ISI Faculty Resource Center

For those interested, I have created two links resource pages:

http://ghostly-kirk.weebly.com/, a page dedicated to the ghostly fiction of Russell Kirk, and

http://mel-bradford.weebly.com/, a page dedicated to the life and work of Mel Bradford.

Neither page is meant to be exhaustive, but they are meant to assist interested searchers by gathering many scattered links into two convenient locations. Though the pages presently have a lot of links on them, they are always works in progress, and will continue to grow in length.

Thank you,
Jeffrey Dennis Pearce

I would like to propose two reasons that conservatives ought to take an interest in verse, one historical and the other ethical.  Following them, I should like to offer as a teaching resource a guide to verisification (prosody) that the reader may find of interest as a means of understanding this seldom taught craft and that the professor of good will is welcome to use as a booklet to distribute to students.

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As a result of common pronouncements about the end of books and my own love of the same, I have been thinking about the future of books and libraries.  I offer the following as some optimistic opinions about the future of books, libraries, and bibliophilism.

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When, what, and how to study? In what spirit? How, and how much, to sow the seeds of reading and memory to reap a fruitful harvest of creative production?  How to strike the right balance between life qua intellectual and life qua human being?

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If Herzog isn't required reading for all of us late modern academics, I don't know what is.

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In his new book, The Line Through the Heart, Budziszewski attempts to show us how the natural law continues to illuminate the ethical and political dimensions of human existence today despite our best efforts to ignore it.

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Most academics spend quite a bit of time (and nervousness) arranging for talks, traveling to them, presenting, listening to presentations, and incorporating comments.

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Following Professor Gordon Wood's recent lecture at the ISI Summer Institute, one of my new friends and fellow participants, a non-historian, posed an interesting question to me and several other Early American historians then present.  "So," my colleague began, "how does one become Gordon Wood?"  Without altering the substance of my friend's query, and for the benefit of an interdisciplinary audience, I might re-frame and expand the question as follows: Why do some historians of the American Revolution and Early Republic consider Gordon Wood the finest practitioner of their craft, certainly of the last fifty years and perhaps of all time, and how might conservative specialists and non-specialists alike profit from Wood's insights?

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This is awfully insulting to you historians, but a little funny.  Does it sound right to you?

I was there to speak about my book on the history of financial theory, but ended up mainly engaged in a long discussion with the 30 or so historians (and a smattering of scholars from other humanities disciplines) on hand about why economists had gained so much influence over the past half-century and historians had lost so much.

One answer I offered was that economists had managed a remarkable balancing act between making the guts of their work totally incomprehensible—and thus forbiddingly impressive—to the outside world while continuing to offer reasonably straightforward conclusions. ... An academic history paper, on the other hand, is often an uninterrupted cascade of semi-comprehensible jargon that neither impresses a lay reader nor offers any clear conclusions.

This is from a Chronicle article on the never-ending sport of skewering economics - this one is about economists' responses. 

Many of us live much, perhaps most, of our intellectual life on blogs. I don’t condemn this, of course, for the irony and hypocrisy of such a condemnation would be off the charts. Yet, the kind of intellectual habits that we are forming and the quality of intellectual fare of which we are partaking—the overall character of the intellectual life we are living—in and by long-term, virtual inhabitation in blog culture is something we vitally (literally) need to consider, even if such consideration takes place right smack in blog country.

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