In his current book, Montgomery, a Southerner, looks at two Southern writers—“two superb craftsmen as makers of fiction” who held their tether on the reality of human existence “by a feeding of intellectual wonder out of love.” Montgomery believes this to be the “first principle” of life and art. Examining these two writers’ vision provides a reality check on our unreal civilization.

[W]hatever kind of “creation” science can disclose, or be used to deny, through particle accelerators or elaborate mathematical models, it would be a scientific account of origins employing, as Smolin would say, principles drawn from within the universe. But such a conception of “creation” is not what philosophers and theologians mean when they speak of creation. The distance between minute fractions of a second after the Big Bang and creation is, in a sense, infinite. We do not get closer to creation by getting closer to the Big Bang. Since, as we shall see, creation is not really an event at all, it is not within the explanatory domain of cosmology; it is a subject for metaphysics and theology.

We are pleased to announce the coming Ciceronian Society Conference, at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Emmitsburg, MD. Scholars such as James Matthew Wilson, Jeff Taylor, David Walsh, Bruce Frohnen, Gerald Russello, Marshall DeRosa, Macon Boczek, Eugene Callahan and many more will be presenting thoughtful papers.

[T. S.] Eliot attempted to shape a philosophy for our times that would be richer and more true to the complexity of human needs than the free-market panaceas that have so often dominated the thinking of conservatives in government. He assigned a central place in his social thinking to high culture. He was a thorough traditionalist in his beliefs but an adventurous modernist in his art, holding artistic modernism and social traditionalism to be different facets of a common enterprise.

To the average reader the name of American novelist Willa Cather conjures up images of the prairies, of frontier Nebraska, and of the nineteenth-century Southwest, the harsh and austerely beautiful landscapes of some of her best known novels, My Antonia (1918), O Pioneers! (1913), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). But Cather was a cosmopolitan—widely traveled, knowledgeable of languages, passionate for high art and culture, sophisticated in taste, and acute to the nuances of manners, customs, furnishings, and dress.