130 – Cultivating Kirk with Jeff Nelson
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
Release Date: 05/02/2023
Roundtable - Vice Vice Baby
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Ohio Senator JD Vance square off for the first—and likely only—vice presidential debate that’s sure to leave pundits chattering, social media accounts fighting, and late economists spinning in their graves. The debate begins at 9PM ET. Join us immediately following the debate for another livestream roundtable to restore some inkling of sanity back to this election. Panelists include Scott Howard, Jeffery Tyler Syck, and John Giokaris.
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163 – Where Does the Conservative Go from Here?
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
In a world where both political parties are moving away from free market oriented policy solutions, a robust defense of our international allies, and traditional social norms, where does the conservative go from here? Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is joined by special returning guests Cal Davenport, Erik Kohn, and Justin Stapley for a roundtable discussion on what the future holds for the conservative movement. This episode first dropped as a livestream on the new Saving Elephants YouTube channel., featuring full-length episodes, exclusive shorts, and even live events! Check it out here:
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Roundtable - Towards a Sensible Foreign Policy
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
From Eastern Europe to the Middle East to Southeast Asia to so many other places, the world's on fire. Yet neither presidential candidate is offering us a compelling vision to navigate this brave new world. Join another august assembly of panelists as we discuss what a sensible foreign policy might look like. You can also watch this episode on YouTube:
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162 – Harmonizing Sentiments with Hans Eicholz
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
The Declaration of Independence audaciously declares certain “truths” to be “self-evident”. And, in so doing, offered a justification for not only a break with Great Britain and Revolutionary War, but the foundation upon which a new nation could be built. But how uniformly were these “truths” held and understood by the Founding Fathers? Were they disparate views that were ultimately incoherent or inconsistent? Did the divergent cultures of the American North and South have fundamentally different ideas of what they conceived of America to be? Were the...
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Roundtable - That 1st Trump vs Harris Debate
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
The stakes were high in the first debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Did anyone, other than the American people, emerge the loser? Were any pets harmed during the debate? Did some semblance of substance somehow slip through? Saving Elephants presents another livestream cross-partisan panel to debate the debate, featuring: Elizabeth Doll Mike Taylor Cal Davenport John Giokaris
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161 – American Covenant with Yuval Levin
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
In this era of polarization and partisan bickering, Americans of all political persuasions are calling for the nation to come together. National unity is certainly in high demand and highly praised. But what is unity? As Yuval Levin argues in his latest book, , “unity doesn’t mean agreement…disagreement does not foreclose the possibility of unity. A more unified society would not always disagree less, but it would disagree better—that is, more constructively and with an eye to how different priorities and goals can be accommodated. That we have lost some...
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Roundtable - Kamala's DNC Speech
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
It's the last night of the Democratic National Convention and who better to offer commentary on Kamala Harris' speech than a cross-partisan panel? Join us for a livestream discussion scheduled to take place shortly after Kamala's speech.
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160 – FreeCons with Avik Roy
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
The great fusionist project of ordered liberty advocated by Frank Meyer, William F. Buckley, and M. Stanton Evans is defended and affirmed today by a group calling themselves Freedom Conservatives, or FreeCons. And as most groups of conservatives are wont to do, they have drafted a outlining what they hope to affirm. Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is a proud signatory on this statement and welcomes in this episode one of the two originators of the Statement, Avik Roy, for a wide-ranging discussion on fusionism, how FreeCons may compare and contrast with NatCons, the need for...
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159 – The Prudential Lincoln with Allen Guelzo
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
Was Abraham Lincoln a racist? Were his efforts at emancipation the mere cold calculations of a politician whose sole aim was to win the Civil War, or do they point to some deeper ideals of America’s first principles? Joining Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is Lincoln historian Dr. Allen C. Guelzo for a wide-ranging conversation on how Lincoln’s efforts at ending slavery and saving the union may provide the clearest example of prudent American statesmanship in practice. About Dr. Allen C. Guelzo Excerpts from the Dr. Allen C. Guelzo is a New York...
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158 – Fashionable Fusionists with Samuel Goldman
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
In an age of rampant informalities, shoddy attire, and the kind of milieu that makes a possibility, conservatives stand athwart history yelling STOP! Joining Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is the impeccably dressed Samuel Goldman to explore how conservatism informs the world of fashion, why legendary figures on the Right from Russell Kirk to Albert J Nock to Willmoore Kendall wore such questionably lavish accessories, the connective tissues between intellectual conservatism and 90s era punk rock, and much more. About Samuel Goldman Samuel Goldman is an associate professor of...
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.