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Mr. Zahnd’s Wild Ride to the Cross
Zahnd, a longtime Missouri pastor of Word of Life Church, drinks deeply from the culture around him as well as from the resources of the Christian tradition. And he finds God everywhere. →
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Love in a Small Cell: Claire Gilbert Gives Voice to Julian of Norwich
Julian’s faith is rich and deep, never skirting past the graveyards of this world, but opening up the nature of a loving God. →
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Reviewing the World in 5 Stars or Fewer
The internet does love it some ratings, even if I can’t quite get used to the pressure of maintaining my 5-star AirBnB guest rating. Is my mom keeping track of my visits like this? →
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The Headlong Poetry of Laura Martin
“I know then that everything is fragile/and that everything does not have to last/to be eternal.” — Laura Martin →
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#1 & a Recap – How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith – 2022 Best Reads
Poets can make excellent prose artists, as Clint Smith proved once again in my favorite read from 2022: How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. Smith takes a journey to sites associated with slavery from Monticello to Angola Prison to the Door of No Return at Goree Island, →
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#2 – Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen – 2022 Best Reads
Audacity. That’s the word that came to mind as I gawked my way through Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Crossroads. The man has no compunctions about burrowing straight to the heart of characters like a Navajo man wary of visiting do-gooders to the reservation and a mid-life woman trying to put together her previous life and →
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#3 – The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell – 2022 Best Reads
Maggie O’Farrell’s breakthrough novel, Hamnet, which was named a New York Times ten best in 2020, didn’t do it for me. I appreciated the gorgeous details of life in Shakespeare’s England, but the connection to Shakespeare himself seemed tenuous at best. However, The Marriage Portrait, O’Farrell’s follow-up novel, hit the sweet spot, even though she →
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#4 – Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby – 2022 Best Reads
This is the first crime thriller I’ve ever put in the Top Ten, but I got hooked on S.A. Cosby this year. His books are crackling page-turners filled with similes and energy. And, o yes, violence. There’s a lot of that, too. Cosby attracted my attention because he’s a Virginia native and aspires to the →
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#5 – Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv – 2022 Best Reads
At the age of 6, Rachel Aviv was hospitalized when she stopped eating and was diagnosed with anorexia. At such a young age, the details of such a diagnosis were lost on the young girl. She explained her situation to herself by saying she had it because “I want to be someone better than me.” →
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#6 – Fatal by Kimberly Johnson – 2022 Best Reads
I’ve gushed about Kimberly Johnson’s poetry on this blog before. Called Johnson “one of our best living poets.” Noted that she is “the rare poet who consistently evokes for me the presence of the barely-cloaked divine.” Credited her with making me a daily reader of poetry. So when Johnson produced a new collection in 2022, →
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Heartlands 