Month: May 2017
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Writing at The Porches – An interview with Trudy Hale – part 2 of 3
In the first part of my interview with Trudy Hale, editor of Streetlight magazine and owner of The Porches writing retreat, we discussed the relationship she developed with a neglected farmhouse in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains. In this segment, we talk about the writing. (And all the ways we contrive not to.) The Porches…
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What can the Rural Church Offer a Declining Community? Hope!
From the Faith & Leadership newsletter, an article by Allen T. Stanton: “In a community of decline, hope becomes countercultural. While it would be wrong to foster a false sense of optimism or to promise that manufacturing and young adults will return, the church has a unique ability to stand in the hard realities and still preach…
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An Osage Mirror: A Review of Killers of the Flower Moon
Two-thirds of the way through this book [Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI] and I was fixing to get very disappointed. Sure, David Grann had done what his title said that he was going to do. He had thrown us into the strange wave of murders…
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This Old House: The Love Story – an interview with Trudy Hale, part 1 of 3
There’s a great love story going on up in the Virginia foothills rolling up to the Blue Ridge. Actually, there’s a bunch of them. Every writer that finds his or her way to Trudy Hale’s writing retreat in the little village of Norwood discovers something to love. I’ve got my list: The big stony bluff…
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Dismantle Confederate Memorials? Let’s Build Some Different Ones
A Robert E. Lee monument is dismantled in New Orleans. A torchlight rally in Charlottesville, Virginia to protect another one. A lieutenant governor candidate in Virginia calls for removing all Confederate memorials and renaming all highways and buildings named for Confederate leaders. William Faulkner had it right. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”…
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The Weird & Beautiful Vision of George Saunders: A Review of Lincoln in the Bardo
You would not think that a full-scale recapitulation of Ecclesiastes would make a great bestseller. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity! This human thing is an exercise of unknowing. I know that there is nothing better than that they should eat, drink, and experience pleasure in their hard work. This is the philosophy of the…
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“A Grace Wholly Gratuitous”
‘Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to encompass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump up against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull. For unless all ages and races of men…
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James Baldwin’s Moment and the Danger of Racial Innocence
James Baldwin is having a moment, 30 years after his death. First, Ta-Nehasi Coates’ Between the World and Me, a book that drew its inspiration from Baldwin’s 1963 book The Fire Next Time, topped The New York Times’ bestsellers list. Then, a documentary about Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, was nominated for an Academy…
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How to Preach a Bad Sermon
Yesterday, I preached a bad sermon. I quoted and misquoted Mark Twain, King, and Ghandi without attribution. I cruelly mocked my child by telling stories of his misdeeds. I violated the privacy of a parishioner with health issues to highlight my prowess in pastoral care. And I managed to talk far more about myself than…
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Down the Line and on the Edge: Poetry Saturday
There’s no mystery to the ball hit to the gap in right centerfield. So much room for error. So many ways it could have been a hit anyway and otherwise. It’s the tailing ball down the line that sprays up chalk that makes a difference. It could so easily have been elsewise: A forgotten foul…
Heartlands 