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27 December 2021Alex Joyner

#4–Hunting Magic Eels by Richard Beck–2021 Best Reads

No book was better at giving voice to things I was feeling about our contemporary landscape than Richard Beck’s Hunting Magic Eels. The title was catchy, referring to an ancient Welsh pilgrimage site that featured prophetic eels who could predict the prospects of your love life. But the whole book worked a kind of magic. […]

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23 December 2021Alex Joyner

#5 — A Burning in My Bones by Winn Collier — 2021 Best Reads

Winn Collier’s biography of Eugene Peterson, A Burning in My Bones, was easily one of my best reads of the year. Collier had access to the journals and papers of the pastor/writer who is best known as the translator of The Message version of the Bible. He also knew the man and brings an appreciative […]

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20 December 202119 December 2021Alex Joyner

#6–The Making of Biblical Womanhood–2021 Best Reads

The 6th book on our Top Ten list is Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood. Barr got a lot of buzz for this book, making her perhaps the country’s most popular medieval historian. Barr also happens to be an evangelical Christian trying to help her branch of the Christian church move out of […]

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19 December 202118 December 2021Alex Joyner

#7–Braided Creek–2021 Best Reads

If you’ve followed this Best Reads exercise before you know that a 2021 Best Read doesn’t have to have been a book published in 2021, although more recent books do get more weight in the discernment process. So far we’ve had three great 2021 books, but this one from 2003 had to make the list. […]

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18 December 2021Alex Joyner

#8–Saint Agnostica–2021 Best Reads

“My poetry got a lot better,” Anya Krugovoy Silver told Macon Magazine in 2010. “Nothing focuses your mind and helps you see clearly what’s important quite like cancer. It made me want to explore, even more, the beauty and divinity of the ordinary world.” The breast cancer diagnosis came in 2004 when she was in […]

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17 December 202117 December 2021Alex Joyner

#9–Across the Airless Wilds–2021 Best Reads

Earl Swift is a great writer who likes to shine a spotlight on out of the way places like Tangier Island and, now, the moon. His history of the lunar rover program takes us back to a period that now seems like an anomaly…a time when confident engineers and competent bureaucrats built something amazing that […]

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14 December 2021Alex Joyner

The Heartlands Best Reads of 2021 –#10 On Juneteenth

The end of the year is approaching quickly so it must be time for the Heartlands Best Reads list. It’s been a good year for reading, even with a move and shift in environment. This is the fifth year for this list. A quick reminder of the criteria for making this list: writing with a […]

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20 November 2021Alex Joyner

The Light Along Braided Creek

Short poems can seem light, slight…a thrown-off thought, a casual aside. But leave the world of nursery rhymes and limericks and there are wonders to behold in a few well-chosen lines. That was my experience reading the collection of poems in Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry. In the midst of a serious illness, U.S. […]

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20 November 2021Alex Joyner

Home of the Brave (Church)

This review was published on the Englewood Review of Books website and is reprinted here with permission. It’s not easy to talk these days. Try having a social gathering over Zoom and see how quickly you tire. Maybe one voice dominates. Maybe you’re frustrated by not having the side conversation you’d like to have. Maybe […]

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16 October 2021Alex Joyner

Over the Moon: Earl Swift’s Tale of Lunar Off-roading

Who wouldn’t love the feeling of fishtailing through remote dunes in a brand new, state-of-the-art vehicle designed for off-road adventure? It took years of engineering and millions of dollars to provide the means, but when Dave Scott and Jim Irwin strapped themselves in for a test drive in the summer of ’71 they set off […]

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editor, Heartlands magazine author United Methodist pastor on Virginia's Eastern Shore

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