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.

Confronting our Current Digital Malaise

“Luke Burgis has written an interesting book exploring the tension between belonging and differentiation.”

A Secular Confession

“The story that she tells in these pages is one of a brewing and ongoing civil war, a civil war not between left and right in America, but a civil war within the Democratic Party.”

Ames, Hamilton, Marshall: Russell Kirk’s Other Founding Federalists

“The Federalist party, of course, is no more. It barely lasted past the fiftieth anniversary of American independence. But, as Russell Kirk demonstrated throughout his work, its conservative vision remains one of the most profound expressions of the meaning of the American Founding itself. Its adherents cannot simply be dismissed as retrograde aristocrats—they were patriots who understood that ‘order is the first need of all.’”

Ernest van den Haag (1914–2002)

In Memoriam With the death of Ernest van den Haag on March 21, 2002, the conservative movement lost one of its most redoubtable intellectual warriors in the decades after World War II. And the University Bookman lost one of its longtime friends and supporters. Like so...

Decline and Fall

At the End of an Age by John Lukacs. Yale University Press (New Haven, Connecticut), 240pp., $22.95 cloth, 2002. In his new book, At the End of an Age, historian John Lukacs argues that the Modern Era, which began about five hundred years ago, is rapidly coming to its...

A Touchstone of Eloquence and Wisdom

Creed & Culture: A Touchstone Reader Edited with an introduction by James M. Kushiner. ISI Books (Wilmington, Delaware), xv + 239 pp., $15.00 paper, 2003. “If Christian dogma is irrelevant to life, to what, in Heaven’s name, is it relevant?—since...

On Not Thinking in Slogans

The American Cause by Russell Kirk. Edited with a new Introduction by Gleaves Whitney. ISI Books (Wilmington, Delaware), xxii, 169 pp., $13.00 paper, 2002. This is a most appropriate time for the appearance of this short book, ably edited by Gleaves Whitney, aide and...

Behold the Reign of Man!

Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy by Paul Gottfried. University of Missouri Press (Columbia and London) 158 pp., $34.95 cloth, 2002. While shaken by the imbroglio of post-victory Iraq, many American conservatives nevertheless...

A Conversation with Joseph Pearce

In an office just off a busy street in Ypsilanti, Michigan, the Writer-in-Residence at Ave Maria College sits down to his work. This is Joseph Pearce, one of the preeminent writers of Catholic/Christian biography today and co-editor of the bimonthly St. Austin Review....

Conservatives and the Environmental Question

Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists; A Conservative Manifesto by Peter Huber. Basic Books (New York, New York), 224 pp., $15.00 paper, 1999. The Greening of Conservative America by John R. E. Bliese. Westview Press (Boulder, Colorado), 339...

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...

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.

The @KirkCenter has announced that the McLellan Prize for Free Speech will be awarded to influential legal scholar Eugene Volokh! @VolokhC https://kirkcenter.org/highlights/eugene-volokh-awarded-2026-richard-d-mclellan-prize-for-advancing-free-speech-and-expression/

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