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A Plea Before the Next Tweet
Because you know there will be another one. And we will have the same choice we always have—to define the world in relation to the tweeter or… …to do something else. Recently I attended an experimental theatre production about the American healthcare system. We had to take off our shoes before going into the theatre.… →
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How Many Piercings Can a Docent Have?: Wondering About Church at the American Civil War Museum
How many piercings can a museum docent have? It was a question Christy Coleman didn’t know she’d have to struggle with when she became the CEO of the American Civil War Center in 2013. But when that museum merged with the Museum of the Confederacy and built a brand new facility around the old Tredegar… →
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Why Mister Rogers Still Matters: Shea Tuttle on the Man and His Faith
The scene Shea Tuttle describes in the introduction of her great new book is so familiar that it could be any one of us as a child. Curled up on a couch wrapped in a holey Afghan watching a television show alone. And then the magic as a performer reaches through that screen and across… →
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The Not-So-Calm Before the Storm: Jesmyn Ward’s Katrina Story
Katrina doesn’t arrive until Salvage the Bones is almost over, but the hurricane has always been coming. She broods over the whole of Jesmyn Ward’s epic 2011 novel, even when the only one who seems to know she’s on the way is Esch’s Daddy, whose preparations seem excessive to his four children living with him… →
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Is There Anything to Say After El Paso?
I wasn’t preaching last Sunday so I didn’t face the decision that most preachers entertained that morning: Do I say something about the violence and death? This time it had happened in El Paso and Dayton, but we have a long list of American cities and schools that now have the words “hosted a mass… →
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Good God, What Happened to the Heartland?: Laughing and Lamenting with Lyz Lenz
Lyz Lenz is so funny sometimes that you can forget that she has written a hard book. As, for instance, when she’s surveying the physical layout of cookie-cutter megachurches and says that “the decor looks like a Hobby Lobby vomited all over the place.” (115) That’s the vibrant Lyz that you want giving you the… →
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Stirring, Terrifying, Inspiring, Troubling—Yeah, That’s America
The first thing I note about Jill Lepore’s new one-volume history of the United States is how out of style it is. In an age of disintegrating consensus and competing truths, who would dare to attempt a comprehensive narrative of our national story? Fortunately, Jill Lepore would and the result is a book you’ll surely… →
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Say Goodbye to the Mind-Numbing Meeting
We’ve all been there. The meeting that begins with the same agenda as every past meeting to time immemorial. The gathering that gets hijacked by one overbearing guest. The party that peters out like air going out of a balloon. And yet we’ve also been there when it’s gone, remarkably, right. When some purpose sparks… →
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There is Still a ‘There’ There: The Atopian Dreams of Suzannah Lessard
This review by Heartlands editor Alex Joyner originally appeared in the Eastertide 2019 print edition of the Englewood Review of Books (now available) and is republished with permission. It’s quaint to live in a place like Parksley. Though the name refers to the original owner from whom the land for the town was bought, one Benjamin Parks, it… →
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A New Style Guide for Word Lovers: Dreyer’s Droll Diversion
It sounds like faint praise to say that a book is diverting. We want our books to be gripping, engrossing, un-put-down-able. Or, if the tome in question is a reference book, we’d prefer that it be reliable, comprehensive, and comprehensible. Sorry. Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style meets none of those… →
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