Casey Spinks

What comes out is a story of a small group of Reformed Canadian Baptists who are rural, hardworking, self-educated (largely by reading the Bible), and persistent in becoming holy, but not without earning some dry humor along the way. Jeffrey excels at the hard task of publishing the culture of his upbringing, as well as some of the best of his private life, with both charity and clarity.

Somewhat surprisingly, this is also McCarthy at his most delighted at everyday joys. There are many tender passages of drinking coffee in porcelain cups in diners, eating tortillas and beans on stops in the desert, working with cowboys at small jobs on ranches, and companionship with horses, mules, even wolves.

With some little local knowledge now in mind, I too may, day by day, attune myself to the Way, How ever imperfectly I go about What I am striving to do.

Are dreams only dreams? Or are they God’s gifts of the unconscious which we still fail to know? McCarthy lets these questions remain, and no argument or worldview can answer them. So, we are left waiting for God to say something, anything, as His answer.

In our day, we cannot ourselves see the heavens; we can only see pixelated images of heaven produced by computer screens. In this respect, we already live in virtual reality.

With this love and materiality, these two films express the pure reality to which their protagonists are so devoted. In a world of frictionless unreality, endless abstractions, and tepid and timid loves, these films impress upon us resistance, difficulty, attachment, and the dire risk that attachment brings

Bugbee’s thought suggests a defiant confidence that the things themselves can and do reveal themselves to us in their independence, if only we would have the patience to let them.

Even if ‘land’ is less important than actual vote share, this map does point to a very real issue at the heart of American politics: namely that majorities, specifically local majorities, matter very much in our democracy.

Hillbilly Elegy is indeed political, but in a deeper sense, entangled as it is in the webs of broken promises and repeated forgiveness.

The act of hunting makes hunters guilty—and so it makes them moral.

So long as old Christianity is treated as an aesthetic or an alternative lifestyle or a set of values contending against alienated modernity, it will never be anything more than a therapeutic commodity. But if we allow it to reckon with us, we may find ourselves snared in the grasp of “something real.”