework of the traditional concerns of this review. Also in subsequent issues we will reprint selections from the voluminous writings of Russell Kirk, remembering with Eliot that “the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”
Annette Kirk
Posted: October 1, 2003 in Editor’s Notes.
A culture is perennially in need of renewal. A culture does not survive and prosper merely by being taken for granted; active defense is always required, and imaginative growth, too.
Russell Kirk
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The Kirk Center and The University Bookman regret the passing of sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz, who died in March. Recipient of many accolades, Horowitz was a sociologist of wide-ranging interests, from religion to analysis of state power and social order in assessing a society’s quality of life, an approach that has since become standard.
Horowitz has a special place in the memory of the Kirk Center. It is he who made possible the Library of Conservative Thought, a collection of more than thirty volumes published by Transaction Press, with which Horowitz was long affiliated, and edited by Russell Kirk. These thirty-odd volumes constitute a basic reading list for the educated conservative, and include classics such as James Burnham’s Congress and the American Tradition, Irving Babbitt’s Rousseau and Romanticism, Orestes Brownson’s Selected Political Essays, and Kirk’s own America’s British Culture. These books brought the tradition of conservative reflection to a new generation, and rightly placed them alongside other important works of sociology, intellectual history, and politics.
In his eulogy for Russell Kirk, given at Kirk’s Memorial Mass in 1994, Horowitz stated that Kirk was now “at one with the great tradition he helped articulate and recover”—words that also aptly describe the legacy of Irving Louis Horowitz.
RIP. (17 Apr 2012)
Here’s a round-up of recent writings by Bookman editor Gerald Russello elsewhere on the Internet and in print. • At the Imaginative Conservative Russello responds to Claes Ryn’s argument that conservatives have failed the culture. • He reviews Gregory Wolfe’s Beauty Will Save the World in the October edition of Chronicles. • At the National Catholic Register he discusses a recent Colorado religious liberty case denying families access to funds for private education, based on an outdated reading of a bigoted “Blaine”-style amendment. • In The Wilson Quarterly, he reviews Why Trilling Matters.
(15 Oct 2011)
The Imaginative Conservative blog has posted an excerpt and link to an essay by Pepperdine’s Ted McAllister on Kirk’s Conservative Mind that is worth a look: “What was then more readily an act of preservation has become today an act of recovery.”
(1 Oct 2011)
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