The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Defending the Christian Faith

“In 100 Tough Questions For Catholics: Common Obstacles To Faith Today… David G. Bonagura, Jr. gives bite-sized answers to dozens of big questions about the faith.”

Limits and the Good Life

“…David McPherson has written an argument for the importance of ‘recognizing proper limits in human life.’ He focuses on the ‘limiting virtues’ of ‘humility, reverence, moderation, contentment, neighborliness, and loyalty.’”

We’re All Epicureans Now

“…as Zubia argues convincingly, Hume’s political vision is not entirely modern but resurrects and reinforces ideas native to the ancient Epicurean framework of empirical skepticism. Hume’s vision of politics, mankind, and truth itself was deeply shaped by Epicureanism, which has, in turn, shaped the modern imagination.”

The Rise of the World Builders

“Maçães’s literal interpretation proposes that the ‘geo’ in ‘geopolitics’ takes on new, technological, meaning, insofar as the earth alone is no longer the surface or space of kinetic encounter; rather, ‘this new battlefield is synthetic or virtual’—comprising the realms of technology, energy, trade, and finance—and ‘the way to win is to reprogram the system, to step outside the game world.'”

After Liberalism, Religion?

Holy Wars and Holy Alliance: The Return of Religion to the Global Political Stage by Manlio Graziano. Columbia University Press, 2017. Hardcover, 368 pages, $35.   The liberal world order that we have complacently enjoyed for the last twenty-five years is...

Everything We Knew Was Wrong

Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX by Andrew Willard Jones. Emmaus Academic, 2017. Hardcover, 510 pages, $40.   Before Church and State, from the historian’s perspective, is undoubtedly a seminal work:...

Public Relations Disaster

The White King: Charles I, Traitor, Murderer, Martyr by Leanda de Lisle. PublicAffairs, 2017. Hardcover, 464 pages, $30.What most of us know about the reign of Charles I we know by way of myth. From Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers we know of the warmongering...

The Beauty of Order

The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition by James Matthew Wilson. The Catholic University of America Press, 2017. Paperback, 352 pages, $30. Despite hitting a few bumps, poet James Matthew Wilson’s The Vision of the Soul delivers a...

What Can We Learn from Ancient Sophistry?

Sophistry and Political Philosophy: Protagoras’ Challenge to Socrates by Robert C. Bartlett. University of Chicago Press, 2016. Hardcover, 272 pages, $40. Reviewed by Ryan Shinkel One should be silent where one cannot speak, philosophy says, yet sophistry somehow...

Upcoming Event for Attorneys and Law Students

Upcoming Event for Attorneys and Law Students

The Society for Law and Culture will gather to discuss “Moral Imagination and the Law” on Saturday, May 19, 2018 at the Kirk Center. We are pleased to announce the following distinguished speakers: the Hon. Caleb Stegall, Justice, Kansas Supreme Court; the Hon....

The Inevitability of Liberal Failure?

Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen. Yale University Press, 2018. Hardcover, 256 pages, $40. Why Liberalism Failed is a timely and radical book. It is timely because it diagnoses the deep anxiety that now characterizes American life. It is radical—in the literal...

Books in Little: A Certain Freedom

Books in Little: A Certain Freedom

Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis by Liesl Olson. Yale University Press, 2017. Hardcover, 392 pages, $35.   If you’ve ever wondered—and who hasn’t?—about what would happen if Mortimer Adler and Gertrude Stein met and talked about...

The Words of a Giant of the Law

Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived by Antonin Scalia, edited by Christopher J. Scalia and Edward Whelan. Crown Forum, 2017. Cloth, 420 pages, $30. Antonin Scalia is the Winston Churchill of the American judiciary. He was a larger-than-life...

The Book Gallery

A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.

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