The Nightstand

Saving String, Kicking Leaves: Donald Hall’s Elegies

Hall’s elegiac poetry and prose teach grim lessons that are worth heeding, but there is also a sort of unsentimental, necessary hope—a hope for continuity and unexpected rebirth, a hope that keeps open a sense of possibility—that shines obscurely beneath their grief.

Max Picard’s Silence

Perhaps, without silence for a reference point—something out there that reminds us of our place in the big order of things—the masters of information feel free to shade, obscure, or otherwise manipulate their messages.

Re-membering the Body: A Review of What It Means to Be...

This book at least provides a compelling diagnostic starting point, calling us back to our own networks of dependence and encouraging us to pursue friendship, particularly in the most challenging and vulnerable contexts.

“Seventy Years Ago”: A Review of Red Stilts by Ted Kooser

Ordinary and unrefined, Kooser's poems suggest the steady hand of a craftsman who doesn’t need to go looking for the next big thing.

More than a Step on the Boss Man’s Ladder

If Dolly Parton left the Smoky Mountains, it seems to have been on a hero’s journey that Joseph Campbell would have recognized. She came back, bearing gifts.

Introduction to Real Characters

"What we have for neighbors out here is–well–more interesting. We have way more folks who are just themselves and nobody else.”

What is Beauty? A Review of The Father of Lights

The idea that “no arguments or reasons have to be given to enable the experience of beauty” is dearly hopeful in a time when arguments and reasons are largely impotent in reaching people.

A Country Boy Can Thrive

You can leave your corner of the country without escaping it. And these memoirs testify to the importance of bringing something back.

Contemporary Christian Fiction: The Example of Joshua Hren

In the Wine Press gathers together a host of rough-edged stories of American Christians living in the rise and fall of both Evangelical Catholic and Protestant American Christianity, which arose in the twilight of the Clinton era and peaked during the confluence of religious fervor and patriotism under the White House of George W. Bush.

The Cauldron of Degrowth

In a nutshell, Degrowthers make a bold case that a future worth living is not about doing more with less, it’s about doing “less with less,” and it’s not at all hard to sense an idea whose time has come.