The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
Playing for Virtual Transcendence
Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second Life, by Robert M. Geraci. Oxford University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 368 pages, $35. Reviewed by Kevin Schut In Virtually Sacred, religious studies scholar Robert M. Geraci tackles the topic of...
Playfulness and Profundity
Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second Life, by Robert M. Geraci. Oxford University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 368 pages, $35.Reviewed by Daniel J. HolmesIt requires a certain sense of academic playfulness to take a theological approach to...
Navigating a Secular Age
How (Not) to Be Secular by James K. A. Smith. Eerdmans, 2014. Paper, 152 pages, $16.In early August I went backpacking in the Glacier Peak Wilderness of the North Cascades. The terrain was unfamiliar to me, and I knew very little of what to expect other than what I...

No More Idols: Taking Measure of a Modern Prophet
Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World by Edward E. Ericson, Jr. Regnery Gateway 1993. Cloth, xi + 432 pp., $24. As breathing returns after our swoon, as a glimmer of consciousness breaks through the unrelieved darkness, it is difficult for us at first to regain our...
Words and Deeds
Maya Angelou (1928–2014)There is a scene near the end of Old Goriot in which the young Rastignac, still new to Paris and Parisian society, observes that “[n]oble natures cannot dwell in this world.” In Balzac’s eponymous novel, Goriot, having literally given...
An Integrated Vision
Aethereal Rumours: T. S. Eliot’s Physics and Poetics, by Benjamin G. Lockerd, Jr. Bucknell University Press, 1999. 320pp., $48.50 cloth. The title of this book, intriguing though it is, may seem forbidding and suggestive of recondite subject matter. Certainly, it is a...
The 2015 Burke Conference
The Edmund Burke Society of America invites you to its third conference, “Edmund Burke and Patriotism” to be held at Villanova University on February 27–28, 2015. The conference aims to trace the development in the relationship between patriotism, liberty, and duty...
Third Burke Conference Announced!
The Edmund Burke Society of America is pleased to announce a call for papers and open registration for “Edmund Burke and Patriotism,” their third conference on Edmund Burke. It will be held on February 27 and 28, 2015 at Villanova University. Keynote addresses will be...
The Rock Star of One First Street
Scalia: A Court of One by Bruce Allen Murphy. Simon & Schuster, 2014. Cloth, 656 pp., $35.This is an unusual book. One has the feeling that the author does not really care for his subject, but, in spite of himself, Bruce Allen Murphy, the Fred Morgan Kirby...
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.