In his introduction to Arguing Conservatism, Mark C. Henrie explains that the purpose of the Review is to determine “what could be conserved and how” in modern times. The underlying premise of each excellent essay is that modernity—with its glorification of technology and its deification of man—has not only fashioned false idols but has also exiled traditional sources of meaning and truth. This is the “crisis of our time” that many of the essayists, from Will Herberg and Robert Penn Warren to Peter F. Lawler, explore.
A common theme among the essays—which include considerations of just-war theory, the founding fathers, the Cold War, free markets, and culture—is that man truly knows himself only in relation to a higher order of things. For the ancient Greeks, this was divine reason; for the Judeo-Christian tradition, this is God. Without God, as Whittaker Chambers reminds readers in an essay devoted to him in the volume, it is not just individual man that loses his soul, but the West itself that loses its soul.
This, of course, has accompanying political ramifications as well. The foreign policy expert Robert R. Reilly, in an essay titled “Atheism and Arms Control,” writes, “Human life is only sacred if there is a God to sanctify it.” Without that sanctity and dignity, there is no reason why men are not morally justified in objectifying their neighbors as mere beasts, slaughtering each other in the cause of an abstract ideology or