The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Support the University Bookman during our annual Kirktober Fundraiser, and receive an audio copy of Kirk’s short story, What Shadows We Pursue.

Kirktober 2025: James Panero and Adam Simon on the Haunted House

October 28, 2025

On Tuesday, October 28, at 6:00 PM, you are invited to join University Bookman editor Luke Sheahan, Hollywood screenwriter Adam Simon, and New Criterion executive editor James Panero, as they explore the theme of the haunted house in gothic literature and its relationship to conservative thought and imagination.

Register for this free webinar here.

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.”

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.”

Trust and Hope as the Final Words

“Each poem is biblically rooted, but Kohler draws on extra-biblical sources and her own creative imagination to ponder what her characters may have been thinking during the pivotal moments of their mostly undocumented lives. The result is a beautiful exploration into the hearts and minds of the women of the Bible—both named and unnamed—that leaves readers feeling as though the women are imminently present, sharing their innermost thoughts and the overlooked aspects of their experiences.”

The Other Greek Woman

“Felson’s Penelope, who seems, in all probability, very close to Homer’s Penelope, is the faithful wife of Odysseus, but she is also the independent and flirtatious matriarch who rules over her household and teases the suitors, whom she views as her ‘geese.’”

Modesty Is the Best Policy

A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue by Wendy Shalit. The Free Press, 1999. Cloth, 291 pp., $24. What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman by Danielle Crittenden. Simon and Schuster, 1999. Cloth, 202 pp., $23.A recent spate of...

Meeting Stalin’s Challenge

Kennan, Lippmann, Burnham, and the Great Strategy Debate in the Early Cold War YearsDuring the late 1940s and early 1950s, in response to repeated Soviet encroachments in the Eastern Mediterranean, Iran, Central Europe, and the Far East, the United States gradually...

“The World’s Last Night”

Provocative titles are meant to, well, provoke. I have always considered C. S. Lewis’s little 1952 book of essays entitled The World’s Last Night (Harcourt) to be one difficult to forget. It takes its title from the last essay in the book, itself redolent of Christian...

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...

The Book Gallery

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

There's still time to sign up to join the @KirkCenter for the McLellan Prizes Gala in DC on November 19 https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/2025-mclellan-prizes

In honor of longtime @ubookman editor Gerald J. Russello, enjoy this Russello Classic, "Christopher Dawson and Pluralism."

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