Tag: church
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The Wisdom of the Body – Les Carpenter’s Gospel According to Improv
This review appeared on the great Englewood Review of Books site. It is republished here with permission. Is the key to discipleship locked in a book or a body? That’s one of the questions Les Carpenter, an Episcopal parish priest, tackles in his new book The Gospel According to Improv: A Radical Way of Creative and…
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The Heartlands Best Reads of 2022 – #10 Shaking the Gates of Hell
It’s that time of year! Although Heartlands has been on hiatus, the reading has been ongoing and it’s time to take stock of the year that was in reading. Since its inception in 2016, Heartlands has been offering book reviews based on my eclectic tastes. Each year I comb through the list to choose ten…
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To Speak the Truth in Bombingham
John Archibald is almost my exact contemporary. Same age. White cis male. Southern. Methodist. A man who deals in words, though he’s an Alabama newspaperman who won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his work in The Birmingham News while my main public output are sermons these days. What Archibald has done in his…
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The Audacity of Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads
It’s hard to know where to start when talking about Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Crossroads. Do you start with the audacity? Franzen ripping across the page, delving into the minds of female and Native American characters with abandon and heedless of the caution so much of contemporary literature has fallen prey to? How about the…
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Burning Down the House of Fear with Brian Zahnd
‘Deconstruction’ is a popular term in conversations among church leaders these days. Only when deconstruction is invoked, we’re not talking French intellectual movements; it’s more to do with reassessing the received faith of our childhood and sorting out what resources are still there for life as an adult. In other words it’s what we used…
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#5 — A Burning in My Bones by Winn Collier — 2021 Best Reads
Winn Collier’s biography of Eugene Peterson, A Burning in My Bones, was easily one of my best reads of the year. Collier had access to the journals and papers of the pastor/writer who is best known as the translator of The Message version of the Bible. He also knew the man and brings an appreciative…
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#6–The Making of Biblical Womanhood–2021 Best Reads
The 6th book on our Top Ten list is Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood. Barr got a lot of buzz for this book, making her perhaps the country’s most popular medieval historian. Barr also happens to be an evangelical Christian trying to help her branch of the Christian church move out of…
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Home of the Brave (Church)
This review was published on the Englewood Review of Books website and is reprinted here with permission. It’s not easy to talk these days. Try having a social gathering over Zoom and see how quickly you tire. Maybe one voice dominates. Maybe you’re frustrated by not having the side conversation you’d like to have. Maybe…
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Unmaking Biblical Womanhood
Sometimes you have to go back to a 15th century woman to find your way to a 21st century church. At least that’s where Beth Allison Barr goes in trying to understand the sad history of patriarchy in the Christian Church. Which makes sense because Barr is both a medieval scholar and an evangelical Christian…
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Why We Should Continue Treating the Pandemic as a Crisis (and an Opportunity)
With the reappearance of so many familiar faces following the Great Unmasking of the vaccinated, there’s a great temptation for people in the church to breathe a sigh of relief and try to pick up where we left off in March 2020. Kay Kotan has other ideas. “Reality check: Life will never be the same,”…
Heartlands 