Free Republic

snip To understand these words "civilization" and "culture," the best book to read is T. S. Eliot's slim volume Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1948). Once upon a time I commended that book to President Richard Nixon, in a private discussion of modern disorders, as the one book which he ought to read for guidance in his high office. Man is the only creature possessing culture, as distinguished from instinct; and if culture is effaced, so is the distinction between man and the brutes that perish. "Art is man's nature," in Edmund Burke's phrase; and if the human arts,...

Because we can frequently find answers to present problems in the past, most established colleges and universities actively discourage the genuine study of history, especially since they themselves have created a crisis that cries for a solution. “We have succeeded in sending a great many people to college and university,” legendary scholar Russell Kirk noted more than a quarter century ago. “We have not succeeded in educating most of them.” Dr. W. Wesley McDonald, himself a political science professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, shows us how much we can still learn from the sage of Mecosta, Michigan in Russell...