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#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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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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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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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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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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Very Dusty, Windy, Mean – Lessons from the Dust Bowl
“On those days when the wind stops blowing across the face of the southern plains, the land falls into a silence that scares people in the way that a big house can haunt after the lights go out and no one else is there.” An opening sentence like that sets up high expectations for a →
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Who Needs Shakespeare? Hamnet Surely Doesn’t
The buzz over Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague has been wildly positive. The New York Times declared it one of its 10 best of 2020. The National Book Critics Circle named it the best work of fiction of the year. I’m not here to say they’re wrong about the quality of the →
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Why We Should Continue Treating the Pandemic as a Crisis (and an Opportunity)
With the reappearance of so many familiar faces following the Great Unmasking of the vaccinated, there’s a great temptation for people in the church to breathe a sigh of relief and try to pick up where we left off in March 2020. Kay Kotan has other ideas. “Reality check: Life will never be the same,” →
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Meaning of Life Thankfully Still Not Answered
What does it mean to be alive? Think about the question for more than a minute and you find a definition nearly impossible. We know it when we see it, we believe, but perhaps the best we can say about life is what the eighteen century French doctor Xavier Bichat said about it: “Life consists →
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