Modern Age articles from September 2005

Modern Age archives from September 2005

The future of conservatism.
September 22, 2005... A SURVEY OF THE PRESENT American political scene provides, I believe, the background and point of departure for examining more permanent and basic aspects of American institutions and politics that pose enormous obstacles to the realization of...

Rediscovering the heroic conservatism of Richard M. Weaver [Part One].
September 22, 2005... POST-WAR AMERICA, and indeed the post-war world as a whole, witnessed one of the most prolific periods of social and political philosophy since the Enlightenment. Dramatic social, political, and economic change transformed a generation and...

The false dilemma of modernity.
September 22, 2005... WE MODERNS FACE A DILEMMA. On the one hand stands the grandeur of enlightenment rationalism, claiming that humans are capable of achieving certain knowledge of universal truths by virtue of the rational minds with which we are endowed. On the...

Flannery O'Connor's witness to the gospel of life.
September 22, 2005... MORE THAN FORTY WORKS have been devoted to Flannery O'Connor's life and art--I myself having recently contributed to this latest weariness in the making of many books on O'Connor. Yet we have not yet begun to fathom the depth of her literary...

Complaint of the jay.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... The jay in blue and black majesty Finds much to complain about. But bears up Anyway, in fact, he's tough, And when the others head south for winter, You may see him finding his nourishment Under the firs where the snow failed to reach,...

On Christopher Lasch.(RECONSIDERATION)(Biography)
September 22, 2005... HAD NATURE TAKEN a more typical course, Christopher Lasch would still be with us. Only sixty-one years old when on Valentine's Day, 1994, he succumbed to cancer in his Pittsford, New York, home, Lasch died while still in his intellectual prime....

The achievement of Russell Kirk.(Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology)(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology, by W. Wesley McDonald, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. xiv + 243 pp. ON ONE OCCASION many years ago, historian Garry Wills was described in The New York Times Book Review as "cheerfully...

An Emersonian bloom.(The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost)(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost, selected and with Commentary by Harold Bloom, New York: HarperCollins, 2004. 972 pp. HAROLD BLOOM is to be congratulated for his courage in speaking up for literary...

Analyzing the literary image.(Christ and Apollo)(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Christ and Apollo, by William Lynch, S.J., Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2004. 275 pp. CHRIST AND APOLLO IS A provocative theoretical treatise on literary criticism boldly enlisting perennial Catholic theology and philosophy. It first...

A superfluous woman.(The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America)(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America, by Stephen Cox, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2004. x + 418 pp. ISABEL PATERSON, the subject of this engaging new biography by Stephen Cox, is best known--to the...

A new Camus?(Icarus Fallen: The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World)(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Icarus Fallen: The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World, by Chantal Delsol, Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2003. 350 pp. FOR GENERATIONS, American intellectuals have had reason to assume that their European counterparts--especially in...

What is the "West"?(COMMENTS)(Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe: Toward the Revival of Higher Education)
September 22, 2005... IN THE AFTERMATH of 9/11, the term "civilized nations" suddenly began to be widely used. Of course, everyone had always known that England and France are civilized and that Syria and Rwanda-Burundi are not. I sense that it was not polite to...

Erasmus.(Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam)
September 22, 2005... THERE ARE GREAT FIGURES in history we delight in reading about but might not enjoy as houseguests. One exception about whom Henrik Van Loon wrote about so charmingly in his Lives, is Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536). Of all the...

Stefan Zweig and Franz Kafka: a study in contrast.
September 22, 2005... STEFAN ZWEIG (1881-1942) and Franz Kafka (1883-1924) could have been expected to have much in common and to belong to the same category in modern literature. Born only two years apart, they belong to the same epoch. Although Zweig was born in...

In the agrarian conservative tradition.(Island Farm)(Book review)
September 22, 2005... ARTHUR VERSLUIS'S Island Farm (2000) is an exemplary piece of writing, a personal memoir of his life on a generational family farm near Grand Rapids, Michigan. It also tenders probing reflections on the agrarian conservative tradition as it,...

In memoriam: John F. Lulves (1940-2005).(Intercollegiate Studies Institute)(Obituary)
September 22, 2005... JOHN LULVES was a joy to be with from the first time I met him. He exuded warmth and likeableness when he applied for the position of ISI's Midwest Director forty years ago. Later, I would realize that his warmth and likeableness were not an...