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Who’s Fighting For Democracy These Days?
Let’s talk politics. I don’t do this much on the blog, because it’s a toxic substance and has to be handled with care. But there’s no doubt that Heartlands had its origin in concerns about the political direction of the country. And there is no way to talk about these strange days of rural America →
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The Tale the Blowflies Tell: A Review of The Dry by Jane Harper
It begins with the blowflies, as good a symbol as any for what happens to rural areas when the weather turns stagnant, hot, and deadly. They know the smell of death and where to find it. So it’s an ominous sign when these end-time harbingers descend upon a small farm in the Australian bush outside →
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Why We Can’t Live Without Horseshoe Crabs
So let me tell you how I think with animals. I see an animal…say, the harbor seal I encountered once while running down a deserted barrier island…I stop dead in my tracks. Pull out my phone to take a picture…(natch)…and then time slows down. I’m aware of the wind, the sun’s position in the sky, →
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Adapting Worship without Climbing Trees
After this many years in worship and as a worship leader, I’ve seen just about everything. Sung prayers in a cathedral choir? Check. Pentecostal healing service in a South Carolina swamp? Check. Taizé? Check. Cowboy Church? Check. Blue jeans and guitars? Check. Radio show a la Prairie Home Companion? Check. In a tree? Check. I →
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Waltzing (and Futzing) Across Texas: A review of Texas Blood
If you pick up this book you won’t know where you’re headed. Texas, sure. After all the title of Roger D. Hodge’s book is Texas Blood: Seven Generations Among the Outlaws, Ranchers, Indians, Missionaries, Soldiers, and Smugglers of the Borderlands. And there are maps in the first chapter that will whet your appetite for West →
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Praying with Fire: A Review of Jamie Quatro’s Fire Sermon
“Dear God: Can you forgive someone for an act they cannot repent of?” (26) So goes Maggie’s prayer journal in the aftermath of an affair in Jamie Quatro’s new novel, Fire Sermon. Maggie has committed to move on. Has cut off communication with the poet she spent one night with in Chicago. In one light, →
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Why Churches Can’t Be Normal Again
Sometimes I have a fantasy that March 2019 will come, the special General Conference of the United Methodist Church designed to heal our rifts will have passed with a grand reaffirmation of our union, and we’ll all go back to normal. That’s the funny thing about normal in the church, though—there’s no going back there. →
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Squinting Through This Latent, Bleak Obscurity with Scott Cairns
“Just now, we squint to see the Image through this latent, bleak obscurity. One day, we’ll see the Image— as Himself—gleaming from each face. Just now, I puzzle through a range of incoherencies; but on that day, the scattered fragments will cohere.” If you don’t recognize 1 Corinthians 13 in this translation, perhaps that good. →
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How to Part Ways With Gadites: A Review of Olu Brown’s New Book
When Olu Brown imagines the conversation between Moses and the leaders of the tribes of Reuben and Gad, it’s a poignant scene. These two tribes, who had traveled through the wilderness on the promise of a new land, were stopping short of the goal, requesting to remain behind as Israel moved on across the Jordan. →
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Shmoop on Huck Finn: Guest Blogger Jeanne Torrence Finley
My colleague Jeanne Torrence Finley has been writing about art and justice on her new blog Tell It Slant, (which you should definitely check out). Today she joins my defense of Huck Finn by discovering an oddly-named defender of satire in literature: When Alex wrote on February 18 (“In Praise of Uncomfortable Books: Huck and →
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