The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Join Kirktober and help support the mission of the University Bookman

 

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.”

The Tolstoy Locomotive on the Berlin Track

Twenty-seven years ago, in 1953, at the height of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union, a short essay by an Oxford don produced a swiftly swelling wave of praise among public thinkers and intellectuals, elevating its writer to a situation of...

Five Faces of Death

Love Is Stronger than Death by Peter Kreeft (Ignatius Press, 1992; originally published in 1979), 121 pages. It might well be expected that a book on death and how we view it would be gloomy and depressing. But Peter Kreeft’s Love Is Stronger than Death, recommended...

About the Bookman

“Reviewing Books that Build Culture.” For over five decades, the University Bookman, founded by Russell Kirk, has sought to redeem the time by identifying and discussing those books that diagnose the modern age and support the renewal of culture and the common good....

unbought

A poor man, if he has dignity, honesty, the respect of his neighbors, a realization of his duties, a love of the wisdom of his ancestors, and possibly some taste for knowledge or beauty, is rich in the unbought grace of life.

Imaginative Conservative

The Imaginative Conservative blog has been posting lots of great material by and about Russell Kirk, including Kirk's reflection on the twelve days of Christmas, the 1953 review of The Conservative Mind from the New York Times, and a selection on the unbought grace of...

Books in Little

The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion by Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger (Ignatius Press, 85 pp.) Does the free state have pre-political moral foundations? This slim volume contains opposing answers to this question by Habermas, one of...

What Is All This?

Russell Kirk presented this lecture as the 1986 Commencement Address at La Lumiere School. Once upon a time I was seated in an automobile passing rapidly along the broad highway that runs between Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo. My companion in the back seat was the very...

The Long Twilight

On Essays and Letters“If we say that human civilization has existed for about a millionth of the age of this Galaxy, we may not be far wrong.” —Arthur C. Clarke, 1963. On every side, we are besieged with theories telling us that, due to man, we are depriving future...

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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