(Those who have supported our work in recent years will soon receive by regular mail a copy of the letter below along with a DVD of our recent video update. In addition, our sustaining donors -- those who contribute $25 a month or $300 a year -- will receive the second of three-CD series on the Trinity recorded in the mid-1990s, along with a plastic case for the set.)

Dear Friends,

There are hardly two writers that interest me less than Jack Kerouac and Truman Capote. They come to mind because, as I spend more time at the computer keyboard these days, I have reason to recall Capote's famous quip about Kerouac's landmark book, On the Road. "That's not writing," Capote snapped; "it's typing." Literary considerations aside, the difference between typing and writing is that the former is a mechanical and the latter a moral activity, entailing incomparably greater responsibilities.

For all I know, Kerouac's On the Road seemed the result of typing rather than writing because he tried to write it while still on the road. As a precaution, I have eliminated that excuse, forsaking the traveling and speaking that I did for many years in order to assemble a manuscript worthy of a discerning readership.

This is hardly the moment, however, to withdraw from the Cornerstone Forum's mission of fostering an anthropological understanding of the civilizational challenges we now face and encouraging the re-evangelization of our culture as the only possible way to meet these challenges responsibly. As we always have, therefore, Randy Coleman-Riese and I are trying to make our modest gifts and limited resources do double duty. We are serializing randomly selected excerpts from the writing project and posting them on a special website we have created for our friends and donors. Not only do we hope that our friends will find these postings interesting and the work they represent worthy of support, but we hope as well that they will share any comments, suggestions and misgivings they may have about the posted texts, thus lending this otherwise solitary project a dialogical dimension which will be of inestimable value to me as I proceed.

For his part, Randy is doing double duty as well. Not only does he handle a small mountain of clerical and administrative chores at the Cornerstone Forum office, but he is reviewing the extensive archive of audio recordings we have distributed over the years and posting excerpts on our weblog several times a week. He is also working constantly to improve our web presence and to adapt for our use an array of internet technologies that we think will amplify and maximize our modest efforts as we go forward.

Our work can only bear fruit, however, with your continued support. As the economic difficulties from which we all now suffer linger, we are ever more grateful to you for your generosity, and ever more determined to be worthy of it. In the spirit of the friendship we hope that generosity betokens, please know that you will be in our thoughts and prayers this Thanksgiving season.

In sincere gratitude,