American conservatives can learn from our Tory forerunners the importance of reverence and order, realism and romance, and ultimately the poetry that is the soul of our civilization

Burke is a defender of the institutions of Christian civilization. Understanding this liberates us from the need to defend failing institutions simply because those institutions happen to exist.

It is childish to demand the real world conform to one’s fancy; it is childlike to learn about the real world by playing in an imaginary one. Both the idealist and the cynical realist are childish. The Christian realist, by contrast, should be childlike.