James Bowman
Resident Scholar
Mr. Bowman is well known for his writing on honor, including his book, Honor: A History and “Whatever Happened to Honor,” originally delivered as one of the prestigious Bradley Lectures at the American Enterprise Institute in 2002, and republished (under the title “The Lost Sense of Honor”) in The Public Interest.
James Bowman is a Resident Scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Mr. Bowman is well known for his writing on honor, including his book, Honor: A History and “Whatever Happened to Honor,” originally delivered as one of the prestigious Bradley Lectures at the American Enterprise Institute in 2002, and republished (under the title “The Lost Sense of Honor”) in The Public Interest.
Among the other publications to which he has contributed are Harper’s, The Public Interest, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily and Sunday Telegraph of London, The Weekly Standard and National Review.
He has worked as a freelance journalist, serving as American editor of the Times Literary Supplement of London from 1991 to 2002, as movie critic of The American Spectator since 1990 and as media critic of The New Criterion since 1993. He has also been a weekly movie reviewer for The New York Sun since the newspaper’s re-foundation in 2002.
Mr. Bowman received B.A. degrees from Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania and the University of Cambridge in England, where he also did graduate study and received an M.A. in 1979.
A Lesson in Wrongology
James Bowman
On the media’s humility, or lack thereof.
Articles
The New Criterion / September 1, 2022
Reality Check
James Bowman
To a greater extent than ever, those on both sides of the political fence, and even those sitting on it, are only talking and writing to and for people who already agree with them.
Articles
The New Criterion / June 28, 2022
World-Shaking Events
James Bowman
It took Protestant Christianity hundreds of years to create and inculcate in ordinary people the idea of the kind of middle-class respectability and decency that Bertie Wooster was always at odds with.
Articles
The New Criterion / April 28, 2022
For the Sake of Argument
James Bowman
Our politics is now a clash of rival dogmas rather than anything our grandfathers would have recognized as argument.
Articles
Claremont Review of Books / April 1, 2022
Real Science
James Bowman
Scientists turned politicians automatically become politicians first, scientists after.
Articles
The New Criterion / March 15, 2022
Vulgar Chants
James Bowman
The media’s unofficial commissars of the Left have to keep the pressure up on behalf of ideological conformity in order to hold the “woke” coalition together—no matter how disconnected from reality they may be.
Articles
The New Criterion - December 2021 issue / January 28, 2022
Volte-face
James Bowman
Democrats and the media continually urge Americans to get ourselves onto “the right side of history” — which, paradoxically, also means leaving history itself behind us in our inevitable progress towards the progressively promised land. The right side of history turns out to be the one that’s turned away from it.
Articles
The New Criterion - May 2021 issue / June 17, 2021
Boom and Gloom
James Bowman
The mess the Boomers made will long be with us.
Articles
Claremont Review of Books - Spring 2021 issue / June 9, 2021
Jane Austen on Film
James Bowman
In a lecture hosted by the Center for Constructive Alternatives at Hillsdale College, EPPC Resident Scholar James Bowman surveys film adaptations of the works of Jane Austen.
Articles
Hillsdale College / April 15, 2021
Experts in Spate
James Bowman
The coronavirus, together with the measures chosen to deal with it, has been a disaster for pretty much everybody else, but it has been a godsend to the American media and their long-running anti-Trump “narrative.”
Articles
The New Criterion - May 2020 issue / June 18, 2020
Polite Fictions
James Bowman
The very existence of polite fictions — such as the fiction that impeachment had arisen out of the disinterested concern of public-spirited Democrats to preserve constitutional norms and not as a squalid partisan affair — comes about because we are aware of the absurdity of regarding them as the firmly established truths they pretend to be.
Articles
The New Criterion - March 2020 issue / April 16, 2020
Ripley’s Believe It or Else
James Bowman
The extremely low opinion, so the pollsters tell us, which Americans hold of the media could never bode well for an institution founded on the extremely high opinion the media hold of themselves.
Articles
The New Criterion - February 2020 issue / March 17, 2020