130 – Cultivating Kirk with Jeff Nelson
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
Release Date: 05/02/2023
Roundtable - Buckley Turns 100
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
William F Buckley was one of the most important figures in the conservative movement over the past century. His posthumous 100th birthday is Monday, November 24. Come celebrate the life and legacy of Buckley as our Saving Elephant panelists pay tribute to a conservative life well lived. Panelists include: - CEO of Michael Lucchese - Founder and CEO of - Podcaster, professor, ect.
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Roundtable - Taking Federalism Seriously
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
Returning to the Founders' blueprint for dividing power across federal, state, and local governments may be the greatest weapon we have to reverse the appalling state of our politic divisiveness. What is federalism? And what would a recommitment to federalism look like? Saving Elephants welcomes panelists from the State Policy Network and the Acton Institute to discuss what it means to take federalism seriously again. The panelists include: Brooke Medina - VP of Comms with the State Policy Network Jenn Butler - Sr Policy Advisor with the State Policy Network Dan Hugger - Librarian and...
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190 – Biographizing Buckley with Sam Tanenhaus
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
There are four faces on the Saving Elephants’ Mount Rushmore of great conservatives: Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Thomas Sowell, and William F. Buckley. While the first three have each had fully episodes dedicated to their life and works, William F. Buckley has yet to be explored at length. And with Buckley’s posthumous 100th birthday happening later this month, now is the perfect time to reflect on his long and remarkable life. Sam Tanehaus’ decades-in-the-making biography of Buckley was published earlier this year and he joins Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis to cover...
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189 – Rescuing the American Project with Nathan Brown and Robert Haglund
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
Those who identify as pro-immigration and pro-nationalist are often at odds with one another. But what if a healthy dose of nationalism is the very thing that could bolster our immigration? Nathan Brown and Robert Haglund argue in their new book that “much of the dysfunction in contemporary American politics is a consequence of the failure by our elites to understand the crucial relationship between immigration and nationalism.” Nathan and Robert join Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis to explore the history and controversy of immigration in America, what the Left and the...
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Roundtable - The Kids are all Alt-Right
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
Does the Right have a radical problem, particularly among young men? Saving Elephants assembles another insightful panel to offer their...insights. The panelists include: - President of America's Future - Proffessor at the University of Pikeville - VP of NoCapFund Lura Forcum - President of the
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188 – The UnLeft with J.J. McCullough
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
Disillusioned with the rigidity of political tribalism, J.J. McCullough left his role as conservative journalist and commentator and became a content creator. His YouTube channel, offers his one million subscribers weekly deep dives about countries, cultures, and Canada. But while politics is not the focus of his channel, some of his content is still tinged with the overtures of his past life. J.J. joins Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis to discuss how his political philosophy can inform his work without his work being subsumed to a set of ideological commitments, how this...
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Bonus Episode - My Conversation / Intervention with Justin Stapley
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
Justin Stapley and I have been on similar journeys these past many years seeking to better understand our worldviews and the ever-changing political moment and how best to restore sanity and integrity to our politics. But while I've been diligently producing podcast episodes for these past seven years, Justin has launched a dizzying array of projects. In his own words: There's an ongoing joke between myself and that every time I'm on his podcast, I've rebranded. And he's not necessarily wrong, lol. Here's the various blogs and efforts I've done since 2016... Never Tyranny was my...
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187 – Audaciously Aspirational with John Wilsey
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
One cannot BE a conservative. One can only aspire to conservatism. So says John Wilsey in his new book . Perhaps Roger Scruton’s was a worthy endeavor but too audacious of a title. John Wilsey joins Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis to flesh out the aspirational nature of conservatism and how it grounds the individual. They explore the religious roots of American conservatism and the challenges of bringing up a new generation of conservatives without the giants of the past conservatives had to look to for inspiration and encouragement. About John Wilsey...
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Roundtable - Combating Political Violence
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
In the wake of Charlie Kirk's shocking assassination, Americans are bracing for further political attacks. But is further violence inevitable? And what can be done to prevent things from escalating? Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis assembles a roundtable to discuss these sobering and important issues. The panelists include: - Host of - Host of - Host of - Host of - Host of
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186 – Conservative Canucks with Shawn Whatley
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
Is Trump correct that Canada is destined to be America’s 51st state? Or is there simply too much distinction between Canada and the United States to collapse us both into one homogenous mess? If conservatives in the U.S. are trying to conserve the American revolution, what are Canadian conservatives hoping to conserve? How might these two liberty-loving nations help each other better understand each other through comparison? Joining Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is Shawn Whatley to make sense of it all. About Shawn Whatley Shawn Whatley hosts , a weekly...
info_outlinePerhaps no other individual (or person, for the benefit of the Kirkian insider) was more responsible for resuscitating intellectual conservatism back to life in the mid Twentieth century than Russell Kirk. Today, Kirk’s efforts to recover and conserve the “Permanent Things” lives on at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal. Co-founder and Vice Chair of the Russell Kirk Center, Jeff Nelson, joins Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis to explore the legacy of Russell Kirk and its lasting impact on the conservative movement today.
About Jeff Nelson
Jeff Nelson co-founded the Kirk Center with Annette Kirk and is currently Vice Chairman of the Center’s Board of Trustees. He served in 1986 and again in 1989 as Dr. Kirk’s personal assistant.
Dr. Nelson is Executive Vice President of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (Wilmington, Delaware). He also served as president of the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts (Merrimack, NH). He received his B.A. at the University of Detroit, an M.A. at Yale University Divinity School, and was awarded his Ph.D. in American History at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
Dr. Nelson founded ISI Books, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s now nationally recognized publishing imprint, in 1993. Under his direction, more than 110 books were published. During that time he also edited two respected journals of thought and opinion: The Intercollegiate Review and The University Bookman, and is publisher of Studies in Burke and His Time. He also is senior fellow of both the International G. K. Chesterton Institute (Toronto, ON) and the Centre for the Study of Faith and Culture in Oxford, England; and he is secretary of the Edmund Burke Society of America.
Dr. Nelson has edited two book collections: Redeeming the Time by Russell Kirk, and Perfect Sowing: Reflections of a Bookman by Henry Regnery; he co-edited an award-winning treasury of the historian John Lukacs’ writings entitled Remembered Past; and was project director of the popular national college guide, Choosing the Right College: The Whole Truth About America’s Top Schools. Dr. Nelson was featured in a New York Times front-page news article about a major reference work he co-edited, American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia; and he is series editor of The Library of Modern Thinkers. Jeff Nelson is a frequent and popular guest on radio and television talk shows across the country.
You can follow Jeff on Twitter @JeffOttoNelson
About The Russell Kirk Center
The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal is located in Kirk’s ancestral village of Mecosta, Michigan. It is at its heart a residential research and study center, a community of fellow travelers that lives together in the Center’s six cottages, and gathers in the Kirk Library of some 15,000 books and in the family house, where ideas and community join in what Dr. Kirk used to describe, borrowing from Tolkien, as the Last Homely House. Like his hero Edmund Burke, Kirk is a perennial thinker, anti-materialist and a Christian humanist. At the Kirk Center and in the writing of Kirk, generations connect, community and tradition live, the politics of prudence and humility extolled, and imagination, religion, and key societal beliefs, practices, and institutions studied with a view toward cultural renewal. Inspired by Russell Kirk, the Kirk Center cherishes the Permanent Things as the best way to enliven the conservative mind and to re-enchant our world.
And so I hope listeners of this podcast will visit the Kirk Center website, kirkcenter.org. Sign up for the Center’s newsletter, Permanent Things, and find great classic Kirk content regularly curated by Cecilia Kirk Nelson. Finally, one of the premier conservative book review publications, The University Bookman, posts new book reviews each weekend and has its own weekly e-newsletter that features reviews and interesting content from other groups and podcasts, including the occasional Saving Elephants episode.
Book Recommendations
Here are four of Jeff Nelson’s book recommendations on Russell Kirk:
First, James Person’s Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind is a wonderful introduction to Kirk and the key areas of his thought.
Second, as mentioned, Bradley Birzer’s Russell Kirk: American Conservative is a thoroughly researched standard biographical treatment that is both insightful and lively.
Third, Gerald Russello’s The Post Modern Imagination of Russell Kirk is one of the best analyses of Kirk’s thought and the role that both ideas and imagination play in it.
Finally, for a discussion and application of Kirk’s understanding of the Moral Imagination, especially as a kind of process or mode of knowledge, through the prism of great children’s literature, Vigen Guroian’s Tending the Heart of Virtue is especially good.