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.”

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.”

A Story of Redemption in Washington

A conversation with Tim Goeglein.Timothy S. Goeglein is currently Vice President of External Relations at Focus on the Family and a Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation in Washington. Before that he served in the White House of President George W. Bush as a...

Russello in the WSJ

Gerald Russello reviews Michael Toth's book on founding father Oliver Ellsworth in the Wall Street Journal: “Uniting the Nation.”

Imaginative Conservative series and other items of note

A few items to call to your attention: • Our friends at The Imaginative Conservative are running a series of posts on "books that make us human" that's well worth a look. • They also ran an item recently on early work of Russell Kirk and his libertarian or merely...

Old Roads and Montesquieu’s Library

On Essays and LettersStudents of mine travel. Not a few of them manage to send me a note or a card, especially when they run across something they read in class or something they thought Schall would enjoy seeing. “I am currently in France,” a recently graduated...

A Child’s Imagination is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child by Anthony Esolen (ISI Books, November 2010), 320 pp., $26.95.“A good book is a dangerous thing. . . . It carries within it the possibility . . . of cracking open the shell of routine that prevents us from seeing the...

And the Tragedy Continues

Symposium: Conservatism and EmpireTen years on, September 11 is a tragedy that continues to break hearts. Family and friends continue to mourn loved ones whose lives were cut short. Many, many Americans mourn the loss of our long and closely held illusion that our...

How the GOP swallowed the Conservative Movement

Symposium: Conservatism and EmpireThe state of “American conservatism” can be fully appreciated by turning on FOX News and then listening to Karl Rove, Sean Hannity, or Bill Kristol present their customary civics lesson. One supposedly becomes a conservative by...

Empire and the Crisis of American Conservatism

Symposium: Conservatism and EmpireConservatism is the will to remain true to type, so American conservatism is a preference for America to remain American. In most ways that makes it a conservatism like any other. America is a particular society, and as such connects...

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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