The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

What the American Revolution Secured: Order, Justice, and Freedom

Throughout the semiquincentennial year celebrating America’s independence, The University Bookman will invite a range of writers and speakers to contribute to a series drawing upon Russell Kirk’s work on the American Revolution and the constitutional order it secured.

Harvey Mansfield’s Long Dissent

“Mansfield’s central and most important complaint about Harvard… is that its faculty has failed to design or even to articulate the general education that might characterize the educated man.”

Hebraic Ideas at the Founding

“…is there room for Jews and Christians to draw closer together adding Hebraic ideas into the treasury of American self-understanding?”

What We’re Reading

Summer Reading Suggestions

Making It Home

Making It Home

“The perils and wonders of the journey home pervade Bilbro’s entire collection, through a variety of verse forms and subjects, many of which are seemingly mundane, as in ‘Listening to the Iliad while Raking Leaves…'”

Aging White Male Future Shock: The Contemporary Relevance of a Sociological Classic

Aging White Male Future Shock: The Contemporary Relevance of a Sociological Classic

“’Future Shock?’ I use that phrase to characterize what I have observed as the predicament—or (as they might view it) the ‘plight’—of aging white males who are buffeted by a host of new developments, ranging from the #MeToo and Black Lives Matters movements to revolutionary technologies of the digital world, that have confused or even paralyzed them.”

The Intrinsic Argument for Free Speech

The Intrinsic Argument for Free Speech

“Core to Turley’s argument is that free speech is justified in the natural law—by which he means modern natural law. Free speech must attach to any coherent understanding of individual rights. In this, Turley is solidly in the liberal tradition. But his argument goes further, drawing from a more nuanced understanding of the person than we often regrettably find in liberal philosophy.”

The Visionary Stigmatists and the Hope of Mercy

The Visionary Stigmatists and the Hope of Mercy

“…Kengor proceeds in his history of key stigmatists through Christian history, looking at the medieval stigmatists of renown including Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Catherine of Sienna, to more modern stigmatists of the past century including Saint Padre Pio and Saint Faustina.”

Challenging the Contraceptive Mind

Challenging the Contraceptive Mind

“…philosophy underlies her work and makes itself evident throughout. Though she applies economic terms to her findings about childbearing—with language of costs and benefits—and draws conclusions about economics and policy, Pakaluk is fundamentally making, alongside her subjects, a philosophical argument about the value of human life. Together with the women of her sample, Pakaluk maintains that children are blessings worth living and dying for, and that having one more child is always a blessing.”

Challenging the Contraceptive Mind

Motherhood in an Age of Childlessness

“Pakaluk posits that her interviews revealed a startling thesis: a supernatural outlook, whereby self-sacrifice is assessed as gain, is perhaps the only way nowadays that most college-educated women are ever going to regard the benefits of large families as greater than the costs. “

The Conservative Resurgence

The Conservative Resurgence

“Milikh begins his introductory essay by straightforwardly asserting that the goal of the book ‘is to correct the trajectory of the Right after several generations of political losses, moral delusions, and intellectual errors.'”

The Book Gallery

A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition. Click on the icon in the upper right corner of the video to see more episodes in this series or check out our YouTube page.

This is good. I’d like to see a follow up piece on Wood’s The American Revolution and on Power & Liberty. Also, maybe some comment on the essay in The Idea of America that walks back the claim in Creation that 1789 marked the end of classical
Politics (the button interests and

“Anton’s book, and his entire worldview, stand as direct challenges to elite preferences and institutions: Okay, boomer, what next?”

Quite the review of Michael Anton's book from Brad Watson in @KirkCenter's @ubookman. https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/a-man-for-all-seasons/

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