By 'the Permanent Things' [T. S. Eliot] meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in that continuity of belief and institution called the great mysterious incorporation of the human race.
Russell Kirk
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
