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.”

Geopolitics and the Making of the Modern World

“Brands’s book should find a ready audience among those interested in developments in the international scene over the last century. It is particularly effective in dealing with the threat that China’s emerging power and influence pose to the West today…”

The Context for Human Dignity

“While the twentieth century was still sporadically marked by remnants of Christian influence and dominance, the twenty-first has seen the final divorce of the secular and sacred, and the consequences are evident. What Leo XIII warned of, the evils he battled, have been let loose, paradigmatically captured by Artificial Intelligence which poorly imitates and devalues that which makes us essentially human… We would do well then to read Hittinger’s book in reflecting on how to face these challenges.”

Between Greatness and Hubris 

“At the core of [the book] is the notion that while America is an exceptional nation, we are not immune from the perils that beset past countries and empires.”

Caesar, princeps, Augustus, god

The shifting identities of Rome’s first emperorOn the Ides of March, 44 BC, Julius Caesar’s great-nephew, Octavius, the future Augustus and first emperor of Rome, was eighteen years of age and a newly arrived student in the Roman province of Illyricum, modern Albania....

Anti-Catholicism and Manifest Destiny

Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War by John C. Pinheiro. Oxford University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 256 pages, $45.Missionaries of Republicanism, a volume in Oxford University Press’s prestigious Religion in America series,...

Homo Economicus, Absurdus, or Viator?

A Brief Philosophical Journey into Modernity.Wavering between the profit and the loss In this brief transit where the dreams cross The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying (Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things From the wide window...

Why the Exorcist Endures

More than forty years after its release, one film still has more power than most films in the horror genre because it speaks to a category of dehumanization that is now taboo in American culture.

Time and Permanence in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

Pedro Blas González In my beginning is my end.... … to be restored, our sickness must grow worse. —T. S. Eliot, Four QuartetsT. S. Eliot begins Burnt Norton with a reflection of time as cyclical. Because time-past and present are enveloped by time-future, Eliot...

The Philosophies of the Modern Era and the Catholic Church

The Church and the Culture of Modernity by Richard Divozzo. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011. Paperback, 404 pages, $13.73.Richard Divozzo’s The Church and the Culture of Modernity provides a insightful study of the root causes of the decline in...

Educational Reform: Back to the Future

Living on the Future Edge: Windows on Tomorrow: The Impact of Global Exponential Trends on Education in the 21st Century By Ted McCain, Ian Jukes, and Lee Crockett. Corwin, 2010. Paperback, 184 pages, $33. The scope and force of informational and communicative...

Dueling Visions

Freedom and Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian Debate, edited by George W Carey. ISI Books, 1998, Cloth, xxii + 231 pp., $25. “Freedom is a great thing, but one should not run the danger of destroying oneself in the pursuit of it,” the libertarian philosopher John...

Propping Up Pretensions

Susan Sontag: A Biography by Daniel Schreiber, translated by David Dollenmayer. Northwestern University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 296 pages, $36.“Susan Sontag, as F. R. Leavis said of the Sitwells, belongs less to the history of literature than to that of publicity.”...

The Book Gallery

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

Geopolitics and the Making of the Modern World
John P. Rossi on "The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars and the Making of the Modern World" by Hal Brands. @wwnorton

The Context for Human Dignity
Rev. Joseph Scolaro reviews "On the Dignity of Society: Catholic Social Teaching and Natural Law" by F. Russell Hittinger. @CUAPress

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