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The Heartlands Best Reads for 2020! #10—Nothing Happened
For the last four years, I’ve been producing a list of Best Reads to end the year on Heartlands. It’s an eclectic collection and should not be mistaken for one of those Top Ten lists of books that actually appeared in print during the current year. Especially this year when the pandemic sent me back →
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The Enduring Myth of the Texas Rangers
While the Washington football team and the Cleveland baseball team were both undergoing public struggles about the appropriateness of their nicknames, my own favorite baseball team, the Texas Rangers,was called out by several national columnistsfor a similar soul-searching. Theodore Roosevelt, (yes, THAT Teddy Roosevelt) made the case for both sides back before there was even →
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Belated Reviews: Willie Morris’s North Toward Home
“I think he got parvo. I think he picked it up out the dirt.” …”Maybe he just sick, Skeet.” “What if it’s in the dirt? What if the rest of them get infected?” —Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward It took some chutzpah for Willie Morris, at the age of roughly 33, to believe that his →
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What’s It Going to Take to Fix and Free the UMC?
Warning: United Methodist inside baseball ahead. One of the strongest selling points for the One Church Plan, (and one that I’ve made), is that it takes off the table the contentious, divisive debate over LGBTQ inclusion and allows us to focus on making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world—the stated mission →
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#1 (& a Recap) Heartlands Best Reads of 2018: The Which-Way Tree
It’s difficult to choose the best ‘best read.’ One of my criteria, (to add once again to the list I outlined at the beginning of this countdown), is that if the book sticks with me in ways that feed my imagination and my own writing…if my world feels larger for having read the book…it has →
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The Longoria’s BBQ: The Long-Awaited Heartlands Review
I was just getting ready to test out the brisket sausage when David Longoria sat down across the table from me as if we had known each other forever. It was a slow Saturday in Everman on the southern fringes of Fort Worth. The temperature hovered around 100 outside. Inside the small restaurant with the →
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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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6 Steps to a Growing Church. Yes, Even Here! – Part 2
In Part One of Ben Rigsby’s post on reviving a church in a small town he talked about life-changing worship and reaching new people. In this post he discusses 4 more steps to growing a rural church… It takes critical mass to launch a church, it takes the same to revive This is a tough →
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6 Steps to a Growing Church. Yes, Even Here!: Guest Blogger Ben Rigsby
Anybody who’s spent more than a minute with me since last summer has heard me yammer on about the people l met in Archer City, Texas on my leave. One of those folks is the dynamic pastor of First UMC, the Rev. Ben RIgsby. You don’t often find church planters on the rural frontier but →
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