Greetings from the Porch,

We've now posted initial details for our fall conference. Make plans to join us in a beautiful venue in Indianapolis and hear from Patrick Deneen, Joanna Taft, Amber Lapp, Bill Kauffman, and others. This will likely be your only opportunity to hear from a Super-Bowl-beringed speaker at an FPR conference.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about the humanities, immigration, and stone walls.

• Karl Johnson wades into the fraught waters of public health: "Since the birth of public health in nineteenth-century rationalism, the profession has been tempted by gnostic seductions."

• Cory Stockwell reviews a recent novel by Vincenzo Latronico and considers its chilling portrayal of frictionless life: "The novel’s chief strength, in other words, lies in its presentation of Anna and Tom’s struggle against . . . something. No matter what they do, they seem lacking in direction; a strange ennui takes over their lives, without there being any identifiable reason for it, and the experience of reading the novel is that of oneself becoming lost in this ennui."

• Adam Smith flips presumptions about small town provincialism on their head. Inhabitants of urban metros, not to mention digital spaces, rub shoulders with fewer people who don't think like they do: "We ought to see localism not as an accomplice to the tribalism that’s everywhere rising, but as an antidote to it."

• Amanda Patchin commends Alan Jacobs recent biography of Milton's Paradise Lost: "Milton may displease, offend, or disrupt, but he rarely leaves a reader unmoved."

• Shemaiah Gonzalez praises Daniel Nayeri's The Teacher of Nomad Land: "Like Anne of Green Gables, Boxcar Children or even Jane Eyre, these children refuse to resign themselves and instead learn resilience by fighting for survival. I would not wish such hardships on any middle school reader, but hope that in reading about such strong characters, they will not resign themselves to trials learn how to become the resilient adults they hope to be."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about the Big Apple this week.

Last year I had the chance to read a remarkable book in manuscript, and this week my print copy arrived. The Body of This Death: Letters from the Last Archbishop of Lancaster by theologian Ross McCullough is a strange and marvelous book. In lieu of an excerpt, here’s the blurb I wrote after reading it:

It is impossible to say what this book is: Epistolary novel? Pastoral handbook? Theological science fiction? Yet if I don’t know what it is, I do know what it does: It awakens the soul with the contagious laugh of one who has seen the incarnate, crucified, and risen Christ and so refuses to take this world’s political or technological crises as ultimate. The Archbishop wields irony not in self-defense but for self-involvement; his is not the irony of the cynic but of the mystic, the martyr. Ross McCullough has given us a brilliant vision of holy sanity.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro