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.”

The Revitalized College: A Model

A few years ago, a graduate of New York University brought suit against that institution. He had been induced to enter those halls (so ran his plea) by the promise that through collegiate studies he would obtain wisdom. But after graduation, he found himself as...

The Common Heritage of America and Europe

“Western civilization,” “North Atlantic community,” “the unity of the free world”—such phrases are employed nowadays by our publicists and our politicians so frequently and loosely that, to a good many of us in America, the words have ceased to signify much. Yet the...

The Best Form of Government

Politics being the art of the possible, I venture to suggest here the general lineaments of the kind of government which seems reasonably consonant with true human happiness. I think that in this problem we need to refer to two principles. The first principle is that...

Kirk in the 1950s

We have new posts of several articles of Russell Kirk in the online archive, including four from the 1950s. Kirk covers topics including tradition, revolution, the age of boredom (addressing themes that later became Eliot and His Age), and "The Inhumane Businessman."...

The Inhumane Businessman

“A man is seldom more innocently occupied than when he is engaged in making money,” said Dr. Samuel Johnson. But he may be cheating himself, says an observer of modern American money-makers.American businessmen are inhumane. I do not mean that they are inhuman; they...

Friedrich Gentz on Revolutions

A little book forgotten for a century and a half, Gentz’s Origin and Principles of the American Revolution, compared with the Origin and Principles of the French Revolution, has recently been reprinted in the United States. For the revolutions of our own century have...

English Letters in the Age of Boredom

Some day I shall write a book with the title The Age of Eliot. The span of Mr. T. S. Eliot’s life, extending from the ascendancy of President Cleveland and Lord Salisbury to our present troubled hour, has been characterized by as much material change as any age in the...

What Are American Traditions?

Everyone seems to be enthusiastic about tradition nowadays—especially the people who denounce most things established in morals and politics. Professor Henry Steele Commager thinks that the great American tradition is a tradition of doubting everything; Mr. E. V....

June Chesterton Centennial

The Kirk Center is pleased to join the G. K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture to co-sponsor a conference on the theme of “What’s Wrong With the World,” a centenary celebration of the publication of G. K. Chesterton’s book. The conference will be held in...

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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