Books
Honest Patriotism
Yesterday I finished reading Michael Medved’s The 10 Big Lies about America: Combating Destructive Distortions about Our Nation’s Past and Present. I gave the book a two star rating on Goodreads (you are a member of Goodreads, right?), and my feelings about the book really are captured in Goodreads’s description of its two star rating: “It [...]
Wendell Berry on “Conservatives” and “Liberals”
I listened to a couple more chapters of Michael Medved’s audiobook, The 10 Big Lies about America, which I wrote about yesterday on this blog. I listened to chapters on “Big Lie #5: The Power of Big Business Hurts the Country and Oppresses the People” and “Big Lie #6: Government Programs Offer the Only Remedy [...]
Guard Your Hearts
I avoid vitriolic talk radio, whether its coming from the right or the left. But recently I had little choice but to listen to a hate-filled left-wing talk show. (I was driving home late one night and it was the only thing on the radio that could keep me awake.) And now I’m listening to [...]
The Church as Memory-Keeper
On my commute, I have been listening to the audiobook of Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, by Paul Greenberg. All day I’ve been thinking about the concept of “shifting baselines,” which in the fisheries world describes the decreasing thresholds used to describe “abundance” from one generation to the next. I’ve also [...]
Beds and Books: The Hospitality of Shakespeare and Company
Everything that rises must converge. Well, here is a fun convergence of interests. I am writing a chapter on hospitality for the Slow Church book. I have reference volumes stacked ten-high on my desk at home. But in the car to and from work I have been listening to audiobooks by Ernest Hemingway. The first audiobook I [...]
Eternal Beings Living in Time: On Wendell Berry’s “Jayber Crow”
My favorite Wendell Berry novels are The Memory of Old Jack (1952) and Jayber Crow (1986), both of which were featured in 2009 in an issue of Oxford American magazine celebrating great Southern fiction. Now that I am about a quarter of the way through my first chronological exploration of the Port William fiction, I thought I would post here the short [...]
Serving the Common Good: An Interview with Miroslav Volf
Chris and I recently collaborated on an article about the political role of the local church for the upcoming February/March issue of Neue Magazine. In preparation for writing the article, I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Miroslav Volf about politics, the local church, promoting human flourishing, and his most recent book, A Public Faith: How [...]
Further Thoughts about Malcolm X’s Life of Reinvention
As I mentioned in my post yesterday, I am reading the late Dr. Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, which the New York Times chose as one of its Ten Best Books of 2011. One of the things that has been so striking for me is how “in process” Malcolm X was. Today I [...]
What I’m Reading Now: “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention”
The audiobook I’ve been listening to on my commute – and every other chance I get – is Dr. Manning Marable’s riveting biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. I’m over two-thirds of the way through the book. I’m at the point in Malcolm’s life when he was been pushed out of the Nation of [...]
