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.”

A Return to Reason

A conversation with Robert Royal.The University Bookman is delighted to post this interview with Robert Royal, president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington D.C. and Editor-in-Chief of The Catholic Thing. He has written, edited, and translated sixteen...

The Enduring Brownson

The Enduring Brownson

In Search of the American Spirit: The Political Thought of Orestes Brownson by Gregory S. Butler. Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, Illinois, 1992), 278 pp., $32.50 cloth. In the generation following the founding fathers of the American republic, Orestes...

Taking Stock

Though you would not know it from the weather outside the Bookman’s headquarters, Spring has come, and with it the end of the first quarter of the new online University Bookman. The transition has been a success: our overall traffic has increased beyond even the...

Santayana’s Liberty

The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States by George Santayana, edited by James Seaton. Yale University Press, 2009. Paper, 240 pp. $16.This volume contains in full the two title works of George Santayana (1863–1952) as...

Modern Flaws and Lasting Norms

Modern Flaws and Lasting Norms

Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormity in Literature and Politics, by Russell Kirk. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969 [Open Court 1999]. Russell Kirk remains consistently one of the most interesting American defenders of the conservative...

On What Knowledge Pertains To

On Essays and LettersIn tightly reasoned and intricate books, especially those of great writers, we find short segments that we do well to spell out as short essays of our own. A thing is never ours unless we state it, articulate it. The great Platonic teaching is...

The Dark Ages of the Enlightenment

The Brave New World of the Enlightenment by Louis I. Bredvold. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961. 164 pp. Fifteen years ago, Louis I. Bredvold noted that Carl Becker’s The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers needed badly to be rewritten....

Significance and Missteps

Adam Schwartz looks at a recent intellectual biography of G. K. Chesterton that breaks new ground in the field, but also makes some significant missteps in interpretation.

Wilhelm Roepke and the ‘Third Road’

The enormous span of Wilhelm Roepke’s interests and writings complicates the task of doing justice to his thought within the confines of an essay. Hence, I have elected to focus on just one aspect of his approach and of his philosophy, but one that has proved to be...

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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