Tired of counting the reasons the sky is falling? Me, too. The traditional metrics for mainline ministry (church membership, finances, number of organists) may be on the decline and the angst about how the nation’s Great Divide will impact the church continues. But let me give voice to the hope that is within me during […]
Having talked with photographer Michael Mergen in previous segments about his Civil War landscapes and the parallel Civil Rights series, today we talk about the glorious shabbiness of American democracy. This is something he explored in two works we talk about here – one a series in which he photographs buildings across the country that […]
I’m so glad I obeyed my impulse at the stoplight in downtown Farmville, Virginia. I was driving through and stopped at a red light next to the Longwood Center for the Visual Arts where a local photographer’s work was on display. I pulled into a parking spot and discovered Michael Mergen. In the first part […]
Michael Mergen is a photographer of memory and landscape. His photos capture ordinary, even shabby parts of America and invest them with the meanings we place on them. So a series on the things businesses give as freebies to veterans (burgers, ice cream) and another on the things we name for war heroes (interstate highway […]
August Wallmeyer paints a distressing picture of rural Virginia in the 21st century. His little book, The Extremes of Virginia, which highlights the realities and common challenges of three regions of the Commonwealth—Southwest, Southside, and the Eastern Shore—gets your attention quickly. You start to see why he calls the regions “the Extremes,” and it isn’t just because […]
“If we become addicted to the external, our interiority will haunt us. We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person, or deed can still. To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known […]
“It is strange to be here,” John O’Donohue says in the opening line of his book, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom. For O’Donohue, that meant attending to the mystery of the particular human life and acknowledging that each of is “the one and only threshold of an inner world.” It is strange to be […]
Recent interviewee, Alix Hawley, has a great new story out in The Walrus. Wistful and wonderful.
He says her name, “Mary.” And suddenly Easter happens. The random becomes the real. The new story line clicks into place. The world rotates on a different axis. The universe is turned upside-down, inside out. Mary becomes the first to understand that death cannot be the last word. That Jesus’s story was not a tragedy. […]
Last night they didn’t try to package Jesus into a digestible savior. In the Good Friday service I attended, the space was prepared. Attention was paid. The movements were purposeful. Light and darkness played across the sanctuary. There was little attempt at explanation and what there was was superfluous. The story was told well. Music […]
Heartlands 