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.”

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 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...

On Russian Conservatism

Russian Conservatism and Its Critics: A Study in Political Culture by Richard Pipes. Yale University Press (New Haven, Connecticut), 216 pp., $30.00 cloth, 2006. Constructing a sustainable political order has been the fundamental challenge for Russia since the Soviet...

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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