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.”

An Augustine for Our Age

I first met Russell Kirk when a professor of mine took me to the Kirk home—Piety Hill—in the winter of 1985. Shortly after that I attended an ISIPiety Hill seminar on renewing the higher learning with Dr. Kirk, Stephen Tonsor, and Gerhart Niemeyer presiding. I was a...

Russello around the web

Here's a round-up of recent writings by Bookman editor Gerald Russello elsewhere on the Internet and in print. • At the Imaginative Conservative Russello responds to Claes Ryn's argument that conservatives have failed the culture. • He reviews Gregory Wolfe's Beauty...

Books in Little

Ovid in Exile: Power and Poetic Redress in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto by Matthew M. McGowan (Brill, 264 pp.) At the height of his career and celebrity, the ancient poet Ovid was abruptly banished from Rome by the personal decree of emperor Caesar Augustus on...

Russell Kirk: An Appreciation

Samuel Johnson remarked once that we need to be reminded more often than we need to be instructed. It is a wise observation. The greatness of Russell Kirk’s achievement consisted in his surpassing ability to remind us of those permanent truths of the human condition;...

Germanna

Our friends at the Germanna Foundation are preserving the permanent things…literally… with this October 15 symposium on traditional masonry techniques to restore and maintain historic buildings.

Moving Briskly

Fall at the University Bookman has gotten off to a brisk start. We have published a symposium on conservatism and empire that garnered a number of notices across the web. We are preparing another symposium later this year; details to follow. This week, we are...

On Education, a Liberal that Liberals Shun

The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 261 pp., $17 paper, 2009 Toward the end of this highly readable book, E. D. Hirsch makes a very telling observation about the overall responses to his...

Knight of Truth

A eulogy for Russell Kirk.As we remember Russell Kirk, the author of an astonishing number of publications, the source of a new idea in American political life, the preserver and distributor of many treasures Of culture that without him would have slipped into the...

McAllister on Kirk

The Imaginative Conservative blog has posted an excerpt and link to an essay by Pepperdine's Ted McAllister on Kirk's Conservative Mind that is worth a look: “What was then more readily an act of preservation has become today an act of recovery.”

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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