Month: June 2020
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The Case for Ending UNRWA: A Review of The War of Return
A few years ago, as I was researching a book about Israel and Palestine, [A Space for Peace in the Holy Land: Listening to Modern Israel & Palestine], I visited a refugee camp in Nablus on the West Bank. Named Balata, it was home to about 25,000 people, all living cheek by jowl in one […]
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Christian Wiman Has Nothing to Prove, And Yet He Does
Christian Wiman has nothing to prove. His output in recent years sparkles: Joy: 100 Poems, an anthology he edited with a title so out of step with the times that it circled back around to surprise us that we could feel such a thing as joy just now. He Held Radical Light: The Art of […]
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Breathe: by Guest Blogger Kathy McGinty
Kathy McGinty, a Safety Officer at Johns Hopkins Hospital, gave permission for Heartlands to publish this essay, which powerfully connects all the ways we can’t breathe right now. When the pandemic of 2020 hit the United States, I could not imagine what a startling change it would bring. Working as a Physical Therapist Assistant in […]
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Poetry: It’s Not The Wind
The wind never stops. It’s been blowing for months. Picking up speed over the broad waters of the bay, blasting the Shore with its insistent fury. It’s unrelenting, leaving us no peace. Like a person who can’t shut up and just keeps yammering on. What is it about the wind that ruffles my feathers? […]
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Racial Justice: A Constant Challenge for an Inconstant People
The challenge is that we’re inconstant. I am inconstant. I walked in two marches on Saturday here on the Eastern Shore, partly because I haven’t had the words to put to my feelings about my country in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands (and knee) of the Minneapolis police. I had the […]
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Saying Their Names: Jesmyn Ward’s Mississippi Memoir
Jesmyn Ward’s memoir, Men We Reaped, derives its title from an arresting Harriet Tubman quote that appears in the book as an epigraph: We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the […]
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Pulling Back the Veil in the Vale of Opioids: Beth Macy’s Dopesick
Three months into our current pandemic we know the scenario. “Epidemics unfold ‘like a vector phenomenon, where you have one individual who seeds that community and then the spread begins.’”(127) Dr. Anna Lembke could have been talking about COVID-19, but the Stanford specialist in addiction medicine was talking about opioids and ace Virginia reporter Beth […]
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