Welcome Home to the Russell Kirk Center
Strengthening America’s Tradition of Order, Justice & Freedom
The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal aims to recover, conserve, and enliven those enduring norms and principles that Russell Kirk (1918–1994) called the Permanent Things. Explore the Center’s programs, publications, and fellowships and join with us to continue Kirk’s work to renew our culture and redeem our time.
Kirk Center Events and Fall Campaigns
Join the School of Conservative Studies on 10.22 at 7pm for a webinar exploring
Russell Kirk’s 10 Conservative Principles
Join our once a year “Kirktober” campaign to raise $20,000 for the operating costs of the University Bookman.
Celebrate with us the awarding of the inaugural Richard D. McLellan Prizes for Freedom of Speech and Expression on December 5, 2024.
At the Kirk Center
Highlights
Video recording of “Adapting The Conservative Mind for the Current Generation” panel discussion in Washington, D.C.
Events
- Webinar on Russell Kirk’s 10 Conservative Principles: In this School of Conservative Studies webinar, Dr. Jason Jewell helps to clarify the meaning of the word “conservative” by unpacking the “ten conservative principles” outlined by Russell Kirk in The Politics of Prudence. Register for this webinar using the following link
- The Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture – 11/13, Fordham University Law School, NYC
- The Inaugural McLellan Prizes Gala, 12/5, Amway Grand Hotel, Grand Rapids MI
On Campus
Explore Kirk On Campus
Russell Kirk understood his work was to convey to America’s rising generations an understanding of the process by which a healthy culture is transmitted from age to age.
We’re continuing this important work through Kirk on Campus as we host conversations about the permanent things on campuses across Michigan. We hope you’ll join us at an event, and help us prepare tomorrow’s leaders with an appreciation of the richness of the conservative intellectual tradition.
From the University Bookman
Here’s Why Not
“Goligher sets this Christian view against the secular view now reigning in healthcare: that humans have extrinsic value. To treat humans as creatures with extrinsic value—meaning they have value only for what they can do, not for what they are—is to treat humans as things that produce value as opposed to persons who are valuable in and of themselves.”
Latest Pieces
Gentlemen Losers
“Yet I suspect that one reason Steely Dan’s star has risen in our own day is that they cannot be exclusively claimed by cultural progressives. Whatever the personal convictions of Fagen and Becker might have been, their songs capture a certain temperamental conservatism, equal parts cynicism towards the promise of a brighter tomorrow and yearning for a sense of social order long past, that feels right at home in our age of fractured shabbiness. Combine this sensibility with the band’s relentless pursuit of aesthetic perfection, and you have a recipe for music that greatly appeals to a certain segment of young fogeys more indebted to T.S. Eliot than to Charlie Kirk.”
Thinking Ourselves into Oblivion
“Without formal and final causes… we have no access to the universal intelligible structures and purposes in the world. And without those, there is no possibility of meaningful philosophy.”
The “Christian Nationalism” Canard
“If the city and the soul are connected, as Russell Kirk affirmed, then what shapes the soul shapes the city, and vice versa, which means that vacating the public square entails transforming society…”
A Social Scientific Apologia for Marriage
“…Wilcox is here to do something unusual… He intuits a need for an updated social scientific apologia of marriage—something that champions marriage comprehensively from a social scientific perspective…”
Genesis Through a Glass Darkly
“Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis is not a commentary or a work of scholarship but a series of essays on the human encounter with the divine as portrayed in this first and perhaps most influential of all books.”
About the Bookman
For six decades, the University Bookman, founded by Russell Kirk, has identified and discussed those books that diagnose the modern age and support the renewal of culture and the common good. Currently published online, the Bookman continues its mission of examining our times in light of the Permanent Things that make us human.
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