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This Old House: The Love Story – an interview with Trudy Hale, part 1 of 3
There’s a great love story going on up in the Virginia foothills rolling up to the Blue Ridge. Actually, there’s a bunch of them. Every writer that finds his or her way to Trudy Hale’s writing retreat in the little village of Norwood discovers something to love. I’ve got my list: The big stony bluff… →
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Dismantle Confederate Memorials? Let’s Build Some Different Ones
A Robert E. Lee monument is dismantled in New Orleans. A torchlight rally in Charlottesville, Virginia to protect another one. A lieutenant governor candidate in Virginia calls for removing all Confederate memorials and renaming all highways and buildings named for Confederate leaders. William Faulkner had it right. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”… →
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The Weird & Beautiful Vision of George Saunders: A Review of Lincoln in the Bardo
You would not think that a full-scale recapitulation of Ecclesiastes would make a great bestseller. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity! This human thing is an exercise of unknowing. I know that there is nothing better than that they should eat, drink, and experience pleasure in their hard work. This is the philosophy of the… →
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“A Grace Wholly Gratuitous”
‘Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to encompass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump up against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull. For unless all ages and races of men… →
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James Baldwin’s Moment and the Danger of Racial Innocence
James Baldwin is having a moment, 30 years after his death. First, Ta-Nehasi Coates’ Between the World and Me, a book that drew its inspiration from Baldwin’s 1963 book The Fire Next Time, topped The New York Times’ bestsellers list. Then, a documentary about Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, was nominated for an Academy… →
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How to Preach a Bad Sermon
Yesterday, I preached a bad sermon. I quoted and misquoted Mark Twain, King, and Ghandi without attribution. I cruelly mocked my child by telling stories of his misdeeds. I violated the privacy of a parishioner with health issues to highlight my prowess in pastoral care. And I managed to talk far more about myself than… →
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Down the Line and on the Edge: Poetry Saturday
There’s no mystery to the ball hit to the gap in right centerfield. So much room for error. So many ways it could have been a hit anyway and otherwise. It’s the tailing ball down the line that sprays up chalk that makes a difference. It could so easily have been elsewise: A forgotten foul… →
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Why Don’t Country People Just Get Out? – revisited
The struggles of rural communities has led a number of recent writers to ask, “Why don’t people just leave?,” an attitude I groused about in a recent post. The Atlantic has been covering this beat in a series of articles. Now Brian Alexander has written another piece in that magazine titled “If Declining Towns ‘Deserve to… →
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Why the Duke Divinity School Controversy Matters
Isn’t this just another academic squabble full of sound and fury but signifying not very much? The recent controversy at Duke Divinity School regarding a faculty training, (the details of which were helpfully outlined by Colleen Flaherty in Inside Higher Ed), could be seen as just one more piece of evidence that the Great Divide… →
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Shame on the Bayou – a Review of Strangers in Their Own Land
Shame, when its uncovered, can get you somewhere in therapy but it’s useless in healing a country. That was my thought as I read through the later chapters of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s 2016 pre-election book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. Hochschild, a Berkley-based sociologist and self-indentified liberal, took her… →
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Heartlands 