Modern Age articles from March 2008

Modern Age archives from March 2008

Conservatism and the challenge of the "Modern Age".(Editorial)
March 22, 2008... This issue of Modern Age begins with an intense focus on the concept of place, which is a crucial element in any truly conservative consideration of the moral and cultural wellbeing of society. Mark Malvasi reflects upon the enduring enigma of...

The Lasting South? A reconsideration after fifty years.(Essay)
March 22, 2008... From the perspective of the twenty-first century, the 1950s seem to many Americans a decade of affluence, security, optimism, and contentment set apart from the uncertain and discordant years that preceded and followed them, an interlude when...

A lesson in hermeneutics.(Poem)(Brief article)
March 22, 2008... In Kenya, vervet monkeys take the ground Until a sentry gives a chattering bark, Which in the simple vervet lexicon Means snake, and connotes evil, death and dark. Or else the sentry makes a guttural sound That translates in our own...

Adalbert Stifter and the "Biedermeier" imagination.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... An historian once suggested that the continued availability of classic works of literature in the Soviet Union helped victims of the communist "experiment" retain their grip on sanity by reminding them what normal human life and society were...

Taking back the cosmopolis.(A DEBATE ON LOCALISM & COSMOPOLITANISM)(Essay)
March 22, 2008... In the early years of the new century, an ideological fault line cuts across the globe. It does not divide some regions of the world from others, as those who talk of a "clash of civilizations" would have us believe. Instead, it recurs within...

My home in the cosmopolitan anti-liberal menagerie.(A DEBATE ON LOCALISM & COSMOPOLITANISM)(Essay)
March 22, 2008... The central thesis of Adam Webb's essay is that anti-liberal traditions need not be parochial, that cosmopolitans can find themselves at home in the anti-liberal menagerie--and indeed, that for anti-liberalism to be successful, it needs to...

Cosmopolitanism with Real Roots.(A DEBATE ON LOCALISM & COSMOPOLITANISM)(Essay)
March 22, 2008... Adam Webb has the right enemies. He worries that elite culture is in the grips of a cosmopolitan sentiment that makes war on tradition. We are increasingly dominated by atomistic universalists (to use his telling twist on C. B. Macpherson's...

Loving the world.(Essay)
March 22, 2008... "You can't be universal without being provincial, can you?" --ROBERT FROST It seems to me that all the foregoing discussions of possible "cosmopolitanisms" have privileged the second half of that term over the first, offering us one...

Vaux-le-vicomte.(Poem)(Brief article)
March 22, 2008... This vast estate, a parvenu's grand dream, was purchased with the veins of revenue that Fouquet syphoned by a clever scheme from royal taxes, as his royal due. Le Notre's gardens, noble in design prolonged the classic forms of the...

The energy crisis.(Essay)
March 22, 2008... The world demand for energy is rapidly increasing. We need energy to warm our homes, to cook our meals, to travel and communicate, and to power our factories. The amount of energy available to us determines not only our standard of living, but...

The young Stephen Tonsor: teacher, historicist, and conservative.(Essay)
March 22, 2008... "I am a historian; I am a patient man; the truth will out."--Stephen Tonsor I have been grateful to Stephen Tonsor since the first day I walked into his classroom fifty years ago. (1) It was fall semester, 1958, at the University of...

A prayer for Livia Grace at Christmas.(Poem)(Brief article)
March 22, 2008... There's little room left in this house for poetry. Or in this world for any lasting language. The managers and sales reps in the office Who've ticketed their holidays are childless, And looking toward five days of sun and liquor. They...

Office of good intentions.(Poem)(Brief article)
March 22, 2008... In the office of good intentions, I maintain a small desk In a dusty corner where paper scraps and clips are strewn (Some might say artfully) waiting a firm purpose to proceed with one choice item from a slate of worthy candidates. As...

The redemption of the Clerks.(Imagining Our Time: Recollections and Reflections on American Writing)(Book review)
March 22, 2008... Imagining Our Time: Recollections and Reflections on American Writing by Lewis P- Simpson (Baron Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007). xv + 264 pp. The story of the original series of the Southern Review has been told often and...

Not the West, but Europe.(Europe East and West )(Book review)
March 22, 2008... Europe East and West by Norman Davies (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006). 560 pp. Stanford is notorious as the university that killed off "Western Culture," but perhaps that reputation is undeserved. In the late 1980s, Stanford did indeed scrap...

Never a man for causes.(George Kennan: A Study in Character)(Book review)
March 22, 2008... George Kennan: A Study in Character by John Lukacs (Yale University Press, 2007). 224 pp. For a few years, from 1946 to 1949, George Frost Kennan was at the center of world events. He also lived long and wrote much, and he remains a puzzle...

Wagner's ambiguities.(Richard Wagner and the Jews)(Book review)
March 22, 2008... Richard Wagner and the Jews, by Milton E. Brener (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Co., 2005). 343 pp. Acentury and a quarter after Richard Wagner's death, the observation of Wagner scholar Bryan Magee remains pertinent: "there are...

A founder of nothing.(Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr)(Book review)
March 22, 2008... Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr by Nancy Isenberg (New York: Viking, 2007). xx + 540 pp. Aaron Burr is not by any definition I know of a "founder" of anything. He did not help to author a state or federal constitution, nor did he...

Pro haereses.(The New Inquisitions: Heretic Hunting and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Totalitarianism)(Book review)
March 22, 2008... The New Inquisitions: Heretic Hunting and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Totalitarianism, by Arthur Versluis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). xii + 190 pp. "Had Gnosticism become the dominant model in early Christianity,...

Rene Girard's accusation: intellectuals are the castrators of meaning: "after language, man is becoming deconstructed": eugenics is a form of human sacrifice: "sexuality is the problem, not the solution": the ruthless ideas of a great thinker.(DOCUMENTATION)(Interview)(Reprint)
March 22, 2008... Despite being 84 years of age, Rene Girard has lost none of his nerve as a definitively radical thinker. He is working on a new essay about Karl von Clausewitz. The author of great contemporary works such as Violence and the Sacred and The...