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.

Who Are the Enemies of Academic Freedom?

“…the authors’ efforts to defend free speech and academic freedom ultimately fall flat. This is because, for all their handwringing about the red-state barbarians at the gates, Chemerinsky and Gillman cannot or will not see what their own argument and their own evidence of student, faculty, and administrator behavior show to even a mildly attentive reader: The greatest enemies of higher learning in America remain within the walls.”

Who’s the Furious One? 

“One also comes away from this book with the sense that her allegedly fit-to-be-tied subjects have had no legitimate reason to be concerned or troubled, much less furious, about anything at all in the American body politic. The reigning orthodoxy of liberal pluralism, however that has been packaged and repackaged, apparently had been—and deserves to continue to be—the prevailing story of life in America before, during, and well after what she hopes will soon prove to be little more than a briefly successful outburst on the part of the MAGA right.”

A New Introduction to the Austrian School

“After discussing Menger, the authors go on to present the ideas of subsequent major figures in the history of the Austrian school, including Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Israel Kirzner, and Murray Rothbard.”

Can the United States Have a Good History?

Can the United States Have a Good History?

“Midwesterners believed in Christianity, optimism, tolerance, local involvement, equality, and embracing hard work, including physical work, while avoiding luxury. They lived out their values by extensive reading, attending public lectures, and founding colleges and primary schools that taught character.”

Yuval Levin’s Stirring Defense of the Constitution

Yuval Levin’s Stirring Defense of the Constitution

“[Levin] believes that, far from being the source of our problems, the American Founding can teach us the best solution to our present discontent. To deal with the growing crisis of faith, he directs our attention to the wisdom at the heart of the Constitution.”

“Putting Civil Back in Civilization”

“Putting Civil Back in Civilization”

“Hudson urgently reminds us that if we cannot live civilly with one another, we may have reached the limits of our democratic ‘proposition,’ as Lincoln called it. Hudson has rightfully re-introduced civility into our vocabulary and, in doing so, raises an inspirational ideal and draws a ‘line-in-the-sand’ by which to judge behavior.”

Here’s Why Not

Here’s Why Not

“Goligher sets this Christian view against the secular view now reigning in healthcare: that humans have extrinsic value. To treat humans as creatures with extrinsic value—meaning they have value only for what they can do, not for what they are—is to treat humans as things that produce value as opposed to persons who are valuable in and of themselves.”

Gentlemen Losers

Gentlemen Losers

“Yet I suspect that one reason Steely Dan’s star has risen in our own day is that they cannot be exclusively claimed by cultural progressives. Whatever the personal convictions of Fagen and Becker might have been, their songs capture a certain temperamental conservatism, equal parts cynicism towards the promise of a brighter tomorrow and yearning for a sense of social order long past, that feels right at home in our age of fractured shabbiness. Combine this sensibility with the band’s relentless pursuit of aesthetic perfection, and you have a recipe for music that greatly appeals to a certain segment of young fogeys more indebted to T.S. Eliot than to Charlie Kirk.”

Thinking Ourselves into Oblivion

Thinking Ourselves into Oblivion

“Without formal and final causes… we have no access to the universal intelligible structures and purposes in the world. And without those, there is no possibility of meaningful philosophy.”

Genesis Through a Glass Darkly

Genesis Through a Glass Darkly

“Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis is not a commentary or a work of scholarship but a series of essays on the human encounter with the divine as portrayed in this first and perhaps most influential of all books.”

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.

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