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.”

Eric Voegelin: A Philosopher’s Journey

In the English-speaking world political philosophy, as traditionally conceived, has been represented by Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Michael Oakeshott, and Eric Voegelin. While each of these four has made contributions to the various dimensions of philosophizing about...

The Middling Mind

The Middling Mind

The Politics of the Center: The Juste Milieu in Theory and Practice, France and England, 1815–1848, by Vincent E. Starzinger, with a new introduction by the author and a foreword by Russell Kirk. Transaction Books, 1991. Paperback, 181 pages, $19.95. Middlingness, the...

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.

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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