Kirk’s conservatism was the conservatism of loss—not of rout or retreat, and certainly not despair, but one that treasures what is gone as well as what we have.
Dante’s La Vita Nuova is indisputably the work of a young man, a man whose passions (and poetic compositions) are still discovering the place they ought to have in the world. Thankfully, though, Dante’s ‘immature’ juvenilia is far greater and more penetrating a work than most poets can ever compose in the entire course of their lives.
Without the root of prayer, Europe is like a drowning museum and a place of cynical intrigue, but at prayer Europe is in the fight of her life—where darkness and collapse beckon the annihilation of identity. In such times, civilisations require saints.
Whether it is the threat of being canceled or anxious concerns that we’ll lose out in the meritocratic race for success, we’re more and more enslaved and less and less free. We’ve lost sight of the true sources of freedom, which come not from permission but from commitment.
