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Why Reading About Burundi is Reading About Humanity
“I hope you can understand why it is that despite all its faults and its legacy of violence, I so very much love my country and my culture. It is an amazingly rich, vibrant, and active way of life. So, it is possible that in one country you can find such extremes as genocide and →
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A Bombblast of Uncommon Prayer: The Pitbulls & Pendulums of Kimberly Johnson
“When thundering through the heavens I hear the B-2 Stealth Bomber—it’s elusive grace as it banks trailing fractals from its skin, its clandestine maneuvers, its trinitarian aerodynamism—I think of God.” (38) Spend some time in Kimberly Johnson’s 2014 poetry collection, Uncommon Prayer, and you’ll think of God in some unlikely images—a bug-zapper, a corpse flower, →
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Love and Loss in Montana: Virginia Reeves Writes Another Winner
Can people really change? To hear Ed Malinowski, a behaviorist in the mold of John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, tell it, the answer must be yes. Ed is one of the central characters in Virginia Reeves’ beguiling sophomore novel, The Behavior of Love. “People are malleable,” he says, “as are their behaviors, and behavior →
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How I Lost My Way to the Heart of America
There are at least two ways to look at a concept like The Heartland. You could look at it as a search for meaning, in which uprooted, sometimes traumatized people, seek to understand their lives in relation to a place. It’s in this sense that the great Southern writer Carson McCullers talked about American homesickness. →
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The Persistence of Print
An article I wrote for FaithLink, the great United Methodist Publishing House resource for study groups on faith and current events, is now up on Ministry Matters. Exploring the remarkable comeback of printed books, despite my earlier predictions that they were headed for the dustbin! Check out The Persistence of Print. →
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Another Southern Writer Finds Love in the Ruins: A Review of Kevin Powers’ Latest
The opening paragraph of Kevin Powers’ new novel, A Shout in the Ruins, is perhaps the finest beginning to a book I’ve read since Flannery O’Conner blew open the universe in the first paragraph of The Violent Bear It Away. Like that gem, Powers’ opener is all mood and tantalizing hooks that spark a thousand →
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A Book You Shouldn’t Read: The Unfortunate Autobiography of Carson McCullers
The title promises more than it delivers. Illumination and Night Glare, the unfinished autobiography of Carson McCullers, purports to be a chronicle of the artistic process, giving us insight into the inspirations (illumination) and trials (night glare) of McCullers’ life. There is some of that in this slight book, but it retains its interest →
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What If We Can’t ‘Get Past’ Sex? A Review of Entangled
The following review was originally published on The Englewood Review of Books and is republished with permission. The author is Heartlands editor, Alex Joyner. What if questions of human sexuality are not something that the United Methodist Church (UMC), like other mainline Protestant denominations, have to settle and get past, but rather are the foundation on which the →
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House Burns. Farm Threatened. Christian Fiction Revived? A Review of This Heavy Silence
The cover of Christy, Catherine Marshall’s 1967 work of Christian fiction, has stared at me from a thousand church library shelves over the years. The original paperback version shows a young woman in early 20th-century dress seemingly dancing through a mountain meadow like Julie Andrews in the Alps. Catherine Marshall created Christy as a tribute →
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4 Ways to Unlock the Power of Your Dreams
In the spirit of a broken clock being right twice a day, let me just say that one of Job’s friends got it right about dreams. Elihu, the fourth and youngest of Job’s blowhard companions who sought to “console” him after his tragedies, says something in chapter 33 that has always seemed just right to →
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