The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Frontier Fiction at Its Best

“This classic frontier story—of the fostered orphan who escapes the baddies who killed his family and who returns to wreak vengeance upon them—is enriched by a vivid depiction of Comanche culture and traditional way of life and by narrative motifs whose roots are deep in the soil of myth and fable…”

The Postmodern Poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien

“Even if Tolkien did not understand his literary enterprise as distinctively modernist, many of the techniques he deployed—the creation of a secondary world, for instance, or his invented languages, and above all the metatextual integration of poetry and prose—nonetheless bear a resemblance to the experiments in letters conducted by his more avant-garde peers.”

Catholic Zen

“Walsh’s philosophy is timely. For the Christian, it’s imperative to try to understand the mystery of the Trinity and always will be, so theology of the person is destined to be a never-completed project. For everybody else, the question of the person has invaded our daily lives. Invaded is the wrong word, of course. The person is always there, but occasionally we glimpse deeply the persons that are woven into our lives. Disputations on abortion and euthanasia reduce to warring conceptions of the person, and now artificial intelligence challenges commonplace understandings of persons and relationships.”

Outlining Sanity in the Garden

“…there are those books like The Tao of Vegetable Gardening by Carol Deppe, which is a beautiful hybrid: mostly how-to gardening advice, but laced with a meditational attitude that, though rarely overt, informs the book as a whole… [It] is part of a rich bed of American gardening literature that, in the words of M.E. Bradford, mixes ‘practical agricultural advice and moral reflection.’”

Two Cities: The Public and the Private

Two Cities: The Public and the Private

“The era of superlatives, the French Revolution, was the time when real people, tired of their private sufferings, abandoned their real names to become citoyens… Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, and other pompous terms, took the place of the real, little, and unwordable affections, turning friends into foes, in the name of an unreal solidarity.”

Remembering Our Unruly Character

Remembering Our Unruly Character

“…Frohnen and McAllister are explicit… that Americans must ‘rediscover’ their unruly character, and it becomes clear that their efforts to mine the historical roots of this defiant, ornery nature are grounded in a concern to push back and save the American way of life…”

Why Public Reason Fails

Why Public Reason Fails

“It is only at a local level that true political deliberation among citizens can take place. Holston’s central message is that, if deliberative democrats are serious about their enterprise, they ought to be working to devolve decision making to the local level as far as possible.”

Christian Freedom and the Western Political Tradition

Christian Freedom and the Western Political Tradition

“For Schindler, there is no tradition without freedom, and no freedom without tradition. These ideas are a precious heritage to be guarded with great care, because they are a gift of the wise born before the present and the God who inspired their wisdom.”

The Spiritualist Origins of Modern Disorder

The Spiritualist Origins of Modern Disorder

“…the dominant characteristic of the new spirituality was the inflation, as egregious as it was absurd, of thought, of language, and of self: every man (or woman) a prophet, every man his own priest, every man a genius, each dedicated to what Dominic Green calls ‘the aristocrat within.’”

The Book Gallery

A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.

Shop through Regnery
Support the Kirk Center
& University Bookman