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Shmoop on Huck Finn: Guest Blogger Jeanne Torrence Finley
My colleague Jeanne Torrence Finley has been writing about art and justice on her new blog Tell It Slant, (which you should definitely check out). Today she joins my defense of Huck Finn by discovering an oddly-named defender of satire in literature: When Alex wrote on February 18 (“In Praise of Uncomfortable Books: Huck and →
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Observing Carson McCullers Day
February 19 – the 101st birthday of Carson McCullers, author of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and other Southern Gothic masterpieces. Followers of this blog will know of my fascination with McCullers, one of the great writers about longing. Or what the poet Nick Norwood has called “spiritual isolation.” But there are moments when →
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In Praise of Uncomfortable Books: Huck & Harper Revisited
Huck and Harper are on the block again and I’m not comfortable with that. Then again, I think it’s high time we all got uncomfortable. In late 2016, as I was beginning Heartlands, I reflected on the controversy that was roiling Accomack County, Virginia where I live. Only that’s not strictly accurate. The decision by →
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Lay Minister Expels Ghosts, Sees Two Rural Churches Turnaround
“I look around my church and all I see are ghosts.” It was time for a pastoral change and I was meeting with the Pastor-Parish Relations Committee in my role as the District Superintendent, preparing the church and myself as we looked toward the appointment of a new pastor. The woman speaking was a longtime →
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Teenager Abuses Hand Sanitizer, Finds Self: The Beauty in John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down
Aza has a hard time getting out of her head. Worse yet, she’s beginning to wonder if she’s really here at all. For all the choice she feels she has, she might as well be fictional. “Your life is a story told about you,” she muses at the beginning of John Green’s Turtles All the →
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How to Get Out of the Inner Circle: Ministry with the Poor
“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.” [Philippians 2:5-6, NRSV] This, I believe, is one of →
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A Rose Still Blooms Post-Brexit: A Review of Ali Smith’s Autumn
Autumn is the season for reflection. A cold wind blows and you wonder how many more winters you have in you. Golden leaves burnished by a golden sunset rustle in the limbs above and you remember how they used to thrill you. “The trees are revealing their structures. There’s the catch of fire in the →
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017:#1 Lincoln in the Bardo (& a recap)
There are certain things you know you’re going to find when you sit down to read a George Saunders story. It will be weird, funny, engaging, and surprisingly deep. I expected no less from Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders’ first novel and I was not disappointed. The book, which won the Man Booker Prize this year, →
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017:#2 Work Like Any Other
It seems a shame not to award this book the top spot just because I got to it late. Truthfully, it could still take the prize despite the fact that my self-imposed rules say that being published in 2017 adds a little weight to the scale. Be that as it may, if you haven’t read →
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