Read the rest …

November is increasingly looking like a political tsunami. Will the GOP even survive? Or go the way of the Whigs?

Our God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we praise your Triune name. Lord God we are the inheritors of the great tradition of Western Christendom. A tradition that is defined by the victory of the risen Christ over the nations of the West. Lord give us wisdom. Give us the wisdom to defend what deserves defending, to reform what deserves reforming, and to celebrate was deserves celebrating. Let us not be ashamed of our inheritance.

Lord God we thank you for all of those among us this evening that have been called to the office of civil magistrate. We thank you that these men and women are your servants for good. That they do not exercises the sword in vain but are defenders of justice, punishers of evil, and preservers of order. Prudence is the greatest virtue of rulers, pour out this gift abundantly upon them.

Sovereign God, this evening we lament the loss of friends. We remember the passing of conservatism’s amiable warrior, William F. Buckley, Jr. We pray for his family. We pray for the institutions born of his labors (including the NY Conservative Party). We pray that his voice would continue to speak powerfully to us, knowing with T.S. Eliot, “that the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.” We ask Lord, that you would comfort us and that you would raise up men to lead us… men who tread in the paths of giants like Buckley, Kirk, Weaver, and Chambers.

Lord we remember Jim Gay, the faithful patron and leader of the Conservative Party. Lord comfort his family and friends. Restore our crestfallen spirits as we look forward to joining our fallen comrades in that better country.

Almighty Father, bless our labors and remind us that politics is not the realm of the eternal but the realm of our shared loves in earthly things. Let us, therefore, in true Buckley-ite fashion, remember not to take our selves our our work to seriously. May we love well, may we fight hard, and may we faithfully pass our precious inheritance to the rising generation.

Prayer of Invocation:

Lord God Almighty, as we gather together this evening we pray that your blessing would be upon us.

We thank you for the blessings that you have poured out upon our nation, our state, our beloved county, and the many towns and villages that each of us calls home. You have blessed us with abundance and beauty… with strength and with order.

Under your providence our fathers have given us liberty. May we ever uphold and defend it.

Lord God, as proud citizens we thank you for the work of the New York Conservative Party. We thank you fro the Conservative Party’s defense of our highest ideas as Americans. For its defense of liberty, order, private property rights, traditional marriage, localism and subsidiarity, the centrality of the individual, the sanctity of the unborn, and the living voice of our dead speaking to us through the great tradition passed down from our fathers.

Bless us this evening as we celebrate these things. We pray in the name of Jesus Christ, King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

Here is an short editorial by Christopher Check.

If we had lost Jones or Jimmy Duncan what hope could still be found in the Republican Party? Cheers the Old School.

The best line is this, “They want voters to think of the Tories as the party of society while Labor is the party of the state. They want the country to see the Tories as the party of decentralized organic networks and the Laborites as the party of top-down mechanistic control.” Amen.

Brooks notes that much of the Cameron’s Tory application of the above stated principle would not fly with American Conservatives… rightly so. The last thing I want is the nanny state dropping bye to help me raise my children. I don’t even want them butting their noses in my kids education. But faulty application does not destroy the principle. Rather, I think the Cameronian (Covenanters please forgive me!!!) application is destroying his own stated principle- again confusing society with state.

If Conservatism finds it self in the wilderness in 2009 we will have lots of time to think. We need it. Thankfully, we have plenty of resources from which to rebuild a conservatism that understands society in terms of Edmund Burke’s eternal contract between the dead, the living, and the unborn. We can be driven back to Burke, to the Southern Agrarians with Burkean tendencies (my Presbyterian friends will note that this includes Thornwell, Dabney, Machen, and Hart), Russell Kirk, and Wilhelm Roepke. We might even find it in ourselves to head the prophetic voices of Wendell Berry, Bill Kauffman, and I dare add Caleb Stegall and Rod Dreher.

We can rediscover that WE are more than the aggragate of individuals and the the community is greater than the sum of its parts without losing our grasp of the sanctity of the individual liberty. Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead” can be restored.

We have the resources for a 21st Century Conservatism. Can we make them work?

Probably the most significant abortion litigation in the country right now just became public: story here. (Let ‘er rip, SteveZ!)

Adventures in politics here. Email me if you want to contribute!

Regarding the last, and the previous post and comment—for all you BFers, I hear Chellis has political aspirations, you need to recruit him for Beaver County DA.

On the one hand, I’m pleasantly surprised that the city council has been able to get away with this form of prayer until now, without an ACLU lawsuit. On the other hand, I wish that they would keep it going and not cave to this lone critic.

This sounds, though, like a good issue for the Geneva College community to address. Let’s bring the mediatorial kingship of Christ to bear on this matter. How would we defend public prayers in Jesus’ name? Thoughts?

Everybody was Kung Fu fighting… those cats were fast as lightning….