(Also see our newsletter, Permanent Things.)
We honor the life and memory of Valerie Eliot, who died earlier this month. Kirk Center Secretary Dr. Ben Lockerd has written a brief memorial for a charming lady who carefully guarded her husband’s literary legacy.
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