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The Unseen Skeleton That IS the Closet—Reading Caste
“With an old house, the work is never done, and you don’t expect it to be. America is an old house.” (15) 2020 has been the year for a lot of divisive debates, but one of the most interesting for students of history has been the one about dates. Is the United States fundamentally a… →
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Love, Life, and Salvation in As I Lay Dying
Perhaps someday I’ll get around to re-reading William Faulkner, which numerous guides suggest one do in order to get the full flavor of his writing. In the meantime, I’ll step back and gawk, wondering why I’m persisting in this recent quest to get to the heart of Yoknapatawpha County, Faulkner’s mythical Mississippi landscape. I mean,… →
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The Embodied Poetics of Scott Cairns
Just as the world shut down last March, Paraclete Press released a small chapbook of new poems by Scott Cairns, A School of Embodied Poetics: New Poems. Cairns is a Heartlands favorite and we’ve checked in on several of his earlier collections, most recently the luminous Anaphora. He invites settled and repeated reading, something that… →
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A Grudging Endorsement of The Advantage
I’m not one for business books. They are, as a rule, reductive, shallow, formulaic, and hokey. So imagine my surprise when I came to Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business and found that it was…nah, not what you’re thinking. Let’s just say that it didn’t stir my skeptical heart.… →
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Protection From Poison and Poisonous Times
I’ve got no objectivity when it comes to Laurence Wareing. I’ll just say that up front. Even though I believe I’d be celebrating the appearance of Celtic Blessings and Celtic Saints into the world without knowing who the author was, I do recognize that knowing the soul behind the books made the reading that much… →
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Adrift in a Sea of Love and Antichrists: The Johannine Epistles
To translate the Johannine epistles (1, 2, & 3 John in the Bible) is to be adrift in a sea of love and antichrists. You get the sense that the community receiving these letters is tragically torn and needs the stern reminding of this elder to remember who they are and to learn how to… →
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3 John — A Translation
The Third Letter of John A translation by Alex Joyner From the elder to the beloved Gaius, whom I love in the Truth. My beloved friend, I pray that you prosper in all things and in good health, just as your soul prospers. What joy I felt when our emissaries came to bear witness to… →
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How Not to Take the Lord’s Name in Vain in an Election Year
Here’s an evergreen commandment—“Don’t take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” (Ex. 20:7) It’s one of the top 10 from Sinai and it’s most often invoked when someone believes they have breached it—say when they let a juicy God-based epithet fly in front of the preacher. How many times have I been… →
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Of Mice and Migration: The Luminous World of Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom
This review originally appeared on The Englewood Review of Books and is republished with permission. The experiments that Gifty, a Stanford PhD candidate, conducts have the illusion of being about control. A pioneer in the field of optogenetics, the young Ghanaian-American researcher is using illuminated neural pathways to understand the brains of mice—particularly brains with… →
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Reading The Sound and the Fury in 2020
In 1929, William Faulkner had a keen sense that it was all falling in of its own weight. When he published The Sound and the Fury, now recognized as an American classic, it confused folks more than wowed them. The first section, written from the perspective of Benjy Compson, the intellectually-challenged son of a white… →
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