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.”

Having It Both Ways

Having It Both Ways

Novelist and poet James Lasdun speaks with the Bookman about why he feels violence is an important theme to be explored in poetry, how Chekhov modernized him as a writer, and why an industrial wasteland in New Jersey inspired the milieu for one of his novels.

Back to the Sources, Almost

Of Farming and Classics: A Memoir by David Grene. University of Chicago Press, 2006, cloth, 184 pages, $35. Reviewed by John Byron Kuhner Augustine, in praising God’s choice to place Adam and Eve in a garden that needed tending, waxed poetic. “When all is said and...

A Road Not Taken

A conversation with Michael Brendan DoughertyIn a pair of recent articles for the American Conservative, Michael Brendan Dougherty—who may also be the only conservative to grace the Apollo Theater stage—has been exploring a path not taken by the Republican Party, but...

A Conservative Scholar’s Wisdom

The Case for Conservatism by Francis Graham Wilson, with a new introduction by Russell Kirk. Transaction Publishers [1951, 1969, 1990, 2011], 74 pp., $20 paper. Forty years have passed since Francis Wilson first published the three lectures contained in this elegant...

Annette Kirk Remembers Valerie Eliot

Kirk Center President Annette Kirk has written a brief remembrance of Valerie Eliot, their meetings, and the literary friendship of their late husbands.

Mrs. Kirk on Valerie Eliot (1926–2012)

When a handsome, statuesque Valerie Eliot entered the restaurant at which we met in June 1999, the pianist broke into selections from the musical Cats, much to the delight of my two daughters who a decade earlier had attended that musical in London with Russell and...

A Candle in the Darkness

Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts by Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner. Thomson/West (St. Paul), 2012608 pp., $49.95, cloth.These are dark days for American law. In June, Chief Justice John Roberts, in what was a stark betrayal of his oath to uphold the...

The Character of Our Constitution

Rights and Duties: Reflections on Our Conservative Constitution by Russell Kirk. Spence Publishing Company, 1997, 208 pp., $28 cloth.The present book includes all of Kirk’s earlier work, The Conservative Constitution (too long unavailable), and adds to it a number of...

Fall Newsletter

We are pleased to release the Fall 2012 Permanent Things, the latest number of the Russell Kirk Center newsletter, featuring updates on recent events and seminars at the Center.

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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