Leaves don’t so much change color in the fall as they become what they’ve always been. The chlorophyll that gives all deciduous trees their summer uniform of green begins to break down in the cooling days of autumn. The carotenoids in the leaves remain, lending trees their brilliant yellows and oranges. Those colors have always […]
Reading Mohsin Hamid’s acclaimed new novel, Exit West, as a window on the current global migration crisis is a mistake. The world imagined by the Pakistani-born Hamid is not one facing a migration issue – migration is the environment in which all its characters swim. It’s not a problem to be addressed; it is in […]
We’d all like a Holy Land made in our own image. I’ve just spent two weeks in Israel and Palestine and there are a few things I’d change. Yes, ending the occupation and a two-state solution are on the list. (More on that to come.) But, less grandly, how about the simplicity of a church […]
I’m traveling back from Israel & Palestine Monday, but not before the Rev. Sara Porter Keeling continues her guest hosting with a post on anthropology, theology, and the continuing journey of discerning the Word. Many thanks to Sara for bringing her rural soul to Heartlands while I’ve been away… Does loving our neighbors look like […]
The Rev. Sara Porter Keeling continues as guest host this week, while I am in Israel & Palestine. Today: a confessional look at the journey of call. I started a blog in 2003. Blogging—was THE social media platform of its time—we were a few years away from facebook, twitter was still confusing, and instagram […]
Sara Keeling, pastor of the Rappahannock Charge of the United Methodist Church, has a rural soul. Or so she told us in a previous guest outing on Heartlands. While I’m in Israel and Palestine, she agreed to share again. I really didn’t ask for all the kind words. They just came free! But read on […]
“Probably the real self is in fact the invented self fully accepted.” That’s Lewis Nordan’s justification for declaring that his outrageous, out-sized fiction is actually memoir. He created himself through imagining a different past, different circumstances, and a different father than the disappointing realities he knew as a child growing up in Itta Bena, Mississippi. […]
“In every family there are subjects that seem to bring out the worst in us when we discuss them. For United Methodists, that topic is currently homosexuality.” (9) So says Jill Johnson, one of my co-authors of the new book, Living Faithfully: Human Sexuality and The United Methodist Church, just out from Abingdon Press. But this […]
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