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.

A Heroic Little Sparrow Shines Brightly in the Dark World of Children’s Literature

“The story is as delightful and charming as it sounds, recounting the odyssey of a virtuous sparrow named Passer who must move his family to a new home after ‘big yellow machines’ appear at his home.”

Ulyssean Interrogations at Dusk, or Slowing Down at 65

“Odysseus himself was offered immortality by the nymph Calypso—and refused it. He chose instead to return to his wife Penelope, a mortal woman who would age. He chose to return to a finite life marked by loss, memory, and longing; and in that choice, I have always thought, lies his greatest courage—and his deepest wisdom… I hope and I believe that I would have made the same Ulyssean decision.”

From the Man Who Loved America

“Angelo Codevilla advanced and argued for an anti-Wilsonian approach to both American foreign and American domestic policy.”

Natural Law in the Protestant Tradition

Natural Law in the Protestant Tradition

“Jensen’s recent book… makes an important contribution to the aforementioned Aufklärung of Protestant natural law, particularly for the way in which it situates the Wittenberg reformer’s various statements about natural law in historical and polemical context rather than painting a picture of… seamless development…”

Identity Politics as Ersatz Religion

Identity Politics as Ersatz Religion

“As Mitchell sees it, there is only one path back from the ‘debilitating pathology’ of identity politics. It is for a community of thoughtful individuals to build, or rebuild, a society of honest ‘face-to-face’ relationships and a ‘politics of competence,’ and thereby restore a society in which individuals are judged on virtue, merit, and conduct rather than affiliation with one or more distinct identity groups.”

From The Quest for Community to the Restoration of Authority

The Quest for Community at 70

“Democracy, as Nisbet imagined it, was not the opposite of fascism and communism, but, in its essence, possibly as totalitarian as either, just in a kinder, more gentle fashion.”

Kirk 101: The Politics of Prudence

Kirk 101: The Politics of Prudence

“The vision of Politics of Prudence is as an inoculation against the ‘sham religion and sham philosophy’ of ideology. It is not a better ideology that we need, but rather none at all.”

Kirk 101: The Politics of Prudence

The Prophet of Imprudence

“As the conservative mind is again on the defensive in America… The Politics of Prudence suggests that no less than the imprudence of conservatives is much to blame for the latest rout. Thirty years ago, few conservatives wanted to hear such a message. Today it calls out as a testament to what went wrong and a corrective for what’s to come.”

Kirk 101: The Politics of Prudence

The Politics of Prudence: Introduction to the 2023 Edition

“The politics of prudence assumes that imperfection is a permanent part of human character and human society. We grope toward a tolerable order that accepts imperfection, the devil we know, while avoiding greater evils, the devil we do not know. Preservation of civilization, as imperfect as it is, is the conservative’s work.”

Germans at War

Germans at War

“…Oxford military historian Peter H. Wilson attempts to take aim at another popular narrative about World War II: that Germans are essentially militant people whose history inevitably led to World War II and National Socialism.”

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.

For America250, @lsheahan enters the fray:
What the American Revolution Secured: Order, Justice, and Freedom
A "revolution not made, but prevented.” Russell Kirk fondly and frequently quoted E. J. Payne’s pithy summary of Burke’s view of the Glorious Revolution.

"So yes, Lord Alfred, perhaps you are right after all. ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world!  Perhaps one last Ulyssean adventure remains beyond the sunset, and perhaps some work of noble note may yet be done."

Load More

Shop through Regnery
Support the Kirk Center
& University Bookman