Russell Kirk

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Watering A Nation’s Roots September 18, 2024

In 1967, Pepperdine College commissioned the historian and conservative man of letters Russell Kirk to write a history textbook for the southern California Christian college. The result, seven years later, was a book entitled The Roots of American Or...

The Babbitt School of Conservatism September 10, 2024

In the 2020s, “conservatism” sounds passé, and its failure is taken for granted. A new right finds inspiration less in Russell Kirk or Edmund Burke than in Carl Schmitt, and the history of the conservative movement up to 2016 seems largely irrelevant...

Russell Kirk’s Moral Imagination May 16, 2024

The publication of Camilo Peralta’s The Wizard of Mecosta: Russell Kirk, Gothic Fiction, and the Moral Imagination by Vernon Press is an exciting development. Peralta is part of a rising generation of scholars and completed his doctoral work at Faulk...

Remembering Russell Kirk, 30 Years Later May 01, 2024

Thirty years ago today, Russell Amos Kirk died. Even though I was born two years after his passing, I have felt Dr. Kirk’s influence my whole adult life. I first read him as a student at Hillsdale College, where he had once taught. In The Conservativ...

Russell Kirk’s Gothic Ghost April 29, 2024

Thirty years after his death on April 29, 1994, Russell Kirk haunts America’s conservatives—because conservatism itself is a ghost. It appears amid ruins, glimpsed at twilight or felt at midnight even by those who in daylight think of nothing but pre...