The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal is a nonprofit educational institute based in Mecosta, Michigan, home of the American writer and thinker Russell Kirk (1918–1994).

Russell Kirk at his deskContinuing in the tradition of Dr. Kirk, the Center’s mission is to strengthen the foundations—cultural, economic, and religious—of Western civilization and the American experience within it. Its programs and publications have a particular focus on moral imagination and right reason. They celebrate and defend the “permanent things”—all that makes human life worth living, particularly the bedrock principles that have traditionally supported and maintained the health of society’s central institutions: family, church, and school.

The Center’s efforts are directed at students, business and religious leaders, policy makers, and the general public. It identifies, educates, and mentors thoughtful men and women, and develops and promotes the writing of both established and emerging thinkers.

The Center also seeks to further these aims through cooperation with people and groups worldwide that are committed to revitalizing our common cultural inheritance.

To these ends the Center offers an unrivaled program of seminars and unique facilities for the support of undergraduate, graduate, and senior residential fellowships.

The University BookmanIt also has its own list of publications, which includes America’s oldest conservative quarterly review of books, The University Bookman, now online, and a newsletter, Permanent Things.

We are grateful for your interest in the Russell Kirk Center and invite you to learn more about our mission and projects.


You can follow the Kirk Center on Facebook and on Twitter. The University Bookman is also on Twitter.


We also offer a companion site with video and audio archives by and about Dr. Kirk. It features video interviews with scholars, prominent persons in the conservative movement, and Kirk himself. The site is kirkcenter.wordpress.com.

Imagination it is that shapes society—moral imagination, or idyllic imagination, or diabolic imagination.

Russell Kirk

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Recently on the University Bookman

News and Events

Fall Newsletter

The latest number of the Russell Kirk Center newsletter (Fall 2011) has just been posted. It features a profile of the new complete Kirk Bibliography, compiled by our archivist, Charles C. Brown. It also includes an interview with Márcia Xavier de Brito, who is translating many works of Kirk into Portuguese. You can download it, and past issues, here.

Jan 2012

Passages: Meijer

We are deeply sorry to learn of the death of Fred Meijer. Meijer was a philanthropist par excellence and beloved by all in Michigan who knew him. Readers interested in his life and legacy may be interested to see Jim Person’s review of his biography published in the University Bookman last year.

Dec 2011

Passages: Hoeflich

Annette Kirk and Jeffrey O. Nelson both contributed tributes to a memorial page for Mr. Charles H. Hoeflich (1914–2011), a long-time friend and financial supporter of the Kirk Center who died recently. The Kirk Center is deeply grateful for his support and commemorates a long and fruitful life.

Dec 2011

Kirk Audio at ISI

We commend to your attention the John M. Olin Online Lecture Library at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which hosts several lectures about Russell Kirk and his influence by scholars including Ted McAlister, Michael P. Federici, W. Wesley McDonald, George H. Nash, Gleaves Whitney, and Allan C. Carlson. It also hosts more than twenty-five audio lectures by Russell Kirk.

Dec 2011