On Essays and Letters
- On Being a Basel Professor Winter 2012
- ‘The Greatest Fool That Ever Lived’ Fall 2011
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In this bonus column, Father Schall reflects on the nature of philosophy, Stoicism, and the Incarnational view of life.
- On Instruction in Cheerful Forms Fall 2011
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In this column, Father Schall reflects on a sermon that John Donne preached to London’s lawyers on a proper understanding of gratitude and suffering.
- Old Roads and Montesquieu’s Library Summer 2011
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Father Schall’s students send him postcards from their travels. Here he reflects on places that several of them have recently been.
- Memories of Johnson Spring 2011
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Father Schall reflects on a collection of the writings and sayings—and conversations of Samuel Johnson. He suggests that “truth ultimately exists in conversation, not in books.”
- On What Knowledge Pertains To Winter 2011
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Father Schall returns to Plato’s Republic for a discussion of the connection of knowledge, philosophy, and action—and a train of thought that points beyond ourselves. We did not cause the beauty and the very existence of what is. . . .
- The Long Twilight Volume 47, Number 3–4 (Fall 2010)
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2010 does not seem to bear the same enthusiasm about the future as existed even forty years ago.
- Safer in Minnesota Volume 47, Number 1 (Winter 2010)
- A Patron Saint of Teachers Volume 46, Number 4 (Winter 2008)
- On the Fixing of Our Gaze Volume 46, Number 3 (Fall 2008)
- What Everybody Can Enjoy Volume 46, Number 2 (Summer 2008)
- The Infinite Anguish of Free Souls Volume 45, Number 3 (Fall 2007)
- Returning to the Real Volume 45, Number 1 (Winter 2007)
- Are Fish Good for the Brain? Volume 42, Number 4 (Winter 2003)
- Many a Touching Story Volume 44, Number 2 (Winter 2006)
- Old China Volume 44, Number 3 (Summer 2006)
- Mr. Shakespeare’s Plays Volume 44, Number 4 (Fall 2006)
- The Bach Moment Volume 44, Number 1 (Fall 2005)
The moral imagination is the principal possession that man does not share with the beasts. It is man’s power to perceive ethical truth, abiding law, in the seeming chaos of many events. Without the moral imagination, man would live merely day to day, or rather moment to moment, as dogs do. It is the strange faculty—inexplicable if men are assumed to have an animal nature only—of discerning greatness, justice, and order, beyond the bars of appetite and self-interest.
Russell Kirk, Enemies of the Permanent Things, 1969
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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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