The University Bookman

The moral imagination is the principal possession that man does not share with the beasts. It is man’s power to perceive ethical truth, abiding law, in the seeming chaos of many events. Without the moral imagination, man would live merely day to day, or rather moment to moment, as dogs do. It is the strange faculty—inexplicable if men are assumed to have an animal nature only—of discerning greatness, justice, and order, beyond the bars of appetite and self-interest.

Russell Kirk, Enemies of the Permanent Things, 1969

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The Kirk Center and The University Bookman regret the passing of sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz, who died in March. Recipient of many accolades, Horowitz was a sociologist of wide-ranging interests, from religion to analysis of state power and social order in assessing a society’s quality of life, an approach that has since become standard. Horowitz has a special place in the memory of the Kirk Center. It is he who made possible the Library of Conservative Thought, a collection of more than thirty volumes published by Transaction Press, with which Horowitz was long affiliated, and edited by Russell Kirk. These thirty-odd volumes constitute a basic reading list for the educated conservative, and include classics such as James Burnham’s Congress and the American Tradition, Irving Babbitt’s Rousseau and Romanticism, Orestes Brownson’s Selected Political Essays, and Kirk’s own America’s British Culture. These books brought the tradition of conservative reflection to a new generation, and rightly placed them alongside other important works of sociology, intellectual history, and politics. In his eulogy for Russell Kirk, given at Kirk’s Memorial Mass in 1994, Horowitz stated that Kirk was now “at one with the great tradition he helped articulate and recover”—words that also aptly describe the legacy of Irving Louis Horowitz. RIP. (17 Apr 2012)

Here’s a round-up of recent writings by Bookman editor Gerald Russello elsewhere on the Internet and in print. • At the Imaginative Conservative Russello responds to Claes Ryn’s argument that conservatives have failed the culture. • He reviews Gregory Wolfe’s Beauty Will Save the World in the October edition of Chronicles. • At the National Catholic Register he discusses a recent Colorado religious liberty case denying families access to funds for private education, based on an outdated reading of a bigoted “Blaine”-style amendment. • In The Wilson Quarterly, he reviews Why Trilling Matters. (15 Oct 2011)

The Imaginative Conservative blog has posted an excerpt and link to an essay by Pepperdine’s Ted McAllister on Kirk’s Conservative Mind that is worth a look: “What was then more readily an act of preservation has become today an act of recovery.” (1 Oct 2011)

Other Sites of Interest

• The Imaginative Conservative
• Arts & Letters Daily
• First Things
• Manhattan Institute
• City Journal
• National Review
• The Heritage Foundation
• Ethics and Public Policy Center
• Books & Culture
• The New Atlantis
• The New Criterion (and blog)
• Intercollegiate Studies Institute
• First Principles Journal
• The Acton Institute
• The New Inquiry
• Reconciling Remus and Rome (Andrea Kirk Assaf)
• Image (Image)
• Good Letters Blog
• The American Spectator
• The American Conservative
• Front Porch Republic
• Anamnesis Journal
• The City (from HBU)
• Lapham’s Quarterly
• Bookworm from KCRW
• G. K. Chesterton Institute
• The Catholic Thing
• What’s Wrong with the World?
• The Western Confucian
• The Tocqueville Forum
• National Humanities Institute
• The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College
• Ricochet
• Chronicles
• Arion
• Via Meadia at The American Interest
• The Distributist Review
• Journal of Catholic Legal Studies
• The Library of Law and Liberty
• Huron County Extract

Publisher Sites

• Yale University Press
• Eerdmans
• Harvard University Press
• Catholic University Press
• Princeton University Press
• Encounter Books
• Ivan R. Dee
• Oxford University Press
• Cambridge University Press
• University of Chicago Press
• Farrar Straus Giroux
• St Augustine’s Press
• Ignatius Press
• University of Missouri Press
• The University Press of Kentucky
• The Crumpled Press