The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

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Each week the Bookman brings you fresh reviews of the books that build culture, and essays that enliven the Permanent Things. Last year nearly 90,000 visitors engaged with the Bookman’s reviews, all free of charge and with no advertising to disrupt the reading experience. Our writers are touching hearts and minds across the globe with their reviews, bringing wisdom, creativity, and beauty to bear on the most important conversations happening in literature and culture.

Would you consider a gift to help us continue this work?

If just 1 in 4 of our readers contributed $10, we’d dramatically increase our capacity to recruit the brightest young writers and tackle more books and topics, all with a Kirkian angle. We’ve set a goal of raising $20k this month in order to continue our mission. Exceeding this amount will allow us to expand our work even more.

If you love the Bookman, and read us with regularity, we’d greatly appreciate your generous support this month.

With gratitude,

Luke Sheahan, Ph.D., editor
The University Bookman

P.S. As a special thank you to all Bookman supporters this month, we’ll send you a link to an audio recording of Ex Tenebris, one of Kirk’s best ghostly short stories. We think you’ll really enjoy it.

Campaign Progress

John Adams: Russell Kirk’s Founding Federalist

“…[Kirk] located the mainstream of the American Founding not with the Jeffersonian Republicans, but with their rivals in the Federalist party. Kirk admired them not only as practical statesmen, but also as anti-revolutionary thinkers in their own right. As he put it, the Constitution they supported was both ‘the most successful conservative device in the history of the world’ and a ‘great monument’ to the Federalists.”

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.

The Brothers Stuart and the Rise of Protestant England

“…Belloc remains a draught of fresh air and a happy antidote to the official version of English national history, with its idealized tale of public-spirited reforms and liberal advances broadening down to the happy present.”

The Fog of the American War for Independence

“Academic and popular history of the period has long noted the early intimidation and violence that accompanied the rise of an American political consciousness and revolutionary movement.”

“To Think Faith” as Educators

“…faith and pedagogy should be in harmony. Smith’s guide is not a theory of faith and teaching or how to sprinkle faith within teaching. ‘It offers repeated practice at noticing and thinking through ways in which faith and the process of teaching might connect in everyday practice,’ in the mundane moments of elementary, secondary, or higher education classrooms.”

Editor’s Introduction

The 2011 volume of Studies in Burke and His Time follows a four year gap in publication. This lapse reflects, in part, the economic conditions of our times, and the struggle to acquire the necessary funding to continue publication. Fortunately, through the support of...

The Perils of Neutrality

The Common Good of Constitutional Democracy: Essays in Political Philosophy and on Catholic Social Teaching by Martin Rhonheimer, edited by William F. Murphy, Jr. Catholic University of America Press, 2013. Paperback, 560 pages, $45. This collection of essays is...

Capitalism vs. the Free Market

The Morality of Capitalism: What Your Professors Won’t Tell You edited by Tom Palmer. Jameson Books, Inc., 2011. Paperback, 129 pp., $8.95. Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy by Robert Sirico. Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2012. Hardcover, 213...

Tolkien and the Great Tale

The Christian World of ‘The Hobbit’ by Devin Brown. Abingdon Press, 2012 193 pp., $14.99 paper.J. R. R. Tolkien’s fame as a founder of modern fantasy and as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century is assured. But he is still often not recognized...

Farming, Community, and Culture

Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, by Wendell Berry. Pantheon Books 1994, 208 pp., $20, cloth; $10 paper. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely. —Edmund Burke Wendell Berry’s career has spanned more than thirty years and this newest collection...

Marital Distress and the 2012 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize

Stag’s Leap: Poems, by Sharon Olds. Knopf, 2012. 112 pages, Hardcover, $27; Paperback, $17.On January 15, 2013, the Poetry Book Society in London announced that the winner of the annual T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry (awarded to the best new collection of poetry...

Studies in Burke and His Time

Studies in Burke and His Time

Welcome to Studies in Burke and His Time, the journal of the Edmund Burke Society of America. Our journal editors are Elizabeth Lambert and Michael Brown, and the executive editor is Ian Crowe. Please direct all articles, review submissions, and correspondence in the...

(The Future of) Liberalism in Our Disordered Age

Post-Liberalism: The Death of a Dream by Melvyn L. Fein. Transaction Press, 2012. Cloth, 359 pages, $40.Reality is never as we think of it. Yet we must live, act, think, choose, and find our place within some story about reality that purports to lay out the...

Prog Rock and the Permanent Things: More with Bradley Birzer

Prog Rock and the Permanent Things: More with Bradley Birzer

This is the second of two parts of a conversation with Bradley Birzer, who holds the Russell Amos Kirk Chair of American Studies at Hillsdale College and is one of his generation’s most important scholars of conservative thought and the tradition of Christian...

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.

Kirk saw poetry, fiction, tradition, and restraint as essential to understanding America and preserving its character. In his review of "On America," @cjscalia explores Kirk’s vision of the founding, statesmanship, literature, and the enduring ideas that have shaped the republic.

The Audacious Russell Kirk
Bruce P. Frohnen reviews "On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776" by Russell Kirk. Edited by Michael Lucchese.

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