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.’”

In Defense of Maintenance 

In Defense of Maintenance 

According to Vinsel and Russell, “The Innovation Delusion is the false belief that the pursuit of innovation and novelty will lead us into the promised land of growth and profit when, in reality, it will lead us to ignore the ever-accumulating pile of deferred maintenance and infrastructural debt—and, in the process, lead individuals toward burnout and our society to accelerating levels of exploitation and inequality.” 

Sowing Seeds in Useless Fields

Sowing Seeds in Useless Fields

“The drawing and quartering of liberal arts is the death of learning. The politics of special interests and the politicization of classrooms by activists posing as educators tilts the classroom towards indoctrination, ‘the dark and evil twin of teaching.'”

Christopher Dawson and Cultural Crisis

The Cultured Mind of Christopher Dawson

“Always in [Dawson’s] work is a sense of the creative interactions between religion and culture, between past and present, between man and his environment, between the material and the spiritual. Dawson had the confidence and humility of a polymath.”

The Book Gallery

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

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