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.
Sign up to receive our semiannual newsletter, Permanent Things.
At the Kirk Center
Events
June 27-28, 2025. Prospects for Anglo-American Conservatism in the Tradition of Russell Kirk and Roger Scruton, Grand Rapids, Michigan
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
The Postmodern Poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien
“Even if Tolkien did not understand his literary enterprise as distinctively modernist, many of the techniques he deployed—the creation of a secondary world, for instance, or his invented languages, and above all the metatextual integration of poetry and prose—nonetheless bear a resemblance to the experiments in letters conducted by his more avant-garde peers.”
Latest Pieces
Catholic Zen
“Walsh’s philosophy is timely. For the Christian, it’s imperative to try to understand the mystery of the Trinity and always will be, so theology of the person is destined to be a never-completed project. For everybody else, the question of the person has invaded our daily lives. Invaded is the wrong word, of course. The person is always there, but occasionally we glimpse deeply the persons that are woven into our lives. Disputations on abortion and euthanasia reduce to warring conceptions of the person, and now artificial intelligence challenges commonplace understandings of persons and relationships.”
Outlining Sanity in the Garden
“…there are those books like The Tao of Vegetable Gardening by Carol Deppe, which is a beautiful hybrid: mostly how-to gardening advice, but laced with a meditational attitude that, though rarely overt, informs the book as a whole… [It] is part of a rich bed of American gardening literature that, in the words of M.E. Bradford, mixes ‘practical agricultural advice and moral reflection.’”
Holy Living After the Fall
“At the center of this work is the sense that the world is essentially irredeemable. Individual persons assuredly may be saved, and to the attainment of this end, we all are summoned; but the world itself, with all its works and uses, is the natural property of the Devil, and we are well advised to keep away from it.”
Frontier Fiction at Its Best
“This classic frontier story—of the fostered orphan who escapes the baddies who killed his family and who returns to wreak vengeance upon them—is enriched by a vivid depiction of Comanche culture and traditional way of life and by narrative motifs whose roots are deep in the soil of myth and fable…”
The Dangers of Modern Nationalism
“For Hayes, what he describes as the ‘ecumenical liberalism’ of the middle decades of the nineteenth century—respect for individual rights, freedom of speech, free trade, and a growing prosperity—were threatened by the forces of materialism, militarism, and scientific racism which he dated as emerging in the 1870s.”
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