Activity

On Saturday nights, the camp hosts a concert, and my husband and I occasionally walk down to the Tabernacle to listen to whatever band has been bused in from Nashville. Neither of us are believers, but we enjoy the music. The bands favor gospel standards, a blend of highlands ballads and Gaither-st…

It’s difficult to live here without developing an existential dizziness, a sense that the rest of the world is moving while you remain still. I spent most of my twenties in South Chicago, in an apartment across from a hellscape of coal-burning plants that ran on grandfather clauses and churned out …

What unites the states of the Midwest—both the ailing and the tenuously “revived”—is a profound loss of telos, the realization that the industries and systems that built the region are no longer tenable