The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Watch James Panero of the New Criterion discuss “The Urbanity of Russell Kirk” at the 2025 Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture.

The Urbanity of Russell Kirk

“The urban fabric must also be mended and darned through continuous upkeep. The city is not yours to experiment. From Russell to Russello, our ancestral spirits cast their shadows whether or not we choose to observe the city of god in the cities of men.”

Words from the Hearth

“Each poem maps a path on the journey by sharing the personal and religious experiences of a young woman falling in love, getting married, and then expecting and welcoming children. As a reader who tends to prefer prose to poetry, I appreciate the narrative arc as well as the opportunity to reminisce, through Reardon’s work, on my own similar experiences. Reardon’s writing is intensely religious, elevating the seemingly mundane aspects of home life to a spiritual level. Because it draws such powerful connections, it invites readers to ponder how even the simplest details of their lives can lead to the divine.”

A Knight of the American West

“His new book is an exciting chivalric adventure and romance, while also being a contemporary American novel set in the Southwest USA. Exceptionally well written, its straightforward crafting is an encouragement to the reader who eagerly returns to its pages.”

Coming to Terms with Sherman

“…Glenn Arbery has contemporary America down cold, the more so since the cultural variations between North and South are far from being as marked as they were even fifty years ago.”

The Cultured Mind of Christopher Dawson

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.”

Theologian of the Heart

Theologian of the Heart

On the passing of Pope Benedict XVI, we rerun this review essay by Religion Editor David Bonagura, which was originally published on October 20, 2008.

More Than a Commercial Republic

More Than a Commercial Republic

“Given recent ideological and partisan shifts, Gregg argues, America today faces a choice between the path of free markets or state capitalism.”

The Circumnavigation of Eliot

The Circumnavigation of Eliot

“A company of scholars, led by Professor Ronald Schuchard, labored for a decade to produce this monumental scholarly work… The project was brilliantly and painstakingly accomplished, and it is having a marked effect on scholarly studies of Eliot…”

The Waste Land at 100

The Waste Land at 100

“If poets came to speak less clearly in consequence of Eliot’s great reputation, Eliot also reestablished poetry as a way of coming to know reality and to perceive the order of being even amid the wreckage of history. If he staged a revolution, he also made possible a restoration.”

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.

@EvieSolheim By the way, the @KirkCenter takes literature, ethics, character formation, & cultural renewal seriously

Encourage you to participate in our @ubookman academic journal & the fellowship of our literary & academic community, enshrining what Dr. Kirk calls “the Moral Imagination”

Load More

Shop through Regnery
Support the Kirk Center
& University Bookman