Welcome Home to the Russell Kirk Center
Strengthening America’s Tradition of Order, Justice & Freedom
The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal aims to recover, conserve, and enliven those enduring norms and principles that Russell Kirk (1918–1994) called the Permanent Things. Explore the Center’s programs, publications, and fellowships and join with us to continue Kirk’s work to renew our culture and redeem our time.
Join us on November 19, 2026 for our 3d annual McLellan Prizes Gala in Washington, D.C. as we celebrate grand prize winner, Eugene Volokh.
At the Kirk Center
Highlights
New Book: Russell Kirk’s On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776
John Engler named as Chairman of the Kirk Center’s Board
Classic Kirk essay: On the Constitution: “A Revolution Not Made, But Prevented”
Visiting Scholar Daniel Pitt discusses Disraeli and the Conservative Tradition
Kirktober Campaign for The University Bookman — Donate Now
Events
November 11: Academic Freedom Lecture, with Dr. Samuel Goldman — Hope College
November 19: Richard D. McLellan Prizes, with Eugene Volokh — The National Press Club
December 2: Saint John Henry Newman Against Liberalism Lecture, with Fr. Gerald Murray — Fordham University
Available now from Creed & Culture
Mecosta House Books
Explore Mecosta House
At Mecosta House, we aim to combine with the Kirk Center’s programs to foster an intellectual community dedicated to exploring the wisdom of our predecessors while forging a new conservative humanism.
We hope our readers will be edified by the titles we publish, and that they will strengthen the programs and the courses we will introduce at the Kirk Center as part of our Institute of Conservative Studies. David Hein’s Teaching the Virtues offers a fresh look at a perennial educational aim—encouraging virtue in the next generation, and we are proud to present it as our first book.
From the University Bookman
The Declaration Now—and Then
This review by Gerald J. Russello, late editor of The University Bookman, was originally published by Chronicles Magazine in June 2016. It is reposted with permission.
Latest Pieces
Divine Light and Darkness
“This collection holds out encouragement to those who are in their ‘strictest and darkest’ winters, but it also bestows upon any reader, whatever his state, ‘signs’ of beauty, of that divine light in the darkness, of the one who harrowed hell and rose victorious.”
Out of Pathos and into Mathos: All the King’s Men at 80
“The proper statement is that [the book] is not merely a novel about politics. The irony that lies at the heart of the novel is that reading it for its political plot can obscure what makes the novel so perennial.”
“The Truths We Keep Coming Back and Back to”: A Critical Sampling of Gloria Whelan’s Short Fiction
“If Kirk—himself a superb literary critic—considered Whelan ‘the best writer of short stories ever to inhabit Michigan,’ it stands to reason that her works merit wider attention.”
Every Line Read Is a Gain
“That is the whole of Campo’s argument, and the whole of her temperament, in a single anecdote: the conviction that attention to something perfect is not an evasion of catastrophe but the only serious response to it. It is also why she is worth the time of anyone who reads Wendell Berry, Emily Dickinson, Russell Kirk, or, and especially, Simone Weil.”
Confronting our Current Digital Malaise
“Luke Burgis has written an interesting book exploring the tension between belonging and differentiation.”
About the Bookman
For six decades, the University Bookman, founded by Russell Kirk, has identified and discussed those books that diagnose the modern age and support the renewal of culture and the common good. Currently published online, the Bookman continues its mission of examining our times in light of the Permanent Things that make us human.
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