Serve to Conserve? Yes We Can!

by Julie Robison

Upon the prompting of Stephen Masty, I'd like to explore "what still really exists in America that is worth conserving and what may be, quite frankly, lost to all but memory."

Reid Buckley has declared that he cannot love our country because we are vile. Morally corrupt and bankrupt, we've even given Pat Buchanan license to doubt. "What is it now that conservatives must conserve?" he asked.

The Declaration of Independence offers a few good suggestions -- life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness -- and, if I may add onto the list: the preservation of the English language.

Life

Life, for one, seems a given right. Life is the highest good-- we all have life in common, though we may live out our own lives differently. Suicidal tendencies aside, most people would argue for the preservation of their life.

If a gun was placed against your head, would you pull the trigger or try to get out of harm's way? Now, what if the gun was placed against another person's head? A good person, who pays taxes and goes to Church; lives in the community and does good. Would you want to save that person? How about a bad person? A bad person is one who disregards other people's lives, has wrecked havoc upon their community and has no regards for good, unless it is good for them.

If you would only save the good person, you are a bad person too.

Some people need a gun at their head every second; do you?

It seems to me that Americans no longer know which way is up and which way is down. As a result, they are milling about life, thinking deeply on issues before growing tired and throwing up one's hands to accepted despair. Change is a farce. Our sacred cows are sinners. Republicans are pansies and Democrats are, well, Democrats. The more things change the more they stay the same, eh?

The value of human life is a constant. In the face of evil, we cannot make exceptions. The Declaration does not read that we have a right to a quality of life; it says we all have a right to life.

In one of my favorite defenses against abortion, the Humble Libertarian writes that "nothing is created at birth." That is, when people do not know whether or not a fetus is a person, remember that we're all developing. A toddler is not an adult. A child is not a teenager. A senior citizen is not less worthy of good healthcare because they are closing in on face time with the Lord.

Rusell Kirk and Pope John Paul II on Redemption of Man: Part 2

By John Hittinger

(This is part two of this previous post by the same title.)

Pope John Paul II and Russell Kirk defended freedom within the limits of truth and its authentic or right use. They knew it was crucial to distinguish license and liberty. But they have different approaches to truth.

An important passage in Redemptor hominis is this one: "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." These words contain both a fundamental requirement and a warning: the requirement of an honest relationship with regard to truth as a condition for authentic freedom, and the warning to avoid every kind of illusory freedom, every superficial unilateral freedom, every freedom that fails to enter into the whole truth about man and the world" §12

John Paul is unabashed in reference to the sayings of Jesus Christ and he has a rich notion of revelation and magisterium standing behind his love of truth. This is appropriate of course for the supreme pontiff. But he also has a vigorous notion of reason as a spiritual capacity for natural knowledge of God and moral law. So in Fides et ratio he says: "This is why I make this strong and insistent appeal—not, I trust, untimely—that faith and philosophy recover the profound unity which allows them to stand in harmony with their nature without compromising their mutual autonomy. The parrhesia of faith must be matched by the boldness of reason." §48 The boldness of reason is not to be found in Kirk, nor is the parrhesia of faith as such.

Russell Kirk and Pope John Paul II on the Redemption of Man

by John Hittinger

(Ed.: This essay is from John's very nice site Reflections on the Philosopher Pope.)

Russell Kirk by Sam Torode (see samtorode@tds.net)

Russell Kirk (1918-1994) was a social critic whose works best defined conservatism in the United States for decades (not that his ideas were embraced or followed by any party or platform). But his case for an imaginative conservatism in books such as The Conservative Mind, Prospects for Conservatives and the Conservative Reader received a wide readership and the comprehensiveness of his accounts and the diffuse range of what is "conservative" continue to attract readers and provoke discussion. A disciple of Edmund Burke, a lover of Scottish history and culture, a devoted family man, beloved teacher, and a Roman Catholic convert -- Russell Kirk cut an eccentric and often misunderstood figure in the world of contemporary politics and academia. My brother and I had the pleasure of meeting him at his home in Mecosta Michigan in 1973 or 74 during a seminar for college students. In Mecosta there is now a Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal directed by his wife Annette Kirk. Yesterday I had the privilege of attending a seminar at the Center for the American Idea on Kirk's Prospects for Conservatives, a seminar run by Dr Bradley Birzer, holder of the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in History and Director of the American Studies Program at Hillsdale College, Michigan.

As we discussed this work of Russell Kirk, written in 1954, revised in 1962 and 1988, I was very struck by similarities between the thought of Kirk and some keys themes in the thought of Pope John Paul II, who surely develops his own style of imaginative conservatism for the world at large through, of all things, the documents of Vatican II, his philosophical studies in Thomism and phenomenology, and Polish literary and religious culture. Kirk and Wojtyla both came of intellectual age in the 1950s, Wojtyla in his country oppressed by communism, and Kirk in the United States, triumphant in its military and economic power. Wojtyla struck his blow for freedom against the might of the Soviet; but Kirk, in the midst of an emerging and expansive economic superpower, is an early critic of the consumerist mentality that John Paul II would later identify as the chief mischief of the West. He struck a blow for integrity and humanity against the dumb Leviathan of liberalism. He begins to articulate the principles of a "civilization of love" also envisioned by the Archbishop of Krakow in the midst of the worker's paradise. I can but draw a few similarities in this blog.

First and foremost Kirk and Wojtyla, like Dante, are disciples of love. We have written a blog or two on John Paul's Redemptor hominis in which he advocates for human self-discovery in love, in Christ. "Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it." §10 Christ reveals man to man himself through his love and his sacrifice on the cross.

Read the complete essay.

Two Years After the Death of Solzhenitsyn

By Brad Birzer

“Shut your eyes, reader. Do you hear the thundering of wheels? Those are the Stolypin cars rolling on and on. Those are the red cows rolling. Every minute of the day. And every day of the year. And you can hear the water gurgling—those are prisoners’ barges moving on and on. And the motors of the Black Marias roar. They are arresting someone all the time, cramming him in somewhere, moving him about. And what is that hum you hear? The overcrowded cells of the transit prisons. And that cry? The complaints of those who have been plundered, raped, beaten to with an inch of their lives. We have reviewed and considered all the methods of delivering prisoners, and we have found that they are all. . . worse. We have examined the transit prisons, but we have not found any that were good. And even the last human hope that there is something better ahead, that it will be better in camp, is a false hope. In camp it will be . . . worse.”—End of Volume 1 of the Gulag.

A week ago today we passed the second anniversary of the death of the Russian prophet, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, one of the truly great men of our day.

Though faced with severe reprisals from the state, the betrayal of his first wife to the Soviet government, and eventual exile from his beloved though tortured homeland, he recorded the tyranny perpetuated by the Soviet ideologues in a number of deeply meaningful works, including, most famously, The Gulag Archipelago. Some of this massive work he wrote on scraps of paper, some he memorized on the rosary beads given to him by Catholic prisoners.