Unveiling the Obvious

by | Feb 23, 2014

The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart. Yale University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 376 pages, $25.To listen to many contemporary atheists, it would seem that the question of whether or not God exists is meaningless. It is not so much...

‘Love Divine’: Remembering Gerhart Niemeyer

by | Feb 23, 2014

In his book Between Nothingness and Paradise, Gerhart Niemeyer wrote: [T]he great confrontation with political irrationality in our time has not the character of a debate or even discussion. The prerequisite for either would be a common universe of reason which is...

Hoover’s Crusade Against Collectivism

by | Feb 16, 2014

A conversation with George H. Nash The University Bookman is pleased to present this interview with George H. Nash. George holds a doctorate in history from Harvard University and is both a historian of American conservatism and a well-known scholar of Herbert Hoover....

An Extraordinary Book

by | Feb 16, 2014

Regionalism and Nationalism in the United States: The Attack on Leviathan, by Donald Davidson, with a new introduction by Russell Kirk. Transaction Publishers, [1938] 1991. xxiii + 368 pp., $33.In the year 1990, half the peoples of the world have risen to strike a...

The first Bookman e-book!

by | Feb 15, 2014

In honor of the great historian John Lukacs, who turns ninety in 2014, we are delighted to announce publication of the first e-book from the University Bookman. The Bookman on John Lukacs features essays and reviews by and about Lukacs gathered from fifty years of our...

Hollow Men and the Search for a Workable Pluralism

by | Feb 9, 2014

The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief by George M. Marsden. Basic Books, 2014. Hardcover, 264 pp. $27. Randall Jarrell once observed that “The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow...

The Rebirth of a Christian State

by | Feb 9, 2014

The Byzantine Revival, 780–842, by Warren Treadgold. Stanford University Press, 1988, 504 pp., $49.50. In the year 146 B.C. Scipio Aemilianus, adopted grandson of the conqueror of Hannibal and son of the conqueror of Macedonia, watched Rome’s great enemy, Carthage,...

Pop Culture Mysticism

by | Feb 2, 2014

So that’s it then, I thought, standing in the darkness. I’m a Catholic conservative, and the most dynamic expression of my faith is pop culture. Being what I call a conservative pop-culture mystic is why I rejected liberalism, and also why I never have fully fit in...

Conservatism and Decline

by | Feb 2, 2014

The Conservative Mind, from Burke to Eliot by Russell Kirk. Fifth revised edition. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1973. In 1902, from somewhere on Regent Street, my mother watched Edward VII’s coronation parade. As she saw this gold and scarlet pageant drawn from the...

Happier Cities, Happier Lives?

by | Jan 26, 2014

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. Hardcover, 290 pages, $27.This is a fascinating and informative but at the same time maddening book. It contains a wealth of evidence making the case that...