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.

The University BookmanTo these ends the Center offers an unrivaled program of seminars and unique facilities for the support of undergraduate, graduate, and senior residential fellowships. It also has its own list of publications, which includes America’s oldest conservative quarterly review of books, The University Bookman.

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

By 'the Permanent Things' [T. S. Eliot] meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in that continuity of belief and institution called the great mysterious incorporation of the human race.

Russell Kirk

Search:

News and Events

Bookman interviews

The University Bookman has posted two recent interviews: “The Predicament of the Individual,” an interview with James Poulos, editor of the Postmodern Conservative blog, and “The Freedom to Use Common Sense,” an interview with Philip K. Howard, author of Life without Lawyers

Jun 2009

Kirk in Time and Newsweek

Russell Kirk has been invoked recently in both Time and Newsweek—briefly in Joe Scarboroough’s article on strategies for the Republican Party in Time, and more extensively in Jon Meacham’s article, “A Modest Case for a Burkean Boomlet” in Newsweek.

Jun 2009

Forgotten Founders

University Bookman editor Gerald J. Russello reviews biographies of Gouverneur Morris and Luther Martin, from the new ISI series on “forgotten founders” of the United States in an online exclusive.

Jun 2009

Duggan on McLuhan

Joseph P. Duggan reviews two posthumously published books by Marshall McLuhan in a new University Bookman online exclusive article.

May 2009

Kirk Video Companion Site

On this, the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Russell Kirk, April 29, we would like to announce the posting of a link to a companion website that features video interviews with scholars, prominent persons in the conservative movement, and with Russell Kirk himself. Among the persons interviewed about Kirk’s contribution and work are: William F. Buckley, Roger Scruton, William Rusher, Dick Armey, Fred Thompson, Ed Feulner, Lee Edwards, Kenneth Cribb, Vigen Guroian and many others. Our deep thanks to David Schock for his many hours of work in creating the site and editing the videos. You can view them at kirkcenter.wordpress.com.

Apr 2009

Permanent Things Newsletter

We are pleased to announce a new number of Permanent Things, the newsletter of the Russell Kirk Center, edited by Ben Lockerd. The spring 2009 edition features a retrospective of thirty years of the Wilbur Foundation program. You may download it at this link (PDF, 2.6MB).

Apr 2009