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To Know the Country Whole – A Definition in Poem
I want to know the country whole. The country: the country with its upturned plains and teeming back bays the country carved, sliced, and served in red and blue the country broken the country of my birth and of exile’s long longings the country promised and made new along with heaven I want to know… →
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How to Know Your Mission Field: Adapting with Jacob Armstrong
Jacob Armstrong, founding pastor of Providence Church in Mt. Joliet, Tennessee, offered a provocative and helpful workshop on evangelism during the 5 Talent Academy in Virginia last October. Provocative enough that I bought his book, The New Adapters: Shaping Ideas to Fit Your Congregation [Abingdon, 2015]. In an occasional series, I’m going to take a look at… →
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The Most-Read of 2017: A Heartlands Retrospective
2017 began with a quaint and quixotic belief that one more blog might be helpful in addressing the Great Divide. Post-election I was casting about for a way to explore this strange, new world we all seemed to be living in. Were we really as divided as we seemed? Had we forgotten how to talk… →
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Considering Our Hearts (& the Future of the UMC): A Review of The Anatomy of Peace
Let’s get this out of the way first: If Dan Brown wrote a book about conflict resolution it would come out looking something like The Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict. If that sounds like an endorsement to you, you’ll love this book. If, like me, you threw The DaVinci Code across the… →
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017:#1 Lincoln in the Bardo (& a recap)
There are certain things you know you’re going to find when you sit down to read a George Saunders story. It will be weird, funny, engaging, and surprisingly deep. I expected no less from Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders’ first novel and I was not disappointed. The book, which won the Man Booker Prize this year,… →
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017:#2 Work Like Any Other
It seems a shame not to award this book the top spot just because I got to it late. Truthfully, it could still take the prize despite the fact that my self-imposed rules say that being published in 2017 adds a little weight to the scale. Be that as it may, if you haven’t read… →
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How to Make Your Church Inefficient: The Winn Collier interview continues (2 of 3)
In the first part of my interview with Winn Collier, pastor of All Souls Charlottesville and author of Love Big. Be Well.: Letters to a Small-Town Church, we talked about his decision to set his novel in a small town. We also talked about the use of letters as a way to tell the story… →
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017:#3 Killers of the Flower Moon
The more I think about David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI the more I realize what a brilliant work of journalism it is. Grann doesn’t call attention to himself and never reaches too far into the ether to get at a larger point. He simply tells… →
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The Lure of Small Towns: The Heartlands Interview with Winn Collier – (1 of 3)
Winn Collier’s new book, Love Big. Be Well: Letters to a Small-Town Church, is a generous celebration of the potential of church. In my review I noted that it is a gentle, human love story between a pastor and his congregation told in the form of letters written to the church over the course of… →
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