Russell Kirk
As a young man Russell Kirk traipsed over the braes of East Ayrshire, Scotland, to a tiny village with a rich history. Known to Dr. Johnson as the residence of his friend Boswell's family, the place had, by Kirk's time, little left of its former vitality. Worse, few seemed to care: there was a new cinema a few towns over, and that was, well, new, if nothing else. In this essay from 1969, Kirk argues that community decline cannot be understood - let alone reversed - without participation in the ever-threatened tradition of literary continuity.
Filed under Featured Essays, Theology, Uncategorized · Tagged with Ambrose Bierce, Americanism, Edmund Burke, George Douglas Brown, Gordon Chalmers, Herbert Spencer, Irving Babbitt, James Boswell, Jeremy Bentham, Mark Twain, Merlin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Paul Elmer More, Robert Frost, Roy Campbell, Russell Kirk, Scotland, Tenniel
Vigen Guroian
During a dinner conversation with Russell and Annette Kirk in Washington, D.C., just five months before Dr. Kirk’s death, Russell turned to me and quipped, with his familiar chuckle and impish smile, “Vigen, they are now calling me a theologian!” I did not ask him who was saying such a thing...
Filed under Articles / Essays, Featured Essays, Uncategorized · Tagged with Christian Humanism, Christopher Dawson, Edmund Burke, G.K. Chesterton, humanism, Irving Babbitt, John Dewey, John Henry Newman, literature, Orestes Brownson, Pico della Miranola, Richard Hooker, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, theology, Vigen Guroian, William F. Buckley Jr.
Russell Kirk
For decades now, mainstream educators have been encouraging their pupils to use their imaginations - even as the literary fare they've been offering has increasingly had the opposite effect. Russell Kirk brings his characteristic perspicacity to bear on the question of literature and the "moral imagination" in a classic essay that has only grown more relevant since it first appeared in 1981.
