Dear Readers,

Welcome! As we approach the first anniversary of our relaunch, we could not be more grateful to each of you for reading along and joining in this ongoing conversation.

The theme of this issue is Correspondence—that is, the writing and receiving of letters. Our interviewee, Jack Shoemaker of Counterpoint Press, mourns that “the days of great letter-writing are largely over,” replaced by the ease and rapidity of contact via email or phone—to say nothing of the illusion of intimacy offered by social media. You could put as much consideration into writing an email as people once put into letters, he says. It’s just that no one does.

But if none of us are writing letters anymore, why, as Dr. Douglas Henry asks in his essay “Co-Celebrants of Being,” do we so delight in reading letters not addressed to us? For Sara Holston, who spent a year reading the archival letters of an ordinary pair of New Hampshire newlyweds separated by the Civil War and a young college athlete on the front lines of World War II, it was getting to know people she’d never meet—and experiencing history-changing events from the ground level. For Joel Cuthbertson, it was finding a companion who understood what it meant to be waiting for life start again as he read through Eileen Alexander’s wartime correspondence during his pandemic quarantine. For Michael Toscano, it was having a chance to get his questions about The Lord of the Rings answered, even though J.R.R. Tolkien is no longer around to ask.

In short, it’s the same reason those letters were written in the first place: to create a bridge that lets us draw a little nearer to people separated from us, whether by space or by time. We yearn to connect to one another. What I’ve most learned from reading this issue is that writing and reading letters is still a pretty good way to do that. It’s an art form worth recovering. And maybe, as Dr. Henry points out, our interpersonal correspondence can point us to the miracle of connection between Word and world that means “we are not, in the final estimation, estranged from either the world or our neighbors.”

Happy reading—and if you have any thoughts about what you read, do let us know. We’d love to receive a letter from you.

Fare forward,

Sarah Clark,

Editor-in-Chief