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Waltzing (and Futzing) Across Texas: A review of Texas Blood
If you pick up this book you won’t know where you’re headed. Texas, sure. After all the title of Roger D. Hodge’s book is Texas Blood: Seven Generations Among the Outlaws, Ranchers, Indians, Missionaries, Soldiers, and Smugglers of the Borderlands. And there are maps in the first chapter that will whet your appetite for West →
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Sunset in Archer County – A Poem
If coyotes howl at sunset why do we sit in silence? Staring at our screens or dumbfounded by our electrified darlings we let the miracle pass unnoticed day after night after day. That a nuclear furnace on which all life depends some millions of miles beyond us is passing once more out of sight plunging →
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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: #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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Coming Off Leave(s)
Leaves don’t so much change color in the fall as they become what they’ve always been. The chlorophyll that gives all deciduous trees their summer uniform of green begins to break down in the cooling days of autumn. The carotenoids in the leaves remain, lending trees their brilliant yellows and oranges. Those colors have always →
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Five Things I Learned from a Cowboy (Church)
I love a horse trough baptism as much as the next guy, but I have to admit that I’m a traditionalist at heart. I appreciate the time-worn beauty of prayers passed down through generations, the mystery and splendor of a good four-part choir, the movement and purposeful flow of a well-planned order of worship, and →
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In Which I Tumble Out of the Tumble In and Head to Terlingua – A West Texas Adventure
The bright lights and hubbub of the big city (Archer City, that is – population ~1800) were starting to get to me, so I decided to head even further out into West Texas. Out to where the skies stretch out like God’s own Imax screen. Out to where coyotes howl at the setting sun and →
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A Border with No Country: A Review of All the Pretty Horses
“This is still good country. Yeah. I know it is. But it aint my country.… Where is your country? he said. I don’t know, said John Grady. I don’t know where it is. I don’t know what happens to country.” (299) Not counting the movies of Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men, →
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The Relentless Storytelling of Philipp Meyer: A Review of American Rust
Philipp Meyer is a relentless storyteller. By the time he gets through with you, you will have a deep immersion in the place where the story happens and will have met characters who are anything but passive. They are doers who fight and scrape against an unjust world. They make many mistakes, some dreadful, →
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