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1 John: A Translation
The First Letter of John A translation by Alex Joyner* That which was from the beginning is also, believe it!, that which we have heard, what we have seen with our own eyes, the Logos of Life—we beheld and held it with these trembling hands. The Life was revealed and we have seen and bear… →
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Leaving Nebraska: Revisiting Willa Cather in the Pandemic
Willa Cather can make you believe that Nebraska is a little more idyllic than your particular piece of America. Prairie flowers bloom near fields of waving wheat. Sturdy immigrant farmers build sturdy farmhouses and some residents install hammocks on the upper porch to sleep out under the stars on summer evenings. Even the fierce winter… →
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The Enduring Myth of the Texas Rangers
While the Washington football team and the Cleveland baseball team were both undergoing public struggles about the appropriateness of their nicknames, my own favorite baseball team, the Texas Rangers,was called out by several national columnistsfor a similar soul-searching. Theodore Roosevelt, (yes, THAT Teddy Roosevelt) made the case for both sides back before there was even… →
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Seeing the Way to ‘You Can,’ When the World Says ‘You Can’t’
What if your job was to go around blessing people? What if, instead of lamenting all that is wrong, you got to say, “There is something terribly, terribly, right with the world”? And what if you got to say this thing in the very places that get written off as ‘God-forsaken’? Michael Mather has such… →
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Raising the M-word in an Economic Crisis
I’m excited to talk about money…said no church person ever. Well, that’s not entirely true. We imagine that the snake-oil version of preacher is always ready to go there with an appeal for money, which only makes us more hesitant to raise the M-word. In most churches I work with, when we do have a… →
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Why a 1939 Story Helps in 2020
Maybe we have been here before. With pandemic running rampant, economic devastation, and protest settling in for a long spell, it can seem that humanity has never been to this place. But we have and I went back to a short novel from 1939 to get the news. On the eve of the Second World… →
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The Case for Ending UNRWA: A Review of The War of Return
A few years ago, as I was researching a book about Israel and Palestine, [A Space for Peace in the Holy Land: Listening to Modern Israel & Palestine], I visited a refugee camp in Nablus on the West Bank. Named Balata, it was home to about 25,000 people, all living cheek by jowl in one… →
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Christian Wiman Has Nothing to Prove, And Yet He Does
Christian Wiman has nothing to prove. His output in recent years sparkles: Joy: 100 Poems, an anthology he edited with a title so out of step with the times that it circled back around to surprise us that we could feel such a thing as joy just now. He Held Radical Light: The Art of… →
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Saying Their Names: Jesmyn Ward’s Mississippi Memoir
Jesmyn Ward’s memoir, Men We Reaped, derives its title from an arresting Harriet Tubman quote that appears in the book as an epigraph: We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the… →
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Pulling Back the Veil in the Vale of Opioids: Beth Macy’s Dopesick
Three months into our current pandemic we know the scenario. “Epidemics unfold ‘like a vector phenomenon, where you have one individual who seeds that community and then the spread begins.’”(127) Dr. Anna Lembke could have been talking about COVID-19, but the Stanford specialist in addiction medicine was talking about opioids and ace Virginia reporter Beth… →
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Heartlands 