My little meditation on the moon is up on the blog of the great Streetlight magazine today. Many thanks to Trudy Hale and the gang for offering the space for such musings.
Recent Posts
A Place Where Walls Are Coming Down: Preparing for Burundi
With all the talk of division and separation in our church and society, it’s heartening to know that there are places where United Methodists are coming together. Next Friday I’m getting on a plane for my first trip to Africa. I got the call about 6 weeks ago when the Burundi United Methodist Church announced […]
A Bombblast of Uncommon Prayer: The Pitbulls & Pendulums of Kimberly Johnson
“When thundering through the heavens I hear the B-2 Stealth Bomber—it’s elusive grace as it banks trailing fractals from its skin, its clandestine maneuvers, its trinitarian aerodynamism—I think of God.” (38) Spend some time in Kimberly Johnson’s 2014 poetry collection, Uncommon Prayer, and you’ll think of God in some unlikely images—a bug-zapper, a corpse flower, […]
Love and Loss in Montana: Virginia Reeves Writes Another Winner
Can people really change? To hear Ed Malinowski, a behaviorist in the mold of John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, tell it, the answer must be yes. Ed is one of the central characters in Virginia Reeves’ beguiling sophomore novel, The Behavior of Love. “People are malleable,” he says, “as are their behaviors, and behavior […]
Recovering the Body: Another Visit with Scott Cairns
A brief word of thanks for an old collection of poems by Scott Cairns. Twenty years has passed since the first publication of Recovered Body, a small collection of Cairns’ poetry. It doesn’t have the warmth of some of his later work, (despite the passionate interludes with Erato, the muse), but it is fun to […]
It’s Time for a Commission on A Way Sideways
What if the problem with the name of the Commission on A Way Forward was that it had one too many words? Pick the one you’d like to delete, but my vote is for ‘Forward.’ ‘Forward’ carries a lot of weight in this title. It implies several things. First, that we are stuck in an […]
How I Lost My Way to the Heart of America
There are at least two ways to look at a concept like The Heartland. You could look at it as a search for meaning, in which uprooted, sometimes traumatized people, seek to understand their lives in relation to a place. It’s in this sense that the great Southern writer Carson McCullers talked about American homesickness. […]
The Persistence of Print
An article I wrote for FaithLink, the great United Methodist Publishing House resource for study groups on faith and current events, is now up on Ministry Matters. Exploring the remarkable comeback of printed books, despite my earlier predictions that they were headed for the dustbin! Check out The Persistence of Print.
Is General Conference Too Important?: The Heartlands Interview with Ashley Boggan Dreff Concludes
Previous segments of my interview with Dr. Ashley Boggan Dreff, author of Entangled: A History of American Methodism, Politics, and Sexuality, covered the history of the incompatibility language in the United Methodist Church and the ways that the trends in American politics and culture have affected the development of the denomination. In this segment, we […]
Chaos, Sexuality, & Politics in the UMC: An Interview with Ashley Boggan Dreff, part 2
In the first segment of my interview with Dr. Ashley Boggan Dreff, author of Entangled: A History of American Methodism, Politics, and Sexuality, we discussed the origin of United Methodist language around homosexuality at one of the first General Conferences of the new United Methodist Church in 1972. (We also talked about George Whitefield’s knuckle, […]
