The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Frontier Fiction at Its Best

“This classic frontier story—of the fostered orphan who escapes the baddies who killed his family and who returns to wreak vengeance upon them—is enriched by a vivid depiction of Comanche culture and traditional way of life and by narrative motifs whose roots are deep in the soil of myth and fable…”

The Postmodern Poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien

“Even if Tolkien did not understand his literary enterprise as distinctively modernist, many of the techniques he deployed—the creation of a secondary world, for instance, or his invented languages, and above all the metatextual integration of poetry and prose—nonetheless bear a resemblance to the experiments in letters conducted by his more avant-garde peers.”

Catholic Zen

“Walsh’s philosophy is timely. For the Christian, it’s imperative to try to understand the mystery of the Trinity and always will be, so theology of the person is destined to be a never-completed project. For everybody else, the question of the person has invaded our daily lives. Invaded is the wrong word, of course. The person is always there, but occasionally we glimpse deeply the persons that are woven into our lives. Disputations on abortion and euthanasia reduce to warring conceptions of the person, and now artificial intelligence challenges commonplace understandings of persons and relationships.”

Outlining Sanity in the Garden

“…there are those books like The Tao of Vegetable Gardening by Carol Deppe, which is a beautiful hybrid: mostly how-to gardening advice, but laced with a meditational attitude that, though rarely overt, informs the book as a whole… [It] is part of a rich bed of American gardening literature that, in the words of M.E. Bradford, mixes ‘practical agricultural advice and moral reflection.’”

Communism: Product of the Fallen West

Communism: Product of the Fallen West

“The reason the Western world should fear Communism, according to Sheen, is not because it is a strong force but rather because the West is weak due to the fact that it has turned away from God and morality.”

Choosing a Currency

Choosing a Currency

“…White succeeds in presenting the complexity of money and its purpose in a way that is both informative and friendly to the general reader.”

“To Help Man Endure by Lifting His Heart”: Earl Hamner at 100

“To Help Man Endure by Lifting His Heart”: Earl Hamner at 100

“Through his work, Earl Hamner not only became one of America’s favorite storytellers; he also became a conservator of the truth that though the modern world disdains the past and elevates immediacy, wealth, and power, the true measure of life’s meaning lies in love, grace, gentleness, forgiveness, and joy.”

Real Natural Law 

Real Natural Law 

“The existence of God and his providential governance of the universe are the right subjects for public debate over the basis and content of natural law.”

Knights On a Darkling Plain

Knights On a Darkling Plain

“Kirk’s reminder speaks to the selflessness of those who defend the ‘permanent things’ and the importance of these things (family, community, faith, and tradition) to our world.”

Mysteries Require Odes, Not Emails

Mysteries Require Odes, Not Emails

“In this volume Christian verse encompasses religious themes addressed ‘explicitly or implicitly’ by poets, whether practicing or lapsed, ‘whose imagination is shaped by the tenets, symbols, and traditions of the faith.’

The Book Gallery

A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.

Shop through Regnery
Support the Kirk Center
& University Bookman