A Country Boy Can Thrive
You can leave your corner of the country without escaping it. And these memoirs testify to the importance of bringing something back.
Introduction to Real Characters
"What we have for neighbors out here is–well–more interesting. We have way more folks who are just themselves and nobody else.”
What is Beauty? A Review of The Father of Lights
The idea that “no arguments or reasons have to be given to enable the experience of beauty” is dearly hopeful in a time when arguments and reasons are largely impotent in reaching people.
More than a Step on the Boss Man’s Ladder
If Dolly Parton left the Smoky Mountains, it seems to have been on a hero’s journey that Joseph Campbell would have recognized. She came back, bearing gifts.
A Call to Arms
JEFFERSON COUNTY, KANSAS. The review below was first published in the Intercollegiate Review in the fall of 2006. Look Homeward, America was my first...
Max Picard’s Silence
Perhaps, without silence for a reference point—something out there that reminds us of our place in the big order of things—the masters of information feel free to shade, obscure, or otherwise manipulate their messages.
“Seventy Years Ago”: A Review of Red Stilts by Ted Kooser
Ordinary and unrefined, Kooser's poems suggest the steady hand of a craftsman who doesn’t need to go looking for the next big thing.
Saving String, Kicking Leaves: Donald Hall’s Elegies
Hall’s elegiac poetry and prose teach grim lessons that are worth heeding, but there is also a sort of unsentimental, necessary hope—a hope for continuity and unexpected rebirth, a hope that keeps open a sense of possibility—that shines obscurely beneath their grief.
Truly “Another Life is Possible”
The Bruderhof do not blindly follow the status quo but have chosen to organize their life around simplicity, self-sacrifice, and peace.
Beauty and Imagination in Christian Witness
When we see that beauty and imagination, rightly understood, are intellectual as well as affective, we no longer have to try to bridge some gap between imagination and reality.