Greetings from the Porch,

Last weekend, a student club hosted a pig roast, and it ended up being a lovely fall day with the leaves in full glory--the perfect setting to enjoy delicious pork.

I'm beginning to prep for a few talks I'll be giving next spring. If you're near Seattle, Lexington, or Pittsburgh, it would be great to see you. (The Seattle event in particular is shaping up to be a wonderful gathering.)

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about empire, pods, and math.

• Brevin Anderson defends the unpopular Daylight Savings Time: "Daylight Savings Time is a liturgical cycle calling us twice a year to mind how we mind time."

• David Bannon reflects on the Pearl poet's portrayal of grief and hope: "The Dreamer too longs to see his little girl again. And when he does, she is older, wiser, mysterious."

• Grant Martsolf describes how he and his wife are using the Machine to make medical care more human: "There is a deep philosophical problem at the heart of the American health care system. Namely, it has an insufficient definition of health."

• Julian Waldner imagines how educators might avoid having to constantly guess whether they are responding to a student or a machine: "The more the struggle of bringing our thoughts to expression is given over to the machine, the more we are made in its image: devoid of understanding."

• Lucas Nossaman reviews Wendell Berry's last collection of essays: "Dispatches from Rural America is a fitting end to the career of a great American writer."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about envy (and jealousy) this week.

I’m teaching “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” this fall in a new one-credit, intro to the humanities course. It’s been great to discuss the liberal arts, Christian theology, and academic virtues with a cohort of new students. And Tolstoy’s story provokes necessary reflection on the shape of a good life. At one point, Tolstoy calls Ilyich a “virtuoso performer,” and his quest for respectability and social approval leads him to become a superficial person with only superficial, “so-called friends” (I’ve paired the story with C.S. Lewis’s “Inner Ring” essay, which works very well.) Take, for instance, how Tolstoy describes Ilyich’s method of furnishing a new house:

These were essentially the accoutrements that appeal to all people who are not actually rich but who want to look rich, though all they manage to do is look like each other: damasks, ebony, plants, rugs and bronzes, anything dark and gleaming—everything that all people of a certain class affect so as to be like all other people of a certain class. And his arrangements looked so much like everyone else’s that they were unremarkable, though he saw them as something truly distinctive. When he met his family at the railway station, brought them home and ushered them into his well-lit furnished apartment and a footman wearing a white tie opened the door into the entrance hall decorated with flowers, and then they went into the drawing-room and the study, ooh-ing and ah-ing with delight, he was a very happy man, showing them around everywhere, reveling in their praise and beaming with delight.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro