I’ve always been a little worried about our open doors. When the United Methodist Church adopted the slogan “Open hearts, open minds, open doors,” some twenty years ago, it captured a sentiment that many United Methodists have about themselves. Whatever else we may be, (and that’s an area of great contention), we have been the […]
And what is wind but a dialect of longing?–: the high pressure rushing to fill the low, the sky trying to slake its heats against the earth’s asymptotic cool, its somersaulting cools against the earth’s radiance. All weather springs from currents of failed desire. No wonder the wind, when it says anything at […]
Crawling under the skin of the present age is a reality, an anthropology so old that it infests everything we do. I felt it as I read Arlie Russell Hochschild’s sociology of Tea Party Louisiana in Strangers in the Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. But it’s there in liberal moral […]
Breathe in rural Alabama circa 1925. Take deep breaths, “great lungfuls of the scent-tinged air—grass and cornstalks and peanut plants, mulch and dung and mule hide” (159). Feel the heat of July. “This low sun turns every lick of water to steam, even the fresh-pumped drinks in our mess-issued bottles. The sun bakes those metal […]
If you had told me last week that I would get to high-five a bishop in the middle of his sermon at Annual Conference, I would have told you that you were dreaming. Bishops don’t do that. But bishops do do that and there I was last Saturday as the visiting bishop from Mississippi, James […]
ministrymatters.com/…/confederate-monuments-and-controversy A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the decision by the City of New Orleans to dismantle a number of monuments to Confederate heroes. “More memory not less,” was my plea. I developed that theme in an article that is now out on FaithLink, a United Methodist Curriculum. A portion of that article […]
By now you know the story, if you’ve been following since Part 1: Blue state sociologist goes to oil patch Louisiana to try and understand the environment and the people of this Red state. Writes Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. Talks with an Eastern Shore preacher about what she […]
We are repenting from our assumption that government can be an adequate expression of our faith. That’s one of the marks of these times for Christians on both sides of the Great Divide. When Arlie Russell Hochschild, the Berkley sociologist, went to Louisiana to try to understand the deep story of people on the American Right, […]
The sofa bench in the back of The Book Bin was empty the other day. The regulars by the coffee window are hesitant to sit there. A sign on the door indicates that the staff knows that our local independent book store will be a place of mourning and memory for awhile. The bench was […]
Can a Berkley sociologist and a Louisiana oil patch Tea Party member find common ground? That was the experiment Arlie Russell Hochschild (the sociologist) undertook when she found she was having a hard time understanding the forces that were shaping Red States. When I wrote a review of her book about the project, Strangers […]
Heartlands 