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Timeless Moments
What happens to us after death is one of the oldest and most difficult questions. Even the standard response of many Christians, that we go to either Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory, can only partly satisfy, because while we experience the passing of time in a linear manner, those places are said to exist completely outside of time. How, then, can it make sense to speak of “going” to Heaven or Hell after death? Must we not always and forever be there—even during our lifetimes? Russell Kirk, a Catholic historian from Michigan who often speculated about the afterlife in his fiction and non-fiction, developed the idea of “timeless moments” to explain how our mortal lives could be placed within the context of an immortal afterlife. Such moments represent a fusion of the human and divine, in which past, present, and future come together. Timeless moments both help to determine whether we end up in Heaven or Hell and constitute our experience of those places. This paper applies Kirk’s framework to the depictions of Purgatory and Hell in certain novels by Charles Williams and Stephen King. All three authors characterize the afterlife as a state of mind that is nevertheless closely associated with specific physical locations where the living and dead work out their salvation or suffer damnation at one and the same time. The timeless nature of Hell, finally, ensures that it is never too late to try to escape from it and seek redemption.
Journal Article
Delight in Horror
Charles Williams has always been one of the more overlooked members of the Inklings, and the continued neglect of his poetry and \"supernatural thrillers\" suggests that he is not likely to experience a dramatic increase in popularity anytime soon. Similarly, Russell Kirk is an American historian who will always be better known for writing The Conservative Mind in 1953 than for any of the dozens of short stories and novels he wrote, many of which deal with ghostly or supernatural themes. In fact, Kirk acknowledged Williams to be an important influence on his fiction; this influence is perhaps most evident in Kirk's final novel, 1979's Lord of the Hollow Dark.
Journal Article
The postmodern imagination of Russell Kirk
Author of The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk (1918-1994) was a principal architect of the American intellectual conservative movement. This book takes a closer look at his works on such subjects as law, history, economics, and statesmanship to introduce a new generation of readers to the depth and range of his thought. By stressing the importance of Kirk's perception of imagination, Gerald J. Russello offers a new approach to understanding him, showing not only that Kirk laid the groundwork for the \"new conservatism\" of the 1950s and '60s, but also that his work evolved into a sophisticated critique of modernity paralleled in the work of some postmodern critics of liberalism. Russello has forged a lively and provocative work that will be a valuable resource for anyone seeking to understand Kirk or conservative thought.
eBook
The Problem with Conservative Art: A Critique of Russell Kirk’s Metaphysical Conservatism
In this paper I measure the progressive potentiality of art against Russell Kirk’s notion of “normative art”. Kirk argues that good literature cultivates virtue according to a transcendent norm, a law of nature. I interrogate the extent to which this art can be conservative according to Kirk’s own meaning of conservatism and read his own conservatism against itself in an effort to show which of its tenets detrimentally supersede and contradict its others. The criticism of Kirk’s discussion of normative art makes use of Charles Sanders Peirce’s more sophisticated epistemology, metaphysics, and normative science of aesthetics. Ultimately, Kirk’s conservatism and his position on normative art rely on metaphysical dualism and the gratuitous capacity of intuition. This ends in an unjustified discounting of his principles of variety, imperfectability, prescription, and continuity and their subordination to his principle of transcendence.
Journal Article