Greetings from the Porch,

When this email hits your inbox, I’ll be with many Porchers in Indianapolis for our annual conference. I’m looking forward to catching up with old friends, making new friends, and hearing some good talks.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about Wildcat Mountain, microdramas, and literacy.

• Karl Johnson and David Tillman imagine an approach to public health inspired by Wendell Berry: "If healing returns the body to itself, then Berry’s vision of public health might very well be to return the community to itself."

• Gene Callahan warns against the allure of consequentialism: "Consequentialism is a way to try to replace tradition all in one go, with 'rational calculation.'"

• Rebekah Grace Potts draws lessons on building community from her raucous family and T.S. Eliot: "The good news is that failure is necessary—it is the path to springtime, to summer, and the harvest. There’s no way out but through."

• Susan Dorman reads a book of local history and reflects on the value of remembering the stories our places hold: "It would be good if history, both local and regional, were taught in schools, along with history national and international, and also the history of science, mathematics, English, and even the technology."

• Ben Sisson asks a telling question: "How did a Baptist, Kentucky farmer come to sound so much like the Magisterium of the Catholic Church?"

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about Sunday this week.

I enjoyed Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent. A relatively quick read, it has more substance than I initially thought it would. It’s an entirely epistolatory novel, and the form perfectly suits the protagonist. Letters enable her to make a kind of order out of the uncertainty that swirls in both the world around her and in her own soul. This quest for clarity also led her to a career in law, as she describes to one correspondent:

I don’t see that there is anything terribly unique in what drew me (and, in fact, Guy) to the practice of law. The appeal for someone like me (us) to find, on the face of this mad, inside-out, senseless, barbaric, intolerably fraught and painful and mind-spinning planet, some semblance of order . . . well, of course it’s appealing. There’s nothing quite like the comfort of the law, black and white, other than, perhaps, if you are a religious person, which I am, a religious text, but even the Bible puts one into a wretched state of confusion with all of its doublespeak and nuance, if one really gets into it, though with a religious text one is, of course, suspending all disbelief and throwing caution to the wind.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro