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Going Somewhere with Jesus: The Lexham Geographic Commentary
In her 2019 book, The Absent Hand:Reimagining our American Landscape, (our Heartlands favorite read last year), Suzannah Lessard described the place where we are just now as atopia, a realm in which place has lost its old meaning because the kind of things that used to define our world, primarily our work, shape our physical →
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The Unseen Skeleton That IS the Closet—Reading Caste
“With an old house, the work is never done, and you don’t expect it to be. America is an old house.” (15) 2020 has been the year for a lot of divisive debates, but one of the most interesting for students of history has been the one about dates. Is the United States fundamentally a →
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Love, Life, and Salvation in As I Lay Dying
Perhaps someday I’ll get around to re-reading William Faulkner, which numerous guides suggest one do in order to get the full flavor of his writing. In the meantime, I’ll step back and gawk, wondering why I’m persisting in this recent quest to get to the heart of Yoknapatawpha County, Faulkner’s mythical Mississippi landscape. I mean, →
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A Grudging Endorsement of The Advantage
I’m not one for business books. They are, as a rule, reductive, shallow, formulaic, and hokey. So imagine my surprise when I came to Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business and found that it was…nah, not what you’re thinking. Let’s just say that it didn’t stir my skeptical heart. →
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Protection From Poison and Poisonous Times
I’ve got no objectivity when it comes to Laurence Wareing. I’ll just say that up front. Even though I believe I’d be celebrating the appearance of Celtic Blessings and Celtic Saints into the world without knowing who the author was, I do recognize that knowing the soul behind the books made the reading that much →
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Of Mice and Migration: The Luminous World of Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom
This review originally appeared on The Englewood Review of Books and is republished with permission. The experiments that Gifty, a Stanford PhD candidate, conducts have the illusion of being about control. A pioneer in the field of optogenetics, the young Ghanaian-American researcher is using illuminated neural pathways to understand the brains of mice—particularly brains with →
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Leaving Nebraska: Revisiting Willa Cather in the Pandemic
Willa Cather can make you believe that Nebraska is a little more idyllic than your particular piece of America. Prairie flowers bloom near fields of waving wheat. Sturdy immigrant farmers build sturdy farmhouses and some residents install hammocks on the upper porch to sleep out under the stars on summer evenings. Even the fierce winter →
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The Enduring Myth of the Texas Rangers
While the Washington football team and the Cleveland baseball team were both undergoing public struggles about the appropriateness of their nicknames, my own favorite baseball team, the Texas Rangers,was called out by several national columnistsfor a similar soul-searching. Theodore Roosevelt, (yes, THAT Teddy Roosevelt) made the case for both sides back before there was even →
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Christian Wiman Has Nothing to Prove, And Yet He Does
Christian Wiman has nothing to prove. His output in recent years sparkles: Joy: 100 Poems, an anthology he edited with a title so out of step with the times that it circled back around to surprise us that we could feel such a thing as joy just now. He Held Radical Light: The Art of →
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Pulling Back the Veil in the Vale of Opioids: Beth Macy’s Dopesick
Three months into our current pandemic we know the scenario. “Epidemics unfold ‘like a vector phenomenon, where you have one individual who seeds that community and then the spread begins.’”(127) Dr. Anna Lembke could have been talking about COVID-19, but the Stanford specialist in addiction medicine was talking about opioids and ace Virginia reporter Beth →
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