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

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

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

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

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.”

Genesis Through a Glass Darkly

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.

Subscribe for all Bookman Reviews and Essays

 

Welcome home to the Russell Kirk Center