The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
Join Kirktober and help support the mission of the University Bookman
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
Good Economics on a Human Scale
“Alexander Salter has written an important book, examining how the political program of distributism can inform contemporary debates about political economy.”
Romano Guardini: A Man of His Times, A Man for Our Own
“…Guardini offers penetrating insights into what he would describe as the end of the modern world, a time in which he saw an old age fading into a new, now called ‘postmodern,’ one.”
Troublesome Corporeality: Mysticism, Gnosticism, and Sacramentality in The Rabbit Hutch
“Although Gunty openly rejects her Catholic faith, the remnants of her upbringing—especially her fascination with Christian mysticism—pervade The Rabbit Hutch, especially in the life of the novel’s heroine, 18-year-old orphan Blandine Watkins…”
Reading Alone
“[Maspero’s] book, complete with close readings of scripture and heavy helpings of theological and sociological insight, dives deep into the mystery of what it means to be human and how to heal after a trauma like lockdowns.”
Learn to Read Early, Then Read to Learn for the Rest of Your Life
“It is to the immense credit of E. D. Hirsch, Jr., and his colleagues and allies in hundreds of schools and communities, that a real, practicable, early-schooling program exists that may be the saving remnant in our otherwise-demoralizing cultural circumstances.”
How to Turn Back the Clock on Constitutional Law
“[Cooper and Dyer] argue convincingly that… the law of God as understood by Aquinas ought to inform our understanding of the Constitutional order, if we are to be true to our tradition.”
The Christian and Classical Roots of American Order
“When claiming the heritage of the traditional rights of Englishmen, Americans were not claiming mere privileges of political or national affiliation, but natural rights born of moral constraints upon the powers of the sovereign…”
Recovering the Founders’ Constitutional Order
“The founders, in their affirmation of the rule of law and the principle of consent, resoundingly rejected modernity’s embrace of unlimited and largely arbitrary state power. Such a rejection depends ultimately on man being made in the image and likeness of the Christian creator God…”
In the Details There Is No Devil
“…the book offers other important lines of evidence for gospel reliability, as well as a look at how early Christians discerned the meaning of what Jesus taught.”
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.
