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Considering Our Hearts (& the Future of the UMC): A Review of The Anatomy of Peace
Let’s get this out of the way first: If Dan Brown wrote a book about conflict resolution it would come out looking something like The Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict. If that sounds like an endorsement to you, you’ll love this book. If, like me, you threw The DaVinci Code across the →
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017:#1 Lincoln in the Bardo (& a recap)
There are certain things you know you’re going to find when you sit down to read a George Saunders story. It will be weird, funny, engaging, and surprisingly deep. I expected no less from Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders’ first novel and I was not disappointed. The book, which won the Man Booker Prize this year, →
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017:#2 Work Like Any Other
It seems a shame not to award this book the top spot just because I got to it late. Truthfully, it could still take the prize despite the fact that my self-imposed rules say that being published in 2017 adds a little weight to the scale. Be that as it may, if you haven’t read →
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How to Make Your Church Inefficient: The Winn Collier interview continues (2 of 3)
In the first part of my interview with Winn Collier, pastor of All Souls Charlottesville and author of Love Big. Be Well.: Letters to a Small-Town Church, we talked about his decision to set his novel in a small town. We also talked about the use of letters as a way to tell the story →
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017:#3 Killers of the Flower Moon
The more I think about David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI the more I realize what a brilliant work of journalism it is. Grann doesn’t call attention to himself and never reaches too far into the ether to get at a larger point. He simply tells →
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The Lure of Small Towns: The Heartlands Interview with Winn Collier – (1 of 3)
Winn Collier’s new book, Love Big. Be Well: Letters to a Small-Town Church, is a generous celebration of the potential of church. In my review I noted that it is a gentle, human love story between a pastor and his congregation told in the form of letters written to the church over the course of →
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017:#4 Wolf Whistle
If I told you there was a laugh-out-loud book about the murder of Emmett Till, the black teenager killed in Mississippi in 1955 after he allegedly whistled at a white woman, you’d call such a thing, at the least, in poor taste. Yet the late Lewis Nordan, who lived through that episode as a teenager →
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017:#5 The Crucifixion
Fleming Rutledge is having a long-overdue moment in the wake of her 2015 book, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. I finally finished it in 2017, qualifying it for this list, and gushed about it in my review, (which you can access through the title link in the previous sentence). Rutledge sees her book as →
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