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.”

Poetically Thinking

The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan by George Steiner. New Directions, 2012. 224 pages, $25. In an often-cited passage of Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Monsieur Jourdain explains to the Maître de Philosophie that he wants to write a love note to...

Spring Newsletter

The latest number of the Russell Kirk Center newsletter (Spring 2012) has just been posted. It features news on the launch of the publishing partnership between the Kirk Center and Brazilian publisher É Realizações and a profile of Wilbur Fellow Ryan Streeter. You...

The Sexual Revolution and the Will to Disbelieve

Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution by Mary Eberstadt. Ignatius Press (San Francisco), 2012. 175 pages, $20.Mary Eberstadt’s slim new essay collection, Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, may at first be more...

Uncanny Tales of the Moral Imagination

Uncanny Tales of the Moral Imagination

The Princess of All Lands by Russell Kirk. Arkham House Publishers, Sauk City, Wisconsin 53583. 1979. 238 pages. $8.95. [The stories from this volume are included in Ancestral Shadows (Eerdmans 2004), Kirk’s collected ghostly tales. —Ed.] On the surface, these are...

RIP Irving Louis Horowitz

The Kirk Center and The University Bookman regret the passing of sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz, who died in March. Recipient of many accolades, Horowitz was a sociologist of wide-ranging interests, from religionto analysis of state power and social order in...

Grounding the Life of the Mind

Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America by Daniel J. Flynn. ISI Books (Wilmington, DE), 2011. 187 pp., $28 clothThe Great Books approach to education, promoted by one of the subjects of this book, Mortimer Adler, is noble in...

A Thundering Paradox of a Life

George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis. New York: The Penguin Press. 2011. 784 pp. $40. William Manchester in his acclaimed biography of Douglas MacArthur, American Caesar, introduced his subject as a “thundering paradox of a man.” The same could be...

Man, Proud Man

Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo, translated by Gregory Elliott. London and New York: Verso Books, 2011. Pages viii+375. $35. Paradox and irony immediately confront the historian of liberalism. Commonly understood as the tradition of political thought...

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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