The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
Awakening the Moral Imagination
Fall 1999 If the events of the past year have demonstrated anything it is the moral and intellectual impoverishment of the American people. From Monica to Littleton the tragic consequences of this fact have been played out on a dizzying scale. Sadly, the road back...
Practical Atheism
The Way of the (Modern) World: Or, Why It’s Tempting to Live As If God Doesn’t Exist by Craig M. Gay. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company (255 Jefferson Avenue, S.E., Grand Rapids, MI 49503), 338 pp., 1998. Craig Gay’s The Way of the (Modern) World...
Are Fish Good for the Brain?
On Essays and LettersWe used to have an ethics teacher in Spokane who, when he wanted to give an example of some intricate moral point, would pull out his dog-eared copy of Will Cuppy’s book, How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes. No doubt today he would be...
Stubborn Myths
Those Terrible Middle Ages! Debunking the Myths, by Régine Pernoud, translated by Anne Englund Nash. Ignatius Press (San Francisco, California) 179 pp., $12.95 paper, 2001. We have all more or less been formed by the grand narrative of the Enlightenment. In...
Henrie on Kirk
Kirk was convinced that in our age, the unimagined life is not worth living for a human being. He labored to reform our sensibilities, so that we could see ourselves both for what we are and for what we have become. He labored to make available an intellectual...
Kirk on Types of Imagination
Imagination it is that shapes society—moral imagination, or idyllic imagination, or diabolic imagination.
Kirk on Eliot on PT
By 'the Permanent Things' [T. S. Eliot] meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in that continuity of belief and...
Kirk on Progress
Real progress consists in the movement of mankind toward the understanding of norms, and toward conformity to norms. Real decadence consists in the movement of mankind away from the understanding of norms, and away from obedience to norms.
Books in Little
A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America, John J. Miller (Encounter Books, 241 pp. $25.95). As American conservatism matures, and its histories are written, the entities and individuals that made its rise and influence possible have begun to...
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.