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Still Kinda In Kansas: Talking Politics with Robert Wuthnow, Part 1 of 3
Robert Wuthnow is that rare academic who still keeps a foot in the heartlands. Wuthnow is a respected Professor of Social Sciences at Princeton University but he’s as apt to talk to you about his native Kansas as he is the cultural capitals of DC and New York. I caught up with Wuthnow a few →
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Dreams Nursed in Darkness: Tommy Orange’s There, There
The best way to understand the ending of There, There, Tommy Orange’s new novel, is to remember that the bullets were always coming. Orange tells you this in the non-fiction prologue to the book where he describes what it’s like to be a Native American today. The Europeans who ‘settled’ the land “fired their guns →
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Burning from Beginning to End with Scott Cairns
It’s all here. Beginnings and endings. Heaven and hell. Divine intentions and bodily appetites. That’s what you get with the poet Scott Cairns. Look for the kitchen sink. I’m sure it’s in there, too. Recently I came back for a season to Philokalia: New & Selected Poems, Cairns’ 2002 collection. It’s as rich and evocative →
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Eating Spinach with Mr. Wesley
One of my great unfinished reading projects is The Works of John Wesley. A long row of books from the series lines one of my shelves these days holding the collected works of the principal founder of Methodism including sermons, journal entries, and minutes of the first conferences. This week I received Volume 32: Medical →
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In Praise of Bad Writing: David Bentley Hart’s New Testament
The New Testament, as translated by the influential Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, is bad. But that’s what makes it such a good read for Christians who need their settled understandings tweaked. Hart’s new translation doesn’t strive for literary heights. He has an ear for beautiful language, something that comes through in all of his →
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Picking Up the Pieces in Iraq: A Review of Frankenstein in Baghdad
However St. George died, (and the catalogues of his gruesome tortures are legion), he was reputedly hard to keep down. “The king ordered that the saint be placed in the olive press,” one story goes, “until his flesh was torn to pieces and he died. They then threw him out of the city, but the →
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When Angels First Trod the Earth: A Review of Philip Jenkins’ Crucible of Faith
It was 113 degrees when I was at Qumran a few weeks ago. Set up on a ridge near the Dead Sea, the site is unforgiving—no escape from the sun, salt flats and barren wilderness in every direction, a claustrophobic gift shop and lunch room packed with tourists who never seem to make it to →
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Little Houses and Big Truths on the Prairie: Caroline Fraser’s Laura Ingalls Wilder
It takes a lot of work to uncover what really happened to the vast prairies of the North American Midwest. You have to dig under Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous 1890 declaration that the frontier had made America what it was and now it was gone. Pioneer famers, Turner said, had busted sod, felled forests, and →
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There’s Something Still the Matter with Kansas: Thomas Frank and a Sinking Society
Thomas Frank is the kind of writer who gets trotted out when the national media wants to cast its distracted gaze on the hinterlands. It helped that he wrote a book a decade and more back about his home state titled What’s the Matter with Kansas? After the 2016 election a whole lot of pundits →
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Fracking & A Fractured Land
The Washington County Fair in 2010 should have been unalloyed joy for Stacey Haney and her family. After all, Haney’s 14-year-old son, Harley, and his goat, Boots, took the Grand Champion Showmanship award. Paige, her 11-year-old daughter, got awards for her two rabbits, Pepsi & Phantom, and for her Mexi-SPAM Mac and Cheese entry in →
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