Letters From the Back Roads

 This newsletter was originally sent on December 25, 2025 Each month, I share new essays, books, and stories from the road. 📬 Want these updates in your inbox?  Subscribe here . Welcome, Friends,  to News from the Back Roads! Dear friends, This Christmas, I find myself thinking less about celebration and more about presence. So much of this season—Advent especially—is about waiting. Waiting in quiet churches. Waiting in half-lit streets. Waiting with stories, with memories, with questions that don’t resolve neatly. Waiting, even at midnight, knowing the hours are still long but trusting that light will come anyway. Much of what I’ve written this year has lived in that space. On back roads and in old museums. Among forgotten names and well-worn books. In cemeteries that refuse to stay silent and stories that insist on being remembered. Again and again, I keep returning to the same truth: what is sacred rarely arrives with spectacle. It arrives quietly. In ordina...

 This newsletter was originally sent on December 20, 2025 Each month, I share new essays, books, and stories from the road. 📬 Want these updates in your inbox?  Subscribe here . Welcome, Friends,  to News from the Back Roads! Dear friends, This week’s newsletter arrives in the quiet space just before Christmas, the pause between remembering where we’ve been and considering what still lies ahead. In these final days of Advent, the stories we tell tend to slow down. They turn inward. They ask us to look honestly at childhood, conscience, sacrifice, and the weight we carry, whether from history, belief, service, or silence. This week, we wander through American nostalgia at the Daisy Airgun Museum, sit with the early Church through  The Epistle of St. Clement to the Corinthians , honor the life and service of Sergeant Larry Gene Hogan, and peer into the unsettling psychology of  The Silent Patient . These are not light stories—but they are meaningful one...

 This newsletter was originally sent on December 13, 2025 Each month, I share new essays, books, and stories from the road. 📬 Want these updates in your inbox?  Subscribe here . Welcome, Friends,  to News from the Back Roads! December has a way of softening the edges of things. The calendar insists we hurry, finish this, close that, prepare for what’s next, but the season itself seems to ask the opposite. To pause. To notice what’s still standing. To sit with what the year has quietly taught us before we rush into the next chapter. This week, I found myself thinking about attention, what we choose to look at, what we pass by, and what only reveals itself when we slow down enough to see it. Small towns altered by highways. A philosopher facing death without fear. A Marine whose service didn’t end when the uniform came off. A long story nearing its storm. Three wildflowers blooming without spectacle on a forest floor. None of these things shouts. But all of them ...

  This newsletter was originally sent on December 06, 2025 Each month, I share new essays, books, and stories from the road. 📬 Want these updates in your inbox?  Subscribe here . Welcome, Friends,  to News from the Back Roads! Dear friends, This week felt like a good reminder that our journeys come in many forms — on long roads under rainy skies, across continents by rail, through the quiet discipline of faithful service, and inside the pages of books that slow our thinking and sharpen our wonder. Some weeks want to be rushed; this was not one of them. This week asked to be noticed. Below are the new stories from the Back Roads, the latest Bucket List Book Adventure, an Everyday Patriot we honor, a classic travel read that made me long for train compartments and wide windows, and a peaceful mountain photograph from the shop that captured the same stillness threading through it all. With gratitude for your company on this road, a.d. elliott Art and Other Odd Adv...