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How to Make Your Church Inefficient: The Winn Collier interview continues (2 of 3)
In the first part of my interview with Winn Collier, pastor of All Souls Charlottesville and author of Love Big. Be Well.: Letters to a Small-Town Church, we talked about his decision to set his novel in a small town. We also talked about the use of letters as a way to tell the story →
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017:#3 Killers of the Flower Moon
The more I think about David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI the more I realize what a brilliant work of journalism it is. Grann doesn’t call attention to himself and never reaches too far into the ether to get at a larger point. He simply tells →
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017:#4 Wolf Whistle
If I told you there was a laugh-out-loud book about the murder of Emmett Till, the black teenager killed in Mississippi in 1955 after he allegedly whistled at a white woman, you’d call such a thing, at the least, in poor taste. Yet the late Lewis Nordan, who lived through that episode as a teenager →
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017:#5 The Crucifixion
Fleming Rutledge is having a long-overdue moment in the wake of her 2015 book, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. I finally finished it in 2017, qualifying it for this list, and gushed about it in my review, (which you can access through the title link in the previous sentence). Rutledge sees her book as →
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017: #7 All the Pretty Horses
I’m sure Cormac McCarthy has been dying to see if this accolade would come his way. His 1992 novel, All the Pretty Horses, is now 25 years old, but I just got around to it this year. Something about spending a month in West Texas made it seem like an appropriate companion. And it was. McCarthy →
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017: #8 American Fire
Of course, it had local appeal for those of us on the Eastern Shore, but Monica Hesse’s exploration of the 2012-13 arson spree here that damaged 60+ structures was masterful writing. In American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land, the Washington Post reporter used the window of the crime to explore what →
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Why Katherine Sonderegger Gets 10 Pages a Day: A Review of Her Systematic Theology
If your fine-grain theological vocabulary has grown a little rusty with lack of use, as I’m afraid mine has, you will find Katherine Sonderegger’s Systematic Theology: Volume One, Doctrine of God [Fortress, 2015] daunting. I’m not ashamed to say that it took me nearly a year to get through it. By this fall, however, I →
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017: #9 Can You See Anything Now?
We continue the idiosyncratic countdown of best reads of 2017 with all its caveats: not all published in 2017, not limited by genre but limited by Alex having to have read them. Don’t let my limitations keep you from Katherine James’ debut novel Can You See Anything Now?–a book with the rich texture of human tragedy →
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017: #10 Strangers In Their Own Land
It’s been a great year for reading. I credit Sarah Willson Craig for inviting me into a real mid-life reading renaissance. She’s the one who posted the Better World Reading Challenge on Facebook in 2016 and got a group of friends committed. I’m grateful. Since everyone else is doing their end-of-the-year list, I decided to →
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