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.

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“The pieces are set primarily at Hadas’s house in rural northern Vermont, and the house itself becomes the intersection where the tangible and intangible, the present and past, even prose and poetry, inextricably blend.”

Preparing for Leisure

“If modern technology is making it increasingly possible to have the opportunities for leisure that Athenian citizens had, then there has never been a better time to rediscover this forgotten ideal.”

Michigan’s Neglected Civil War Governor

“Blair, as Dempsey notes, certainly fit the bill of a radical. The notion that slavery’s expansion needed to cease—the Lincolnian proposition—was far too mild for him; he wanted to kill slavery where it was, and he nurtured a burgeoning community of like-minded institutions—civic, educational, political, and religious—in Michigan.”

Order for a Disordered Time

Order for a Disordered Time

“When one thinks of order one might think of the phrase law and order. Kirk explains, however, that order is wider and larger than law.”

Order for a Disordered Time

Kirk’s Constitution: From the Roots to the End of American Order?

“The tragedy is that Kirk was correct: our Constitution was grounded in a deeper tradition, embodied in the people’s habits of thought and social practice, its religion, its historical common mind, its recognition of the importance and nature of order in the soul and, from it, order in the commonwealth. It is this tradition—this people—we have more than half lost. From this loss we have lost our public order, along with the Constitution that once supported it through good, legitimate law. “

The Babbitt School of Conservatism

The Babbitt School of Conservatism

“Viereck and Kirk—the one a Pulitzer-winning poet, the other a highly regarded author of eerie fiction—understood the nexus of morality, imagination, and politics. But the businessmen, journalists, policy experts, and politicians who came to define the conservative movement just a few years after the appearance of The Conservative Mind did not.”

The Babbitt School of Conservatism

The Conservative Need for Conservative Philosophy

“Ryn does not take sides in the ideological wars but urges conservatives to reject ideology altogether and to engage in deeper philosophical thinking. Philosophy does the opposite of ideology. It recognizes complexity and gropes toward a deeper understanding of reality that builds on the insights of previous thinkers. There are no final answers in true philosophy… Moreover, monistic, ideological thinking is inconsistent with constitutional politics, which requires compromise and consensus.”

The Babbitt School of Conservatism

A Half Century of Conservative Criticism

“…the most important theme of his essays suggests that all the common answers about where conservatism went wrong avoid a more fundamental one: conservatives have been too obsessed with politics.”

Literary Virtue and Vice

Literary Virtue and Vice

“Griffis, Ooms, and Roberts offer practices of thought and attention that those eager to read deeply would do well to implement. Yet those eager to learn how Christianity ought to inform their reading and thinking would do well to consult other writers less concerned with rehearsing the language of our milieu, such as C.S. Lewis, Flannery O’Connor, T.S. Eliot, Dana Gioia.”

JP O’Malley Interviews Author Maurice Samuels

JP O’Malley Interviews Author Maurice Samuels

“‘Dreyfus’s Jewishness played a major role’ in convincing many within the army hierarchy to believe he was a traitor and a spy, Samuels stresses… This, in essence, is the main thesis put forward in [the book]. ‘Clearly, you cannot write about this case without mentioning the fact that Dreyfus was Jewish, or bringing up the role of antisemitism,’ the historian points out.”

The Left Wing Patriot

The Left Wing Patriot

“A man of the left and an American patriot, [Peretz] is a rare bird today—and, therefore, possibly even a controversial one, not to mention an iconoclastic one.” 

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.

"In an age when so many of our inherited institutions seem to be unraveling under the pressures of a restless, self-regarding individualism, it is a rare and welcome thing to encounter a book that speaks with quiet conviction about the things that have long sustained the American

"If classical teachers believe that truth, beauty, and goodness can indeed change the world, then the sort of student (and teacher and school) described by @AnthonyEsolen is a net gain for this world. And his Classical Catechism serves as a helpful tool in building the necessary

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