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.”

Prudential Conservatism?

The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and its Times by Jeffrey Hart. ISI Books (Wilmington, Delaware), 410 pp., $28.00 cloth, 2006.Jeffrey Hart’s The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times is both a memoir of...

Summer 2007 Bookman

The Spring / Summer 2007 issue of the University Bookman is here! The table of contents and articles are now here online. We've also updated the masthead. Don’t subscribe? You can join the oldest conservative quarterly review of books by clicking here.

Philip Rieff, Modern Prophet

The Triumph of the Therapeutic by Philip Rieff. ISI Books (Wilmington, Delaware) 325 pp., $18.00 paper, 2006. “For the last time psychology!” Kafka urged, already amid a Western civilization doomed to repeat the mistakes of psychological man. Once it was believed that...

The Wolfe Who Cried Kirk

In the pages of the once-respectable New Republic, Alan Wolfe has written a scurrilous attack on Russell Kirk in the guise of a review of the recently published collection entitled The Essential Russell Kirk. The review is noteworthy not for its ugliness or completely...

Russello Interview

Gerald Russello has done an interview with John J. Miller at National Review Online discussing his new book on Kirk's thought.

Nash Heritage Lecture

Senior Fellow George H. Nash spoke at the Heritage Foundation on June 22, 2007 to give the Russell Kirk Lecture on Kirk's life and legacy and to celebrate the release of The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays. You can view the lecture or listen to the MP3 audio...

Is Life Worth Living?

Concluding a public lecture, Russell Kirk once assured his listeners: “If you look for the Supernatural, you will find it. I promise you: I have.” From the concluding chapter of Kirk's third-person autobiography.In some ages, what Thoreau says is true:...

Two Essays on the Imagination

We have added to the web site two pieces by Russell Kirk that touch on the moral imagination. First, “The Moral Imagination,” a 1981 essay that describes the concept. Second is “Is Life Worth Living?” the epilogue of Kirk’s autobiography, The Sword of...

Wall Street Journal

We were pleased to see the aptly titled op-ed “The Conservative Mind” by Peter Berkowitz in The Wall Street Journal on May 29, 2007. Very clearly written and helpful.

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.

Jesuits and Revolutions
Rev. Anthony D. Andreassi, C.O. on "Dragons: A Roman Requiem" by Joseph Carola, S.J.
@SophiaPress

Taking Movies Seriously, Perhaps Too Seriously
Thomas Banks on "The Screen and the Mirror: What Movies Show Us About Ourselves, the World, and God" by Gina Dalfonzo.

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