First Things RSS Feed - Gerald J. Russello

Make Europe One Again

Fri, 04 Aug 2017 06:00:00 -0400

Messages from a Lost World: Europe on the Brink
by stefan zweig
pushkin press, 216 pages, $15.95

Catholicism Before and After 1963

Mon, 19 Jan 2015 23:04:00 -0500

In trying to understand the extraordinary changes the Catholic Church underwent in the middle of the twentieth century, I recently came across two illuminating novels. The first was the last novel in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor trilogy, Unconditional Surrender . The three novels loosely trace Waugh’s own military experience, darkly satirizing the military and more broadly modern society. Specifically, Waugh uses the war as a backdrop against which to lay out a different battle, this one between Catholicism and the modern world. The trilogy is widely regarded as Waugh’s masterwork.

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Unholy Holidays

Wed, 14 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0500

My commuter railway sent out the warning on a Friday afternoon in late December: No alcoholic beverages would be allowed on the trains this weekend. It was not a new temperance message or Bloombergian attempt to control our vices, just a safety announcement on the eve of SantaCon, an event in New York and many other cities, during which Kris Kringle-disguised revelers drink themselves silly through a weekend before Christmas.

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Leaving Brooklyn

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

My family had been in Brooklyn (or, as I will ever call it, God’s country) for over a century, refugees from the Lower East Side and a Jacob Riis–style life in early-twentieth-century New York. My father didn’t speak much about his youth in Bensonhurst, but what he did say was enough to fill that neighborhood—which we visited every Saturday for dinner at my grandparents’ house, with several dozen cousins and hangers-on—with myth.

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The Achievement of Jacques Barzun

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 00:01:00 -0400

One of the last of the generation of critics that included Edmund Wilson, Irving Howe, and Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, who died yesterday at the age of 104, developed a historically informed critical approach that, without descending into polemic, didn’t shy from defining or diagnosing Western culture. For Barzun, “the historian can only show, not prove; persuade, not convince.” To do that required both sureness of judgment as well as respect for the unpredictability and vagaries of history.

Like only a few others”his longtime Columbia colleague Trilling, for example, or the late Philip Rieff”Barzun inspired respect both as a critic beyond the academy and as a scholar within it. Though he came to be viewed as a conservative, in that he defended a series of values that were superior to others, and (more important) could be distinguished from them, Barzun evaded neat description. He certainly avoided the vilification poured upon others, such as Allan Bloom, when offering his critiques of popular culture and modern education, which he criticized for credential inflation and failure to maintain its proper object, the removal of ignorance, in favor of networking and “life skills.”

For example, Barzun helped invent the area of study now known as cultural history, which has been derided (often rightly) by conservatives as a hotbed of leftist agitprop, poor scholarship, and political correctness. This was a world away from Barzun’s view, which stressed the importance for the historian to use cultural materials to identify the “makers of culture” from the mass of humanity, a focus that has now largely been reversed in contemporary academia.

Given the struggles the West now faces before a resurgent Islam, it may be worth returning again to Barzun’s work. It was not that long ago when certain elites saw the West to be backward, if not hopelessly oppressive. Barzun did not share this opinion, though he was not shy about his assessment of the weaknesses of Western culture. In the magisterial From Dawn to Decadence , published in 2000, Barzun opens his study of the last half-millennium survey of Western culture as follows:

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Lacking Liberalism

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

The Democratic Soul: A Wilson Carey McWilliams Reader ?
by Wilson Carey Mcwilliams,? edited by Patrick J. Deneen and Susan J. Mcwilliams
?University Press of Kentucky, 440 pages, $40

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The Real Myth

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

The Myth of American Religious Freedom
by David Sehat
Oxford, 368 pages, $29.95

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Russell Kirk & Postmodern Conservatism

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

This week marks the ninetieth anniversary of the birth of Russell Kirk. Kirk, who died in 1994, is best remembered for his role in helping to create the postwar conservative movement in America. His groundbreaking work, The Conservative Mind , received national attention when it was published in 1953, upsetting the settled elite consensus (as articulated most famously by Lionel Trilling) that liberalism was the only intellectual tradition in America.

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Barzun at 100

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Remember the culture wars? In light of September 11 and the continuing War on Terror, it seems hard to believe that there was a time when Jesse Jackson chanting with Stanford undergraduates seemed like a real threat. The fight still rages on in some quarters, however, generating, as it did two decades ago, more heat than light. Writers like Christopher Hitchens have written that, once the war against terrorism here and abroad has been won, the world will enter a new era of liberal secularist progress, while others mutter darkly about “American fundamentalism.” Meanwhile, conservatives too have their divisions. Some, like David Brooks, see the future largely as a pleasant bourgeois paradise; others, such as Russell Kirk, were less optimistic about the benefits of technology and consumer culture.

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The Fall of Rome: Season Two

Mon, 09 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

What was perhaps the most pro-Christian show on television did not have a single Christian character in it¯and there was no way it could have. Rome , the hit series that has just completed its second (and for now final) season on the cable channel HBO, turned out to be a surprising affirmation of the Western religious tradition. While it is packed with sex and violence, its message¯intended or not¯is that the Roman world was desperate for Christianity.

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