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Rural Soul: Origins in Orange. Guest blogger Sara Keeling returns
Sara Keeling, pastor of the Rappahannock Charge of the United Methodist Church, has a rural soul. Or so she told us in a previous guest outing on Heartlands. While I’m in Israel and Palestine, she agreed to share again. I really didn’t ask for all the kind words. They just came free! But read on… →
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Dreaming Something Real: A Review of Music of the Swamp by Lewis Nordan
“Probably the real self is in fact the invented self fully accepted.” That’s Lewis Nordan’s justification for declaring that his outrageous, out-sized fiction is actually memoir. He created himself through imagining a different past, different circumstances, and a different father than the disappointing realities he knew as a child growing up in Itta Bena, Mississippi. … →
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Can We Talk About Sexuality?
“In every family there are subjects that seem to bring out the worst in us when we discuss them. For United Methodists, that topic is currently homosexuality.” (9) So says Jill Johnson, one of my co-authors of the new book, Living Faithfully: Human Sexuality and The United Methodist Church, just out from Abingdon Press. But this… →
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Freaks & Monsters – Being an Artist in the South – My interview with Nick Norwood concludes – Part 3 of 3
Nick Norwood, director of the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians at Columbus State University, is also a great poet. Like McCullers, he writes about what he knows – the American South and its eccentricities. In previous segments of this essay we talked about the universal themes in McCullers’ work and her sense… →
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Five Things I Learned from a Cowboy (Church)
I love a horse trough baptism as much as the next guy, but I have to admit that I’m a traditionalist at heart. I appreciate the time-worn beauty of prayers passed down through generations, the mystery and splendor of a good four-part choir, the movement and purposeful flow of a well-planned order of worship, and… →
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Carson’s Place – My Interview with Nick Norwood Continues – part 2 of 3
In the first part of my interview with Nick Norwood, director of the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians at Columbus State University, we talked about the universal themes of McCullers’ writing. Today we talk about the strong sense of place in her work and the way Columbus, Georgia, her hometown, informs it. So we… →
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In Which I Tumble Out of the Tumble In and Head to Terlingua – A West Texas Adventure
The bright lights and hubbub of the big city (Archer City, that is – population ~1800) were starting to get to me, so I decided to head even further out into West Texas. Out to where the skies stretch out like God’s own Imax screen. Out to where coyotes howl at the setting sun and… →
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The Spiritual Isolation of Carson McCullers – An Interview with Nick Norwood – part 1 of 3
So, I’ve got a thing for Carson McCullers. Anybody who read this blog through the McCullers-palooza that was her 100th birthday celebration in February will know that this Southern writer speaks to me. The characters that she introduced us to in such classics as The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Member of the Wedding, and The Ballad of… →
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What Goes Without Saying – Some Thoughts on Charlottesville
Let me begin with the ‘ought to’s. It ought to go without saying that what happened in Charlottesville at a gathering of white supremacists and white nationalists was an ugly display of our divisions in this current moment. It ought to go without saying that an ideology that believes the white race is superior to… →
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