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Little Houses and Big Truths on the Prairie: Caroline Fraser’s Laura Ingalls Wilder
It takes a lot of work to uncover what really happened to the vast prairies of the North American Midwest. You have to dig under Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous 1890 declaration that the frontier had made America what it was and now it was gone. Pioneer famers, Turner said, had busted sod, felled forests, and… →
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Revisiting a Letter to My Haitian Neighbor (plus Ry Cooder!)
Maybe I was a little premature. When I saw my Haitian neighbor leaving town awhile back, I wrote a letter assuming that his departure meant we were going to see a more general exodus from town. I wrote the letter in frustration over the wretched condition of our immigration policies. The Haitian community on the… →
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Rescuing Hope: And Other Lessons From the Cave
Tuesday the news was filled with the spectacle of reporters crying. They weren’t alone. Maybe you shed a few tears yourself when you heard that 12 boys and their coach had made their way out of a cave in Thailand. “We can take a breath now,” a Miami diving instructor said on CNN before choking… →
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There’s Something Still the Matter with Kansas: Thomas Frank and a Sinking Society
Thomas Frank is the kind of writer who gets trotted out when the national media wants to cast its distracted gaze on the hinterlands. It helped that he wrote a book a decade and more back about his home state titled What’s the Matter with Kansas? After the 2016 election a whole lot of pundits… →
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Fracking & A Fractured Land
The Washington County Fair in 2010 should have been unalloyed joy for Stacey Haney and her family. After all, Haney’s 14-year-old son, Harley, and his goat, Boots, took the Grand Champion Showmanship award. Paige, her 11-year-old daughter, got awards for her two rabbits, Pepsi & Phantom, and for her Mexi-SPAM Mac and Cheese entry in… →
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Who is This ‘We’?: Poetry for the ‘Families Belong Together’ Rally
I’m not going to make the ‘Families Belong Together’ Rally in Onancock today (Saturday, June 30) from 11-12:30. And when asked for a statement, I couldn’t find the words. So I contributed this poem to be read. May we find the ‘we’ that is truly ‘us.’ Who is this ‘we’ into which I am enlisted?… →
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No One’s Anything: A Reflection on Kate Bowler’s Everything Happens for a Reason
Peter Surran, is a pastor, teacher, EMT, building inspector, and a good friend. He’s also a heck of a writer. I’ve been wanting to get him on the blog for awhile and finally roped him in with a review of Kate Bowler’s Everything Happens For a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved. Enjoy: I bustled into my… →
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Why We Don’t Care About ‘The National Water Situation’
“For all my love of rivers, ‘our nation’s rivers’ have not moved me once. The rivers that move me are those I’ve fished, canoed, slept beside, lived on, nearly drowned in, dreamed about, sipped tea and wine by, taught my kids to swim in, pulled a thousand fish from, fought and fought to defend. I’ve… →
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Everyday Apocalypse: Poetry
Katherine Sonderegger is right when she says: It is a wonder that Moses is not annihilated—consumed—by the Name uttered to him in the wilderness. For all the other apocalypses in Holy Scripture can only pale before this Naming, the annihilating Speech of God as Subject. This is the end, the finality of all creatures, of… →
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Jeff Sessions and the Things Church Trials Can’t Do
Church trials don’t create community; they create tribes. And that’s got me concerned for The United Methodist Church. Some 640 United Methodists recently lodged a formal complaint against the Attorney General of the United States, Jeff Sessions, who is a United Methodist with membership in a Mobile, Alabama church. Though it is almost so rare… →
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Heartlands 