It’s not that dancing on the stage of the Latino Cultural Center in Dallas the evening I arrived in the city wasn’t in the range of possibilities. Over the years, my friend Juan has introduced me to a lot of things I hadn’t previously considered. Like the time we put together a talent show in […]
De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s debut novel begins with an arresting scene. Pratt Shepherd is in the middle of a fight with his free-spirited girlfriend in a small, coastal North Carolina town on the eve of World War 2. However, Azalea ‘Knot’ Centre, a sometime teacher at the local school for African-American children, is nobody’s possession. When […]
Late in her brief but thought-provoking new book, historian Jill Lepore gets down to why she would write something titled This America: The Case for the Nation: “In American history, liberals have failed, time and again, to defeat illiberalism except by making appeals to national aims and ends…Writing national history creates plenty of problems. But […]
Even when I was a child in the 1960s and 70s there was still some adventurer’s romance attached to the words of Henry Stanley upon finding his quarry: Dr. Livingstone, I presume? Despite the flood of newly independent African nations in that era, people could still be heard referring to Africa as “the dark continent” […]
It wasn’t your typical megachurch experience. When journalist and Lutheran pastor Angela Denker showed up at New Destiny Christian Center to check out the ministry of Paula White, one of Donald Trump’s pastoral advisors, she might have expected a coffee shop in the lobby (she kinda did) and a glitzy auditorium for a sanctuary. Instead […]
Because you know there will be another one. And we will have the same choice we always have—to define the world in relation to the tweeter or… …to do something else. Recently I attended an experimental theatre production about the American healthcare system. We had to take off our shoes before going into the theatre. […]
How many piercings can a museum docent have? It was a question Christy Coleman didn’t know she’d have to struggle with when she became the CEO of the American Civil War Center in 2013. But when that museum merged with the Museum of the Confederacy and built a brand new facility around the old Tredegar […]
The scene Shea Tuttle describes in the introduction of her great new book is so familiar that it could be any one of us as a child. Curled up on a couch wrapped in a holey Afghan watching a television show alone. And then the magic as a performer reaches through that screen and across […]
Katrina doesn’t arrive until Salvage the Bones is almost over, but the hurricane has always been coming. She broods over the whole of Jesmyn Ward’s epic 2011 novel, even when the only one who seems to know she’s on the way is Esch’s Daddy, whose preparations seem excessive to his four children living with him […]
I wasn’t preaching last Sunday so I didn’t face the decision that most preachers entertained that morning: Do I say something about the violence and death? This time it had happened in El Paso and Dayton, but we have a long list of American cities and schools that now have the words “hosted a mass […]
