Hello there. This is Mark Bauerline with another conversation. Before we get to it, a word about one of our sponsors.

You may have seen a recent article in Inside Higher Ed.com that began, Wyoming Catholic College has a lot of unusual things about it, each enough to merit a story in itself.

Wyoming Catholic is a conservative Catholic college that educates students in the great books and Catholic tradition.

It also teaches horsemanship and banned cell phones on campus. I love that.

And it turned down federal funding.

President Glenn Arbery describes the mission this way.

This college is engaged in deep ways with the agony of a culture that has lost its spiritual center.

We're adventurous and poetic and deeply Catholic.

He likes to cite Dostoevsky in crime and punishment.

Low ceilings are bad for the soul.

The ceilings rise at Wyoming Catholic, which is located in the foothills of the Wind River Mountains,

the curriculum centers in the Western tradition.

Its Catholic identity builds upon Thomas Aquinas

in the Magisterium of the Catholic Church

and engaging with God in the wilderness.

Find out more at Wyoming Catholic.edu.

Everyone here in the audience knows Dana Joya,

who is often in the pages of First things, and one of our supreme poets

and essayists. And so I hear a literature teacher. Dana, I actually have to ask you, you were at

USC for several years until you retired last year. You told me once you get 200 students in your poetry classes.

Now, how does that happen when English enrollments have been dropping so fast? I'm asking

you that before we get to the book that we're going to talk about, but I had to ask you,

...