The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Join friends of the Bookman in New York City on December 8, 2025 for the Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture.

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.”

How to Love What is Permanent

“Throughout the book, Gibbs pleads with his readers that we not only think of the soul in terms of salvation but also in terms of health. Good taste won’t save one’s soul. But it will nourish the soul and incline the soul towards virtue much more than the bad taste we will acquire from mediocre things.”

Personalism in the Age of AI

“Personalism is a philosophical movement that places the human person at the center of inquiry, affirming the inherent dignity, value, and uniqueness of each individual. While it spans both religious and secular traditions, its common thread is a commitment to defending the irreducible reality of the person in an age increasingly shaped by systems, technologies, and abstractions.”

Christopher Dawson and Pluralism

“In particular, I want to examine three aspects of Dawson’s thought: his conclusion that cultures, especially Western culture, historically have been pluralist; his contention that a pluralism of cultures preserves a sphere of freedom from dominant modern ideologies that would eliminate that freedom; and finally, Dawson’s conviction that a pluralist world represents a new opportunity for evangelization.”

Creating in Community

Bandersnatch: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings by Diana P. Glyer. Kent State University Press, 2015. Paperback, 224 pages, $19.There is no shortage of books on the authors who made up the best known writing group of the...

A Poet Aware of the Past

A Poet Aware of the Past

Most Ancient of All Splendors, by Johann Moser. Sophia Institute Press, 1989. Hardcover, 94 pages, $15. It was difficult to believe, until this book arrived at my desk, that in this fin de siècle of computers, word processors, videos, and other robots, poems still are...

An Anti-Utopian Life

Isaiah Berlin: A Life, by Michael Ignatieff. New York: Owl Books, 1999. Paper, 356pp., $16. Isaiah Berlin, who died in 1997, was that rare man of letters who was also a man of the world. If Churchill was the statesman who earned laurels as an historian, Berlin was the...

On What Is Not Found in English Departments

“English as It’s Taught” by Joseph Epstein, in A Literary Education and Other Essays. Axios Press, 2014. pages 335-40 (of 537).In A Literary Education and Other Essays is found Joseph Epstein’s 2011 review, “English as It’s Taught” in The Cambridge History of the...

A Champion of Inherited Culture

A Champion of Inherited Culture

The Intemperate Professor and Other Cultural Splenetics, by Russell Kirk. Sherwood Sugden and Company, 1988. 143pp. paper, $7.95. H. L. Mencken once said that the college professor, “menaced by the timid dogmatism of the plutocracy above him and the incurable...

Kissinger as Political Philosopher

Kissinger 1923–1968: The Idealist by Niall Ferguson. New York: Penguin Press, 2015. Hardcover, 986 pp., $39.95. Henry Kissinger has been called many things in his long, eventful public career, but “idealist” is not one of them. Until now. The first volume of the...

The Meaning of Capitalism

TO THE POINT: FRIDAY, WEDNESDAY, MAY 1, 1963Did you know that “capitalism” is a term coined by Karl Marx? Like most Marxist terms, it is loaded, and misleading to employ. So I never advocate or defend the abstraction called “capitalism”: rather, I favor a reasonably...

Our Wisest President

TO THE POINT: FRIDAY, JULY 31, 1964Tardily, historians and the intelligent public are coming to realize that the most intelligent, as well as most learned, man ever to inhabit the White House was sardonic old John Adams. Unlike the “advanced thinkers” of his time,...

The Book Gallery

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

How to Love What is Permanent
Sarah Reardon on "Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity" by Joshua Gibbs.
@CirceInstitute

Personalism in the Age of AI Grant R. Martsolf on "Personalism for the Twenty-First Century: Essays in Honor of David Walsh" Edited by Thomas W. Holman and Richard Avramenko.
@RLPublisher

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