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More Carson…
I have thought of Carson McCullers’ economic insights as underdeveloped, but here’s a testimony to her observations in that area from the Director of the Carson McCullers Center… Nick Norwood: What Carson McCullers knew about cotton mills and misery →
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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter: Carson McCullers Week, part 2
Post 2 for Carson McCullers 100th Birthday Week. Things to expect when you read Carson McCullers: late night diners, music, triangles of frustrated love, circuses, outsiders, and wanderers. In her two best works, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Member of the Wedding, you also find a fiery, pre-teen girl trying to make sense of… →
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“A World Intense & Strange”: Carson McCullers Week
Sunday, Feb. 19, 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of my new favorite writer — Carson McCullers. My relationship with her began with an audio book of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and quickly followed with lapping up all of her novels. I’ll share some thoughts through the week on her basic themes,… →
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It’s about that Church Building. It’s Got to Go.
Beginning in the late 19th century, the Methodists began settling down. What had been a movement of house groups, camp meetings, and simple preaching houses, set up shop on every Main Street and country crossroad and made themselves a presence with substantial stained-glassed buildings. In the 1950s and 1960s we built again during that… →
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A Heart in Darkness – Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad By Colson Whitehead Doubleday, 2016 320 pages South Carolina seemed enlightened, until you realized that, beneath the comforts and opportunities, the plan was to sterilize the black race out of existence. North Carolina used less subterfuge, resorting to a grisly ‘Freedom Trail’ of hanging black bodies as a way of dealing with… →
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In which I talk spelunking with the guys from Crackers & Grape Juice
A great podcast for theology, honesty, and occasionally, humor… →
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Won’t You Be a Neighbor?
My review of The Neighboring Church over on the great Englewood Review of Books… →
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What a Charismatic Preacher Can’t Do
Put together a charismatic preacher, a warm environment where people care about each other, and a lively music team and it’s still possible to have a viable small church ministry in the heartland. People looking for an experience of church appreciate those things and they certainly rate high on my list of desirable qualities. Two problems,… →
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A Brief Word of Introduction
Heartlands is the site of Alex Joyner, an eclectic practitioner of trades and a person formed by faith and region. Heartlands is a collection point for writing, news, and sharing on life and ministry in rural America. I grew up in Virginia and make it my home now, but I have also spent significant… →
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