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Postcard – Flash Fiction
A new Heartlands category–Fiction–begins today with this flash fiction. Elaine almost missed the slim card beneath the stack of bills in the post office box. The box was always stuffed after she’d been away a few days. She might have missed the postcard altogether had it not slid out onto the tiled floor. She picked it… →
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How an Old United Ad Gives Me Hope for the Church
A hard-bitten boss paces around a circle of workers in his sales force. “I got a phone call this morning from one of our oldest customers,” he says. “He fired us. After 20 years, he fired us. Said he didn’t know us anymore.” The scene is from a United Airlines commercial from almost 30 years… →
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What If We Can’t ‘Get Past’ Sex? A Review of Entangled
The following review was originally published on The Englewood Review of Books and is republished with permission. The author is Heartlands editor, Alex Joyner. What if questions of human sexuality are not something that the United Methodist Church (UMC), like other mainline Protestant denominations, have to settle and get past, but rather are the foundation on which the… →
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House Burns. Farm Threatened. Christian Fiction Revived? A Review of This Heavy Silence
The cover of Christy, Catherine Marshall’s 1967 work of Christian fiction, has stared at me from a thousand church library shelves over the years. The original paperback version shows a young woman in early 20th-century dress seemingly dancing through a mountain meadow like Julie Andrews in the Alps. Catherine Marshall created Christy as a tribute… →
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The Prodigal Son’s Older Brother as Wimbledon Chair Umpire – Friday Poetry
What the older brother squandered was his sweat, which, had he known it was as dissolute as life in the far country, he might have traded out for something more exciting. But his fierce fidelity to the American dream was his particular delusion. “Virtue can be earned in honest labor.” Only honesty was not his… →
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God is in the Countryside (and Country Churches)
Maybe it’s because I’m getting ready to do a workshop on storytelling this weekend, but I’ve been thinking about the parables of Jesus. The Nazarene had a way of incorporating the stuff of the world around him into his messages. Farmers and seeds, shepherds and sheep, tenants and landowners—these were things Jesus’ listeners knew about.… →
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Why Don’t Country People Just Get Out? – Episode 3
It’s happened again. Writers in The New York Times are once again wondering aloud if country people shouldn’t just give up and move to the city to deal with problems of economic insecurity. Which means, it’s time for another episode of “Why Don’t Country People Just Get Out?” In an article titled “The Hard Truth… →
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4 Ways to Unlock the Power of Your Dreams
In the spirit of a broken clock being right twice a day, let me just say that one of Job’s friends got it right about dreams. Elihu, the fourth and youngest of Job’s blowhard companions who sought to “console” him after his tragedies, says something in chapter 33 that has always seemed just right to… →
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Top 10 Posts of 2018 – Heartlands
A word of thanks and best wishes to all the friends of Heartlands who have supported this labor of love in 2018. We’ve grown this year with more views and visits. The top posts reveal a lot of interest (and probably anxiety) about where the United Methodist Church is headed in 2019. But look down… →
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Christmas Music and the Incarnation
Originally posted on Tell it Slant: photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash The essay from my FaithLink for Dec. 23rd–“Christmas Music and the Incarnation”—has been posted on the Ministry Matters website: https://www.ministrymatters.com/all/entry/9420/christmas-music-and-the-incarnation Here are links to the songs mentioned in the essay: John McCutcheon’s “Christmas in the Trenches”: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox?projector=1 Noel Paul Stookey’s “Christmas Dinner” with… →
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