Dear  John,

I want to share with you some of the students' responses from the fall seminars, as I found two themes running throughout their comments:
 

• “I loved the opportunity to talk with faculty and spend significant time with them in an intimate setting.”
•  “The Kirk Center provided me the perfect space to explore great ideas, surrounded by intentional and loving peers. I couldn’t have asked for better.”
• “The ability to deep-dive in these readings, in a setting so strengthened by this tradition, was excellent.”
• “It was great being able to talk with my peers about excellent books and readings…Great conversations and good people made the trip excellent.”
• “It has been wonderful. I love it here.”
• “The Kirk Center is a beautiful and peaceful place and is refreshing to the mind.”
•  “Incredible—coming here always rewards a visitor with a nostalgic return to a true, small-town, personable welcome.”
•  “Never abandon the kindness of the place.”

As you may have noticed, the students clearly resonated with the importance of this historic place and highlighted how important the personal interactions are with respected scholars and like-minded students. With a setting and schedule conducive to good conversations, participants often form life-long associations and friendships. They connect with the experience of place and community, while studying the beliefs, practices, and institutions that shaped the American order. It is so heartening how they respond to being at the Kirk Center, exploring important texts with accomplished teachers.  This is always our calling, but it is an especially urgent one in our time.

In addition to the formal programs for students, the Center frequently hosts individual visits from journalists, professors, and readers of Russell’s books from a wide range of professions. They want to experience Russell’s library, where he wrote the books that articulated the conservative intellectual tradition in America, as well as the columns and lectures that advanced those ideas in practice. Some of them seek material on a specific topic that can only be found in the Kirk Center’s extensive archive.

This time of year it is appropriate to remember and affirm that the human person acts in a physical space, place, and time. Despite the claims of the so-called metaverse that it’s just “like being there,” we know that while technology can supplement communication, it is no replacement for personal experience. We are embodied souls for whom place and people are the reality forming our lives. Students know this, even as it is hard for them to find educational encounters that are, in effect, incarnational. That is a big part of the Kirk Center’s appeal to students of all ages and over time. Human nature is the most permanent of the Permanent Things.

“What is the soul?,” Russell asks in this brief meditation published on December 31, 1987 in National Review that might be appropriate for Advent.  Aware that belief in the existence of the soul has declined, he offers descriptions drawn from philosophy, theology, and his own personal experience.

As the year draws to a close, we ask for your support to keep the Russell Kirk Center open and operating for student seminars, fellows, and the interested public—to fortify them in body, mind, and soul.

Thank you for being part of the Kirk Center’s mission and community.

Best,

Annette Y. Kirk, President
The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal