Help Us Finish 2022 Strong
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Dear
John,
As we approach the end of the year, I'd like to take a moment to share just a few of the many encouraging signs of the ongoing importance of the Kirk Center’s mission. It has been a wonderful experience guiding the Russell Kirk Center this first full year in my new position. I spent almost fourteen weeks traveling to meet donors, organizational leaders, top scholars, and otherwise representing the Kirk Center at a range of events sponsored by mission-friendly groups. The reception to the Kirk Center program has been enthusiastic and promising.
As we know all too well, educating students and teachers in the moral and political principles of America and the West is an urgent task in our time. Below are three positive notes to give you an idea of the range and quality of our cultural mission–from a respected writer that gives voice to our work, a student participant in a Kirk Center seminar, and some wonderful news from one of our recent residential Wilbur Fellows.
** Roger Kimball Considers Russell Kirk in American Greatness
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The first is by one of America’s premier imaginative conservatives, Roger Kimball. As you may know, Roger edits the indispensable cultural quarterly, The New Criterion. This fall, a new edition of a book I have long had on my short shelf of important conservative books was published, The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia ([link removed]) (St. Augustine’s Press). In the preface to the second and paperback edition, Roger at some length considers Russell Kirk as a “a thinker who coaxed us to enlarge, not diminish, the existential furniture of our world.” I encourage you to read his four-page excerpt published in American Greatness ([link removed]) . Elegantly written and evocative, it recalls us to the best of conservatism—a principal aim of the Kirk Center
Retreat to Piety Hill
The second is a charming article published in National Review by a recent participant at a Kirk Center conference in partnership with The Fund for American Studies. If you ever wondered what it was like to participate in a Kirk Center program, this article captures it. I am grateful to Bobby Miller at National Review for writing it. Please take a read on our website ([link removed]) , and come visit us!
Recent Wilbur Fellow Awarded Marshall Fellowship
The third is to relate some terrific news we received this week: recent Wilbur Fellow and Yale senior, Alex Hu, was awarded a prestigious Marshall Fellowship, which funds up to three years of graduate study in the United Kingdom for Americans poised to become leaders in their fields. As a Marshall Scholar, Alex plans to study the geopolitics of the internet at King’s College London through MA programs in War Studies and Geopolitics, Resources, and Territory. He ultimately hopes to work in Washington, D.C., as a strategic planner for the Indo-Pacific.
Currently, Alex is writing his senior thesis on the history of Yale's Humanities Program and the evolution of the undergraduate curriculum. He completed some of this research as a Wilbur Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center in the summer of 2021, where he studied Russell Kirk's philosophy of education in comparison with some contemporary progressive educationists.
** How to Support the Kirk Center
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The Kirk Center is preparing to build on its advances this year and expand its programs and resources to more effectively educate the rising generation in those Permanent Things championed by our touchstone, Russell Kirk. I look forward to sharing with you some exciting developments at every level of the Kirk Center in 2023.
In the meantime, we are working to close a $30,000 gap in our operations as we move toward the end of what was necessarily an ambitious fiscal year. I realize that you are receiving many of these kinds of letters at this time of year. I am personally asking you to consider helping us close that gap ([link removed]) –no intermediate direct mail firms necessary on our behalf. We are all original. When you get a note from me, it is from me.
Know, then, how grateful I am for your support of the Kirk Center. I realize that economic times are not favorable. If you are able, then, I ask that you join me as a co-conspirator in our shared commitment to renewing American culture. A gift of any amount is significant to the Kirk Center and will help us to end 2022 in the black.
As always, I look forward to partnering with you as together we remember and defend the Permanent Things. For as Roger Kimball writes, quoting the British writer John Buchan in his aforementioned book: “The world must remain an oyster for youth to open.” Amen to that.
Christmastide blessing to you and yours,
Jeffrey O. Nelson, Ph.D.
Executive Director & CEO
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“A widespread longing for membership in a true family is more apparent nowadays than it was half a century ago. Spiritual isolation and a sterile ‘autonomy’ do not satisfy the deep longings of human nature; while the modern state manifestly grows less and less effectual in its struggle to restrain the violent, educate the young, cheer the old and sick, or even to assure sustenance. For those offices, as for love and common lodging, once more we begin to look to ‘the little platoon we belong to in society.’”
--From this month’s Classic Kirk essay, Conservatives and the Family. ([link removed]) [link removed]
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