The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to fostering traditional liberal education and promoting conservative values among college students. Established in 1953, ISI aims to cultivate a deeper understanding of the principles of liberty and the American founding through scholarly publications, events, and student programs. The organization engages with college communities across the United States, encouraging intellectual discourse and providing resources for students interested in classical learning, conservative thought, and responsible citizenship.
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute publishes the journal Modern Age: A Conservative Review. The journal is a place where the different facets of conservatism are brought together and debated—where the vital work of renewal continues on a regular basis. In the decades since its founding Modern Age has served as the principal quarterly of the intellectual right.
SELECT CONTENTS:
F. H. Buckley “How America Became a Monarchy” Kevin R. C. Guzman “The Anti-Party President” Philip Jenkins “When Christianity Was Remade (or Not)”
In an essay titled “The Abolition of Mania” (Modern Age, Spring 2022), Michael Ward applies C. S. Lewis’s insights to the polarization that afflicts modern societies. (16 minutes)
Stephen Gurney shows how in his sermons, John Henry Newman draws the listener in through the craft and beauty of his prose while nonetheless removing himself from the spotlight in order to convey his listeners to the True Presence of Christ. (51 minutes)
Thomas Howard describes C. S. Lewis’s fictional works in terms of a mythological re-presentation of the Christian and pre-modern moral and cosmic vision. (41 minutes)
John Desmond uses the novels of Walker Percy to critique the increasing trend in today’s medical fields and in secular society as a whole to affirm, even if tacitly, that suicide is a decision belonging to each individual as a right. (24 minutes)
Jeremy Beer describes the intellectual trajectory of cultural historian Christopher Lasch, who critiqued the modern “anxiously narcissistic” self and the culture that produced it. (55 minutes)
Vigen Guroian contrasts the features of character and virtue with those of what is more modernly called “values,” and examines how these different approaches to moral consideration reflect conflicting ways of understanding self-formation. (48 minutes)
Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
Richard Sherlock explores the significance of political philosopher Leo Strauss’s methodology, focusing on how he understood the communication of ideas in classical and modern thought about political order. (36 minutes)
Louise Cowan insists that what we label the classics “have become classics because they elicit greatness of soul,” and that such aspiration can only be informed by such works. (35 minutes)
Joshua P. Hochschild examines the effects of globalization on local communities and argues for the need for reflection on the ends of politics given the ends of human beings. (36 minutes)
