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Marilynne Robinson Goes Back to the Beginning
Robinson, the storyteller who created such vivid, fleshed-out characters in her Gilead series, turns a practiced eye to the characters of Genesis, finding some surprising stand-outs. Cain, for instance, creates real issues for a God who has established the utter sacredness of life. Given that the earth’s first family includes a murderer, how will God… →
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The Lightness of Abigail Carroll
She has a knack for going to the deep and sometimes difficult heart of things without flinching and yet returning with something like uplift and joy. There is a lightness verging on flight to her images and words. And a reassuring faithfulness in her discipline of witness. →
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Christian Wiman Cuts Close to the Bone Again
Here is a scrapbook, a glorious one, that dabbles in autobiography, poetry, biblical exegesis, and compendia of quotations from some of literature and spirituality’s greatest lights. Is it seamless? Far from it. But should you submit to the grim and magnificent ride? Absolutely. →
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Fleming Rutledge Upends Another Season
Alongside Dry January, a preacher might offer a sermon series on ‘6 Ways to Up Your Spiritual Game in 2024.’ I don’t even know what that means, but it sounds…productive. Inconveniently for such well-intentioned attempts to enter the marketplace of resolutions, the calendar of the Christian year gives us Epiphany, an obscure season that puts… →
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#1 & A Recap & A Few More Best Reads of 2023
Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life was a doorstop of a book, coming in at 688 pages, but I wouldn’t have wanted it to be any shorter than it was. →
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#2 – big wonderful thing by Stephen Harrigan – Best Reads of 2023
Mary Austin Holley, author of the first English history of Texas, (and cousin to Stephen F. Austin), said “One’s feelings in Texas are unique and original…and very like a dream or youthful vision realized.” (116) Many a Texas visitor or emigré has discovered the same thing about the state, despite its outsized contradictions. →
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#3 – All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby – Best Reads of 2023
What Cosby brings to the table is a landscape I know and love and people who are too often hidden in plain sight. And the context of his fiction is both as ancient as the Chesapeake and as contemporary as a black sheriff in a rural Southern backwater county. →
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#4 – The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky – Best Reads of 2023
Yeah, this Dostoevsky guy has got potential. →
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#5 – Lone Women by Victor Lavalle – Best Reads of 2023
Victor Lavelle’s Lone Women takes a real historical trend—single African-American women taking advantage of the Homestead Act to set up shop in the Big Sky country of the 1910s—and turns it into a compelling story of frontier relationships, corruption, and…well, yes, horror. →
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#6 – I, Julian by Claire Gilbert – Best Reads of 2023
The writing is simple and elegant. The characters illustrative of the times without being preachy. And the post-pandemic world Gilbert evokes is eerily similar to our own. →
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Heartlands 