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.

To Find Eyes to See

“Hren selects earnest classics that have stood the test of time—books that generations of readers have found edifying and moving. But also, in the introduction and conclusion alike, Hren returns to another key point of fiction: it doesn’t just help us see extraordinary truth, although it can. More important is that fiction gives us eyes to see the transcendence of ordinary lives, including our own.”

Rural America as It Really Is

“Harold Bell Wright, regardless of how literary tastemakers viewed him in the 1920s, is the central figure in the origin of Branson. Though denigrated by the Baldwins and H. L. Menckens of his day, Wright was one of the century’s best-selling novelists.”

The Poet Watches Birds

“Jennifer A. Hartenburg’s debut collection of poems… offers such a poetic practice of waking, attending, and caring. These are poems rich with the life of the world, flocking with birds and bees both literal and metaphorical, but also closely attentive to the quiddities of language and the motions of the soul.”

You Have the Body

Habeas Corpus. From England to Empire by Paul D. Halliday. (Harvard University Press, 2010, 502 pp., $39.95) The legal right to be judged by a neutral arbiter before as a condition of imprisonment is deeply ingrained in the Anglo-American legal system, so much so that...

Two Cold Warriors

The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War by Nicholas Thompson. Henry Holt and Company, 2009, ISBN: 978-0-8050-8142-8, pp. 403, $27.50The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War is not a...

The Farewell Address Revisited

As late as a century ago Washington’s Farewell Address would have ranked along with the Declaration and the Constitution as an intellectual source of periodic self-renewal for American patriots. It was still being memorized and declaimed in schools and referred to...

Recommended reading on economics

In Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute, Ryan Anderson has a two-part article on the flaws of modern economics (part one) (part two). We commend it to your attention. Anderson notes the lacunae in modern economic thought, which has little...

Poetry and the Common Language

If there is one principle which is nearly axiomatic among our contemporaries who regard themselves as poets and critics of poetry, it is that poetry should be written in the language of the everyday. This opinion can be traced back to Wordsworth’s famous assertion...

Christian Studies and the Liberal Arts College

This paper was delivered at the launching of the Christian Studies Institute program at Hillsdale College on November 8, 1980. What can a student today rightfully demand from a “liberal arts education”? A diploma that translates into a better-paid job? Such a...

Divine Faith, Human Faith

John Henry Newman: A View of Catholic Faith for the New Millennium by John R. Connolly. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005, pp. xviii+162. cloth $90; paper: $30.With this book, Connolly, a professor at Loyola Marymount, hopes to reach not only theologians and...

Newman’s ‘Idea’ and the Crisis of the Secular University

The secular university in the United States has reached a long-deferred moment of truth and ought to be ripe for the wisdom of John Henry Newman. Looking at the university today, its overextension, confusion about its purpose, catastrophic funding decline, and...

Resisting the Imperial Academy

The Critic as Conservator: Essays in Literature, Society, and Culture by George A. Panichas. Catholic University of America Press (Baltimore, MD) 1992, xii + 262 pp., $49.95.If you think that our intellectual culture is healthy, you do not want to read this book. It...

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.

To Find Eyes to See
@NadyaWilliams81 on "More Than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature" by Joshua Hren. @WordOnFire Luminor

Rural America as It Really Is
Jason C. Phillips on "Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America" by Joanna Dee Das. @UChicagoPress

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