“How are you going to tell the story of what God is doing in your ministry?” It’s often the forgotten question in planning, but it may be one of the most crucial. Failing to tell the story in a compelling way often leads to confusion about the mission, apathy, financial struggles, dispirited volunteers, and gingivitis. […]
A Review of Christian Wiman’s He Held Radical Light The poet Seamus Heaney paused in the middle of dinner and leaned over to make a confession to Christian Wiman, who was, at the time, the editor of Poetry magazine. Knowing Wiman to be a Christian not only in name, Heaney admitted that he “felt caught between […]
We got John Grady and Billy Parham back for the last crossing. John Grady was the romantically-inclined teenaged horse whisperer from All the Pretty Horses. Billy Parham was the beleaguered teenaged ranch hand who seems always to be helping people get home—a wolf and his dead brother, Boyd, in The Crossing. Cormac McCarthy brings the […]
What happens to the coal patch when the coal industry leaves? https://www.ministrymatters.com/all/entry/9358/the-decline-of-coal
This review originally appeared on the Englewood Review of Books. Experiments flourish on the margins. It’s why visionaries and mavericks gather in places far from the watchful eye of social convention and official control. Think Donald Judd making his art and his mark in Marfa in ultra-West Texas. Think Brigham Young and the Mormons building […]
Appetite for Destruction – Fixing Roofs in Waverly https://streetlightmag.com/2018/11/11/appetite-for-destruction-fixing-roofs-in-waverly-by-alex-joyner/
When you go to the Holy Land and discuss the current realities of Israelis and Palestinians, you’ll often hear about two biblical characters—David and Goliath. Palestinians will point out how they have been consigned to two small patches of their former homeland—Gaza and the West Bank, how Israeli settlements and security encroach on these, and […]
The land, this land, is not a problem to be solved. It is a matrix, this mother, for health. The great migrations of the day— from Syria, the South, central Africa— are symptoms of a greater dis location. It’s not just about resources and economic opportunity (or lack thereof). These are […]
We went to the polls. We voted for change or not. We resisted or didn’t. And in the end, we remain divided. One pundit I heard this morning said that the most profound and confounding divide in America is the rural-urban/suburban split. As a site begun after the 2016 elections and devoted to understanding the […]
In the last part of my interview with Princeton sociologist, Robert Wuthnow, we talked about rural churches. In this segment we pull back the lens and look at shame, among other things… You say in the book, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America, that part of your effort is to explain to other […]
Heartlands 