Modern Age articles from January 2008

Modern Age archives from January 2008

Modern Age at the threshold of a new half century.(Editorial)
January 1, 2008... With this issue we open the fiftieth volume of Modern Age, founded by Russell Kirk as "a journal of controversy." After half a century, there is no sign that the kind of controversy that he relished has at all diminished. Kirk founded the...

What's wrong with liberalism?(Essay)
January 1, 2008... To many, liberalism seems the best, in fact the only, platform that enables political leaders and social groups to cooperate and to introduce social changes and political reforms. At any rate this is the situation in Eastern Europe, but I...

Discivilization in the criticism of George A. Panichas.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2008... No American intellectual has offered more steadfast resistance over many decades to the decline of our civilization than George A. Panichas. As literary critic, book reviewer and editor of the most distinguished conservative journal, Modern...

Religious belief in Newman's Grammar of Assent.(John Henry Cardinal Newman)(Critical essay)
January 1, 2008... John Henry Cardinal Newman's An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870) is at times a forbidding work. While it is one of Newman's major works, and his only fully theoretical work, it is not as often read or quoted as is his Apologia or...

Education in British universities.(Essay)
January 1, 2008... It is universally recognised that education is vital for the future prosperity of the world, and yet at the present time there are serious defects that merit determined action. I can speak only from my limited experience, which is mainly that...

The decline of common law constitutionalism in Canada.(Essay)
January 1, 2008... Canada provides a case study in the precipitous decline and fall of common law constitutionalism in the face of modern, and especially postmodern, political thought and practice.(1) In 1982, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (or "the...

We came to hear Dickens.(A DRAMATIC RECONSTRAUCTION)(Charles Dickens)(Essay)
January 1, 2008... December 2, 2007 marked the 140th anniversary of a phenomenon that occurred in Boston in 1867--when a select audience heard Charles Dickens' first public reading in America. What had begun as Dickens' mission to reach a nonreading public in...

In the beginning: a note from the poetry editors.(POEMS)(Poem)
January 1, 2008... In the spring of 1990, John Martin Finlay, the distinguished Alabama poet, terminally ill at forty-nine, lay blind and paralyzed in a railed hospital bed in his room on the family farm near Enterprise, Alabama. There, in extremis, he composed...

Christ Pantokrator.(Poem)(Reprint)(Brief article)
January 1, 2008... His right hand raised, its slender fingers curled, the left hand holding up the holy book, He offers His salvation to the world and blessing from the One whom it forsook. The figure dominates the apse, its cloak of blue half-open,...

T.S. Eliot at Norwich, 1942.(Poem)(Reprint)
January 1, 2008... Swirl and riddle beyond the gray wall Where she was anchored, an old church, A labyrinth of vines and dragonflies now, Maze of thistles overtaking enclosures, Crevices and crenellations of vegetation, Tufts of grass piercing hermitage...

Islam's Christian Captives.(Captives and Their Saviors in the Medieval Crown of Aragon)(Book review)
January 1, 2008... Captives and their Saviors in the Medieval Crown of Aragon, by Jarbel Rodriguez (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America, 2007). 225 pp. For centuries, Muslims have captured Christians in exchange for demands of one kind or...

The Sacralization of Politics.
January 1, 2008... The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium by Paul Edward Gottfried (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005). 154 pp. Paul Gottfried's previous book, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt (2002),...

The Secret of American Vitality.(Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America)(Book review)
January 1, 2008... Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America by Ellis Sandoz (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006). 230 pp. Ellis Sandoz's most recent book brings all his prodigious learning to bear on a matter evidently close to his heart:...

The Neoconservative Way of Thinking.(In Defense of the Bush Doctrine)(Book review)
January 1, 2008... In Defense of the Bush Doctrine by Robert G. Kaufman (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007). 251 pp. Some books are of the moment, slamming their bows straight on into contemporary political storms. Robert Kaufman's In Defense...

A Bizarre World of Shadows.(Law Without Nations? Why Constitutional Government Requires Sovereign States)(Book review)
January 1, 2008... Law Without Nations? Why Constitutional Government Requires Sovereign States, by Jeremy A. Rabkin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 350 pp. This is an ambitious book in which its author Jeremy Rabkin, a professor at the George...

The Allure of "Demonic Patriotism".(Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion)(Book review)
January 1, 2008... Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion, by David Gelernter (New York: Doubleday, 2007). 240 pp. Midway through a century battered by ideological warfare, C. S. Lewis thought it unnecessary to remind anyone that "love of one's...

Reason and faith: a Lenten reflection.(DOCUMENTATIONS)(Essay)
January 1, 2008... What is truth? This is a question that we seldom formulate in these terms, but that we often ask, when we ask ourselves if we really see what we see. Do we really see what we see? To verify, we try to touch. Truth needs a touchstone; it is...