Whither conservatism?
 
Caleb Stegall has alerted us to this article from The New York Times by David D. Kirkpatrick: "Young Right Tries to Define Post-Buckley Future." Kirkpatrick quotes Stegall:

"Conservative is a word that is almost meaningless these days," said Caleb Stegall, 32, a lawyer in Topeka, Kan., and a founder of The New Pantagruel, newpantagruel.com, an irreverent Web site about religion and politics named for the jovial drunkard created by [François] Rabelais. "It tells you almost nothing about where a person stands on a lot of questions," he said, like gay marriage, stem cell research, the environment and Iraq.

To which I would say yes, but there's much more to it than this. Because conservatism consists merely of a cluster of attitudes supportive of existing institutions and sceptical towards change, it lacks a solid theoretical and spiritual base. Is Christianity true? is generally not the question conservatives would ask themselves. Rather they would ask: Has it been useful in maintaining social order? As for a theoretical articulation of the nature and task of the state, different conservatives will tell us different things. But of course I've said all this before.
 
Stegall's parents once taught at the American Academy in Larnaca, Cyprus, where my father was educated some sixty years ago.