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.’”

Irving Babbitt’s Defense of the Humanities

Democracy and Leadership at 100: Lessons for the 21st Century

“…Russell Kirk… calls it ‘one of the few truly important works of political thought to be written by an American in the twentieth century—or, for that matter, during the past two centuries.’ He saw clearly that Babbitt’s diagnosis of the post-WWI moment was rooted in a deep understanding of timeless elements of the human condition. Moreover, because the trends Babbitt discussed in the 1920s have continued largely unabated since that time, his critique of them and prescriptions to remedy them remain salient.”

Irving Babbitt’s Defense of the Humanities

The Great Intellectual Scandal: Irving Babbitt and His Traditionalist Critics  

“…Babbitt identified tendencies in Western modernity that were eroding the very foundations of civilization, including those of American constitutionalism. He also showed how in the circumstances of the modern world they might be reinforced. He explained, in particular, how a transformation of the imagination was causing disastrous moral-spiritual and cultural change and what countermeasures were needed.”

Irving Babbitt’s Defense of the Humanities

Irving Babbitt and Populism

“Good democratic leaders possess moral imagination, the ability to see life for what it is and to anticipate the path of prudence. Moreover, good leadership stems from good character that is the product of a sound inner life. Like any other form of government, democracy achieves the aspirations of civilization in proportion to its ability to produce men and women of character who concentrate on the inner life. The crisis of American democracy was, for Babbitt, a crisis of character and leadership.”

Edwards: From the Beginning of the Right

Edwards: From the Beginning of the Right

Just Right: A Life in Pursuit of Liberty By Lee Edwards. ISI Books, 2017. Hardcover, 378 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by George H. Nash. In his lively new memoir Just Right, Lee Edwards remarks that four distinct groups have molded the modern American conservative...

Seeing the True Presence

Seeing the True Presence

“…Heschmeyer examines the Eucharist in its Biblical, theological, philosophical, and historical contexts. ‘Sometimes,’ he notes, ‘to increase our understanding, we don’t need new information but a new way of thinking about the information that we already have.’”

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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