“The Declaration of Independence” by Bradley Birzer

I was on a multi-day business trip to Washington, D.C. I had a free afternoon, so I walked from the hotel to the National Gallery on the Mall. And then, for reason or reasons unknown, I walked across the street to the National Archives. And there it was – the original Declaration of Independence. 

 

Drafted mostly if not entirely by Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration is to America what the Magna Carta is to England. The statement of beliefs. The citation of grievances against an unjust ruler (also an English king, no less). The signatures.  

As Bradley Birzer points out in The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty, the Declaration is all these things. And it is more. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Prudence vs. Fanaticism: On the American & French Revolutions – Russell Kirk at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

The art of translation: On Les Fleurs du mal, by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Richard Howard – David Paul at The New Criterion.

 

Short Story, Deep Treasures: Biblical Allusion in “Gift of the Magi” – John Savoie at Literary Matters.

Some Monday Readings

“Recuerdo” by Edna St. Vincent Millay – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern. 

The Tragedy and Triumph of The Killing Fields – Bradley Birzer at Law & Liberty.

 

Turbulence After the Trump Verdict – Charles Lipson at The Spectator.

 

What Lowry saw in the sea – William Cook at The Critic Magazine on the philosophical side of the British painter.

 

How Hadrian’s Wall is revealing a hidden side of Roman history – Julia Buckey, CNN.

 

A Confederate Buried at Mount Vernon? – Evan Portman at Emerging Civil War.

 

AI, Poetry, and Prayer – Dwight Longenecker at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Comps and Circumstance – Lincoln Michel at Counter Craft.

 

Daniel Defoe: The first futurist – Jeremy Black at The Critic Magazine.

 

London Maps in Books – A London Inheritance.

 

Photograph: Hadrian’s Wall near Waltown Crags,by Ray Harrington via Unsplash. Used with permission.

 

"Mythic Realms" by Bradley Birzer

Hillsdale College history professor Bradley Birzer is a co-founder of The Imaginative Conservative website, which I read daily and have often featured in my weekly Saturday Good Reads. I also read and reviewed his Beyond Tenebrae: Christian Humanism in the Twilight of the West.  

 What I didn’t know was how closely his literary influences (and reading) tracked with my own until I read his newest work, Mythic Realms: The Moral Imagination in Literature & Film. It was almost like reading a list – a long list – of books and writers that I had read myself.

 

Ray Bradbury and his The Illustrated Man and The October Country, and his wonderful Something Wicked This Way Comes. Tolkien. George Orwell. Leon Uris and his Mila 18 and Armageddon. Sherlock Holmes. Willa Cather. A biography series on famous Americans (where I, too, first learned about Lewis and Clark). Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. Pulp fiction. Science fiction writer Arthur Clarke (whose Childhood’s End is one of the best novels of the 20^th century) (in my own opinion). 

 

But the influences don’t story there. His childhood Mecca was the Hutchinson, Kansas, Public Library, 2.4 miles from his home and where his mother allowed him to ride his bike. Mine was the Kenner, Louisiana, Public Library, about 1.5 miles from my home on one of the busiest highways in the New Orleans area at the time and less than a mile from the airport. My mother allowed me to ride my bike there; I had a library card in first grade (just like Birzer). 

 

Bradley Birzer

Mythic Realms is a collection of articles, essays, lectures, and book and film reviews Birzer has written over the years and which have appeared in a variety of publications and venues. While our literary influences are remarkably similar, we diverge on most of the films and television series he covers. That’s likely a reflection of the roughly 15 years difference in our ages. Except for the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Birzer’s cinematic influences and interests reflect the late 1970s, 1980s, and later. Mine reflect the 1960s, early 1970s (like Chinatown) and, at the latest, Chariots of Fire. My television preferences tend to the British productions.

 

Birzer writes with insight and verve. Even in short reviews, he sees things that most of us would miss, like finding national greatness in Cather’s O Pioneers! Or the significant contributions that pulp fiction have made to American literature, and how deeply conservative the tradition of Romanticism actually is. 

 

Birzer holds the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies and is a professor of history at Hillsdale College in Michigan. He received a B.A. degree from the University of Notre Dame and his Ph.D. degree from Indiana University. He serves on the boards of the Free Enterprise Institute and the Center for Cultural Renewal and is a fellow or scholar with the Foundation for Economic Education, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, The McDonnell Center, and the Center for Economic Personalism. His books include In Defense of Andrew Jackson, Russell Kirk: American Conservative, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth, Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson, American Cicero: The Life of Charles Caroll, Neal Peart: Cultural (Re)Percussions, and Beyond Tenebrae: Christian Humanism in the Twilight of the West. 

 

I found myself over and over again in Mythic Realms. I discovered the influence of popular culture. I remembered my own years-long love affair with science fiction. And Birzer reminds us of just how much we share a culture and its films and literature, and why that’s important.  

 

Related:

 

My review of Beyond Tenebrae by Bradley Birzer. 

"Beyond Tenebrae" by Bradley Birzer

It’s a rare thing, but every so often you find a book that can be defined outside its pre-supposed genre. Beyond Tenebrae: Christian Humanism in the Twilight of the West by Bradley Birzer is such a book.

It’s partially a discussion of Christian humanism – what it is, where it comes from, and what it is about it that conservatives believe they need to “conserve.” It’s partially a memoir – about the people, writers, and thinkers who influenced Birzer. It’s an introduction to some of the well-known and not-so-well-known lights of Christian humanism. It’s a list of suggested reading, with so many books listed and cited that it might take most of us a year to get through. 

It’s a book whose parts are greater than the whole, and a book whose whole is greater than the parts. 

It begins, appropriately enough, with the idea of Tenebrae, the period of worship that begins on the afternoon of Good Friday. I’ve been to one Tenebrae service at my church, and it ends with lit candles extinguished one by one until the church is left in darkness and the congregation departs in silence. It is a reminder of what happened after the crucifixion of Christ, after the earthquake, the darkened sky, and the tearing of the temple curtain, that period of darkness and mourning before the light of the resurrection. 

Birzer suggests that Tenebrae is what Western culture is currently experiencing, a twilight time when what is good, true, and beautiful is being jettisoned for what is trendy and politically correct in government, the media, and academia. He doesn’t offer a step-by-step prescription to counter this; instead, he tells the story of Christian humanism and some of its more contemporary practitioners.

Bradley Birzer

Initial chapters focus on key elements of Christian humanism, the conservative mind, Edmund Burke and Alexis de Toqueville, and many of Birzer’s favorite writers, including J.R.R. Tolkien. Part II of the book provides shorter vignettes of the people who might called “the lights” of 20^th and 21^st century Christian humanism to counter the growing darkness.

Some of these lights are well-known: Willa Cather, Tolkien and the Inklings, Flannery O’Connor, Shirley Jackson, Russell Kirk, Ray Bradbury, Ronald Reagan, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Some deserve to be better known: Clyde Kilby, Sister Madeleva Wolff, Paul Elmer More, Chsristipher Dawson, Eric Voegelin, and Ralph McInerny. One that was a personal surprise and delight was author Walter Miller; I read his A Canticle for Leibowitz in high school and loved it.

Birzer is a professor of history and the Russell Kirk Chair of American Studies at Hillsdale College. He received his B.A. degree from Notre Dame University in 1990 and his Ph.D. degree from Indiana University in 1998. He was a co-founder of The Imaginative Conservative site and publication in 2010. He is the author of numerous works in history and literature, including J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth (2003), Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson (2007), American Cicero: Charles Carroll of Carrollton (2010), Russell Kirk: American, Conservative (2015), and Neil Peart: Cultural (Re)Percussions (2015).

Beyond Tenebrae is a solid introduction to Christian humanism and its writers, adherents, and proponents. It’s also a book about hope, that no matter how dark the culture may become, there will always be a light.