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Touching Snakes in Stanley Kunitz’s Garden
Stanley Kunitz was well into his nineties when Genine Lentine collaborated with him on a luminous book about poetry and gardening. The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden came out in 2005 and it includes interviews Lentine did with Kunitz, mostly about his long-tended garden in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It’s a… →
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Putting Colossians in the Mix
Reading Colossians Remixed:Subverting the Empire by Brian J. Walsh and Sylvia C. Keesmaat, published in 2004, is a reminder of a time when postmodernity was in its ascendency. It’s not clear where we live now, but less than two decades later you feel that we are somewhere very different than the environment Walsh and Keesmaat… →
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Joy Harjo Reclaims America
Joy Harjo wants to reclaim America. That’s what I imagine as I read through the wide variety of poems in her most recent book. An American Sunrise plays with form and time, pulling together strands to weave a picture of the land, particularly the land traced by the journey of Harjo’s ancestors, the Muscogee (Mvskoke),… →
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The Women Beyond Wesley
This review by Alex Joyner was published on the great Englewood Review of Books site and is republished here with permission. Even today, if you visit the website for Cokesbury, United Methodism’s venerable bookseller, you’ll see an image that has shaped Methodist perceptions of their heritage. It’s a circuit riding preacher on horseback reading a… →
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Standing at the Threshold of a Post-Pandemic Church
Here’s a bit of trivia for you: In ancient Roman construction, there was often a stone placed at the threshold of a door that one would have to traverse in order to enter or exit a building. That stone was called a limen. I tell you that because the word lies behind this year’s trendiest… →
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Rediscovering the Enchanted World
Allow me some magic. Some dark, mammalian creature moves swiftly across the field outside my window at middle distance between the treeline and me. It traces a smooth, straight line across my field of vision, just far enough away in the early dawn light to be indistinct. Could Maxwell, the neighbor cat, be that far… →
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For the Love of Dolly Parton
When I took a part-time job as a disc jockey for a country music station in 1984, there were some hard and fast rules. You always time your hour to get in the ads and mark them in the log. Songs in heavy rotation had to cycle through at least once during your shift. And… →
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Carson McCullers at 104
“Mick is perhaps the most outstanding character in the book.” Carson McCullers is describing a central character in her remarkable debut novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. “At the beginning of the second part of the work she steps out boldly—and from then on, up until the last section, she commands more space and… →
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Heartlands 