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No One’s Anything: A Reflection on Kate Bowler’s Everything Happens for a Reason
Peter Surran, is a pastor, teacher, EMT, building inspector, and a good friend. He’s also a heck of a writer. I’ve been wanting to get him on the blog for awhile and finally roped him in with a review of Kate Bowler’s Everything Happens For a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved. Enjoy: I bustled into my →
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A Quick Reminder of Why Wesley Still Matters
John Wesley has been claimed by so many different heirs and used to so many and varied ends that it is refreshing to have someone like Hal Knight come along and point us back to the source. John Wesley: Optimist of Grace, his new entry in the Cascade Companions series designed for nonspecialist readers, comes →
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Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor: Yossi Klein Halevi’s Call Across the Wall
I don’t talk much on this blog about Palestine and Israel, even though you’ll see a link here to my 2014 book, A Space for Peace in the Holy Land: Listening to Modern Israel and Palestine. That’s partly due to the fact that the commitment of this site is to understanding rural life and ministry, →
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Normal is How America Got This Way: A Review of The View from Flyover Country
“The absence of complaining should be taken as a sign that something is rotting in a society,” Sarah Kendzior says. “Complaining is beautiful. Complaining should be encouraged. Complaining means you have a chance.” (225) Sometimes it takes a critic to get things to change, and Kendzior is such a critic. Her book, The View from →
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Han Solo and the Myth of the Heroic Leader
There’s no doubt that a charismatic leader can have a big impact on the size of a congregation. It’s what most churches ask for when I go around doing consultations about the missional needs of the congregation as they prepare for a new pastoral appointment. “If we had somebody who would knock on doors and →
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Chasing the Panther and Finding One’s Self: A Review of The Which Way Tree
You might say that Elizabeth Crook has written a classic boy’s adventure. The Which Way Tree is narrated by 17-year-old Benjamin Shreve, who tells the tale of an epic panther hunt in Civil War-era Texas. There are renegade soldiers, larger-than-life characters, chases through the Hill Country and a magnificent, terrifying beast. But this is also →
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The UMC & The Which Way Tree
Preacher Dob, the Mexican horse thief, and two young teens were at a standstill. They had lost the trail of the panther they were hunting, the one who had killed the girl’s mother and on whom she had sworn vengeance. Zechariah, their panther dog, had gotten the worse of an encounter with a skunk, and →
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Small Towns as Moral Communities: A Review of The Left Behind
Here’s the plot: a ragtag group of survivors suddenly discovers that people who have been a significant part of their lives have moved on leaving them in a desperate moral quandary as they try to piece together what has happened and work for a better future. No, it’s not Tim LeHaye’s rapture series, Left Behind. →
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Living in the Pages of The Sarah Book: A Review
If I didn’t know Scott McClanahan, I’d be worried about him. In fact, I’d go up to him and ask, “What is wrong with you?” That’s a less profane version of the question his wife, Sarah, asks him near the beginning of The Sarah Book when he burns their wedding Bible after getting a series →
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Looking In on Lookout Mountain: A Review of I Want to Show You More
There’s a lot going on up on Lookout Mountain. The battle of Chickamauga is not really over. 89-year-old Eva Bock braves traffic to walk up Lula Lake Road to deliver snail mail to President Bush protesting the war. A mainline church takes Corbett Earnshaw’s abrupt confession of disbelief as a sign and demolishes their building →
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Heartlands 