“…[Kirk] located the mainstream of the American Founding not with the Jeffersonian Republicans, but with their rivals in the Federalist party. Kirk admired them not only as practical statesmen, but also as anti-revolutionary thinkers in their own right. As he put it, the Constitution they supported was both ‘the most successful conservative device in the history of the world’ and a ‘great monument’ to the Federalists.”

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.

“If Kirk—himself a superb literary critic—considered Whelan ‘the best writer of short stories ever to inhabit Michigan,’ it stands to reason that her works merit wider attention.”

“That is the whole of Campo’s argument, and the whole of her temperament, in a single anecdote: the conviction that attention to something perfect is not an evasion of catastrophe but the only serious response to it. It is also why she is worth the time of anyone who reads Wendell Berry, Emily Dickinson, Russell Kirk, or, and especially, Simone Weil.”

“Luke Burgis has written an interesting book exploring the tension between belonging and differentiation.”