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).

Continuing 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 hosts publications including America’s oldest conservative quarterly review of books, The University Bookman, now online; a newsletter, Permanent Things; and Studies in Burke and His Time.

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.


Video Companion Site

“The Wardrobe,” a companion site, features video and audio archives by and about Russell Kirk. Please visit to find exclusive interviews with scholars, prominent persons in the conservative movement, and Kirk himself. The address is thewardrobe.org.

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

| | Search:

Recently on the University Bookman

Highlights

A new issue of Studies in Burke and His Time

SBHT24 Cover The Edmund Burke Society of America announces a new issue of their journal, Studies in Burke and His Time, Volume 24. The issue features articles on Burke’s identity, and also includes a report on the 2015 conference on Burke held at Villanova University. Articles from Matt Salyer, Michael Brown, and Ian Crowe accompany several book reviews, including a review of Yuval Levin’s Great Debate. The journal is being released as a PDF and is now available for download.

Nov 2015

Russell Kirk as a Midwestern Writer

A panel on “Russell Kirk as a Midwestern Writer”  took place at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature on June 2, 2015 at Michigan State University. Jon Lauck was the moderator and presentations were made by Gleaves Whitney, James Person and James Seaton. The session was recorded and is available here.

Jul 2015

Spring Newsletter

The latest number of the Russell Kirk Center newsletter (Spring 2015) has just been posted. It features news on the recent Edmund Burke Society conference and other recent visitors and scholars at the Kirk Center. You can download it, and past issues, here.

Jun 2015