This is a letter I wrote from prison in 2007 to someone. I discuss the beauty of the English language, how to write well, modernity, and alienation from God. "Our age is the culmination of a shift from a spiritual to a material view of the world, and it is this material view that  defines our age, and is the source of its disease. Some very insightful men and women perceived this, at least with respect to the modern era, and I believe it’s impossible to understand our disease, & how to cure it, without reading them."

It is human nature for individuals to reach different conclusions about what is true, and to be convinced that one’s beliefs, being true, deserve to prevail over false beliefs. The diversity of our opinions and our zeal in advancing them, wrote James Madison, has “divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.” This dilemma is thus “sown in the nature of man,” and the resolution to it of late-18th century Americans was the disestablishment of religion: first, through the No Religious Test Clause of Article VI of the Constitution, and later, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment...