The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
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 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
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...
Must Matters of Taste Not Be Disputed?
“Art is beautiful in revealing the truth of man to himself such that he grows in knowledge of the good and the true through the encounter.”
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.’”
Home, Sour Home
“Beckeld finds oikophobia not only in the present-day United States but also across the West and in ancient Greece and Rome, eighteenth-century France, and twentieth-century Great Britain. Oikophobia’s onset is significant because it has weakened the places in which it appeared.”
Lincoln and the Democratic Cause
“Professor Guelzo is prescient… in offering Lincoln’s contemplations on the meaning and purpose of the Civil War, including the possibility that the war was a providential necessity preceding an outcome, emancipation, and largely because race and slavery are central to Lincoln’s history as a great evil, our country’s original sin, and anathema to our democracy. “
JP O’Malley Interviews Author Frank Tallis
“…is it possible to embrace Freud’s core ideas while also remaining critical of him? Tallis believes so. He claims Freud ‘was unquestionably a great writer, but he is often contradictory, and his ideas are generally not original.'”
Finding the Historical Vergil
“Sarah Ruden… takes a step back to remove Vergil from the constraints of later mythmaking and find the historical poet… As Ruden writes, ‘As always, there has to be something about the author himself that is vital to the thing called literary achievement.’”
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.
Here, Kirk references with approval MacIntryre's argument from "After Virtue" on the need for "communities of character."
At the passing of the great Alasdair MacIntyre, one would do well to return to Russell Kirk' s classic essay "Civilization without Religion?" https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2011/04/russell-kirk-civilization-without-religion.html
At the passing of the great Alasdair MacIntyre, one would do well to return to Russell Kirk' s classic essay "Civilization without Religion?"
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