The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Frontier Fiction at Its Best

“This classic frontier story—of the fostered orphan who escapes the baddies who killed his family and who returns to wreak vengeance upon them—is enriched by a vivid depiction of Comanche culture and traditional way of life and by narrative motifs whose roots are deep in the soil of myth and fable…”

The Postmodern Poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien

“Even if Tolkien did not understand his literary enterprise as distinctively modernist, many of the techniques he deployed—the creation of a secondary world, for instance, or his invented languages, and above all the metatextual integration of poetry and prose—nonetheless bear a resemblance to the experiments in letters conducted by his more avant-garde peers.”

Catholic Zen

“Walsh’s philosophy is timely. For the Christian, it’s imperative to try to understand the mystery of the Trinity and always will be, so theology of the person is destined to be a never-completed project. For everybody else, the question of the person has invaded our daily lives. Invaded is the wrong word, of course. The person is always there, but occasionally we glimpse deeply the persons that are woven into our lives. Disputations on abortion and euthanasia reduce to warring conceptions of the person, and now artificial intelligence challenges commonplace understandings of persons and relationships.”

Outlining Sanity in the Garden

“…there are those books like The Tao of Vegetable Gardening by Carol Deppe, which is a beautiful hybrid: mostly how-to gardening advice, but laced with a meditational attitude that, though rarely overt, informs the book as a whole… [It] is part of a rich bed of American gardening literature that, in the words of M.E. Bradford, mixes ‘practical agricultural advice and moral reflection.’”

Virtue in the Age of Neo-Machiavellianism

Virtue in the Age of Neo-Machiavellianism

“For Hankins the notion of a new nobility based upon merit—not class or blood, on one hand, nor ‘equity,’ on the other—is one of Patrizi’s most important messages for America today. Hankins, throughout the book, presents the optimistic case that such a vision of a virtuous, meritocratic Republic is the way forward for America.”

Crafting a New Evangelical Imagination

Crafting a New Evangelical Imagination

“The result of a Christian subculture so deeply infused with Victorian era sentimentalism is that evangelicalism became less an intellectual theological system and more ‘a religion of the heart.'”

Rising with the Saints

Rising with the Saints

“…the Church will come alive again when we become committed to being radical in the ordinary things: prayer, devotion, sacrifice, charity, and the study of the truth.”

Thinking as a Human Being

Thinking as a Human Being

“…the world we are involved in is cognitively sorted by us according to the purposes and concerns of our form of life, which is in turn… shaped by the structures, traditions and worldviews in which we bodily participate. This poses a major challenge for AI…”

JP O’Malley Interviews Author Ian Buruma

JP O’Malley Interviews Author Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma published The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II early last year. The University Bookman contributor JP O’Malley caught up with Mr. Buruma to discuss his latest book.

Imprisoned by the Internet

Imprisoned by the Internet

“…James’s volume is an accessible invitation to consider the possibility that the internet as such—wholly apart from any particular content—is forming people in essentially malign ways.”

The Book Gallery

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

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