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“Pessimism, Hopelessness & Doom” – Traveling the Virginia Extremes with August Wallmeyer
August Wallmeyer paints a distressing picture of rural Virginia in the 21st century. His little book, The Extremes of Virginia, which highlights the realities and common challenges of three regions of the Commonwealth—Southwest, Southside, and the Eastern Shore—gets your attention quickly. You start to see why he calls the regions “the Extremes,” and it isn’t just because… →
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You are the one and only threshold
“If we become addicted to the external, our interiority will haunt us. We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person, or deed can still. To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known… →
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How to Be Here (and Not There)
“It is strange to be here,” John O’Donohue says in the opening line of his book, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom. For O’Donohue, that meant attending to the mystery of the particular human life and acknowledging that each of is “the one and only threshold of an inner world.” It is strange to be… →
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“My Pleasure” – New story by Alix Hawley
Recent interviewee, Alix Hawley, has a great new story out in The Walrus. Wistful and wonderful. →
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A comedy after all: Easter
He says her name, “Mary.” And suddenly Easter happens. The random becomes the real. The new story line clicks into place. The world rotates on a different axis. The universe is turned upside-down, inside out. Mary becomes the first to understand that death cannot be the last word. That Jesus’s story was not a tragedy. … →
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Attention was paid: The strange & sensual movement of Holy Week
Last night they didn’t try to package Jesus into a digestible savior. In the Good Friday service I attended, the space was prepared. Attention was paid. The movements were purposeful. Light and darkness played across the sanctuary. There was little attempt at explanation and what there was was superfluous. The story was told well. Music… →
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Rural Soul – guest blogger: Sara Porter Keeling
Sara Porter Keeling can tell you about many things, but today she goes Across the Street to shed light on how community is built in a small town. Sara is the pastor of three United Methodist Churches in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains. She’s also got some truly excellent preacher boots: This is… →
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Can we see a little less clearly, Lord? – Prayers for a Way Forward
WITH my glasses off the thing I think I know becomes indistinct and fresh. A deer’s tail becomes a great white feather. A distant tree, a man by the roadside hailing me. When I run without my lenses the world slips out of bounds and newness emerges like angels in our midst. Since we… →
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“S-Town” and the sordid underbelly of this American life
This week I finished listening to “S-Town,” the latest buzzy podcast from the folks who brought us “This American Life,” and “Serial.” Like a trip to the all-you-can-eat buffet, it was great while it lasted but made me feel various degrees of queasy when it was all over, and least of all because of all… →
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Your Giddy Desire — Prayers for a Way Forward
HOW good and pleasant it is for brothers and sisters to dwell together in unity! So the psalmist says and we believe it could be so, though our glimpses of such goodness and pleasantness are scant and near mythical. Yet we long to live together – to see as you see and love as you… →
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Heartlands 