Friday Links
September 4, 2026
Autumn Landscape, John Eyre, R.B.I.
How Can You Not Be Romantic About Baseball
The Back of the Book: The Poetry and Fiction of Sally Thomas
The Real Ideal
Epiphanies of Beauty
The Music and the Google Docs
How Can You Not Be Romantic About Baseball
Adrian McKinty asks this important question as we head into fall, and answers it well:
Baseball movies are meant to be entertainment not propaganda but they work wonders on the foreign imagination with their arcane rules and lore and gorgeous settings and deep weirdness. There’s a famous piece of graffiti from the Iraq War that I remember well: “Yankee go home - and take me with you.” Baseball movies put this idea into one’s head and the really remarkable thing about them is that they rarely require you to understand baseball. They require only that you comprehend what David Hume pointed out in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: reason is important, but reason is the slave of the passions.
The Back of the Book: The Poetry and Fiction of Sally Thomas
Chris’s guest is the poet and fiction writer Sally Thomas, who shares a few of her poems and discusses some of her stories. Sally and Chris also talk about her development as a writer, why she enjoys writing formal poetry, and what she does when her short-story characters won’t leave her alone.
Sally is the author of The Blackbird and Other Stories (Wiseblood, 2024) and the forthcoming poetry collection Among the Living (Able Muse Press, TBA). She also co-edits the Poems Ancient and Modern Substack and co-edited Christian Poetry in America Since 1940 (Paraclete Press, 2022).
The Real Ideal
Paul J. Pastor on Wendell Berry:
Into this halcyon hour of my young adulthood, it was reassuring for me to learn that Wendell Berry had also figured things out. He was a self-proclaimed “Mad Farmer,” and I was here for it. I was glad to hear him state what I considered to be the obvious: that modern life did not represent “progress,” that the local and the traditional represented very fragile goods that had to be actively defended, and that a good life was inextricable from our connections to place and the whole fabric of lives (human, animal, and vegetable) that bound all together. He was eloquent, he was engaged, he did not map easily on a conservative/liberal spectrum. He was an expression of true American wisdom. He had, I thought, figured things out just like me. Lucky guy.
Epiphanies of Beauty
Writing Retreat: Epiphanies of Beauty, an Ignatian, semi-silent extended weekend retreat for adults led by Carla Galdo in Illinois. For more info, follow the link HERE.
The Music and the Google Docs
From musical J. J. Wright:
As artists, it’s easy to become obsessed with medium and the conditions surrounding it. We convince ourselves that we can only do the real work if everything is right: this style of music, these musicians, this instrument, this uninterrupted block of time, this room temperature. Some of those conditions genuinely matter. Art is embodied, after all; people, places, and tools change what becomes possible.
