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Rural is Plural
This article originally appeared in the great Topology magazine. We were in danger of becoming a caricature. When a parent stood up at a local school board meeting and expressed her dismay at a word being used in two books in the school library, blogposts and news stories from New York to Singapore decried the benighted →
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Why Iowa isn’t Heaven
Where else would Ray Kinsella have built his Field of Dreams except in an Iowa cornfield? Am I right? A baseball diamond where the ghosts of the past could come for healing and restoration – for their own and for the living? Had to be in the heartland, where the solid goodness of America is →
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The We of Me – Carson McCullers week continues
Don’t we long to be fully engaged? I’ve checked in with Carson McCullers a couple of times this week on the occasion of her 100th birthday. She’s often thought of as a prophet of loneliness, but I wonder if what she expressed in her writing was more a longing to be released from the silo →
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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter: Carson McCullers Week, part 2
Post 2 for Carson McCullers 100th Birthday Week. Things to expect when you read Carson McCullers: late night diners, music, triangles of frustrated love, circuses, outsiders, and wanderers. In her two best works, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Member of the Wedding, you also find a fiery, pre-teen girl trying to make sense of →
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“A World Intense & Strange”: Carson McCullers Week
Sunday, Feb. 19, 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of my new favorite writer — Carson McCullers. My relationship with her began with an audio book of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and quickly followed with lapping up all of her novels. I’ll share some thoughts through the week on her basic themes, →
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It’s about that Church Building. It’s Got to Go.
Beginning in the late 19th century, the Methodists began settling down. What had been a movement of house groups, camp meetings, and simple preaching houses, set up shop on every Main Street and country crossroad and made themselves a presence with substantial stained-glassed buildings. In the 1950s and 1960s we built again during that →
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A Heart in Darkness – Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad By Colson Whitehead Doubleday, 2016 320 pages South Carolina seemed enlightened, until you realized that, beneath the comforts and opportunities, the plan was to sterilize the black race out of existence. North Carolina used less subterfuge, resorting to a grisly ‘Freedom Trail’ of hanging black bodies as a way of dealing with →
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Won’t You Be a Neighbor?
My review of The Neighboring Church over on the great Englewood Review of Books… →
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Heartlands 