“Home” strikes a million chords for each of us: familiarity, pain, loss, roots that go deeper than words. But what happens when a country’s young people choose to return in loving commitment to the place that bore them, believing that their matured agency might come back to help nourish a future for the “forgotten” places?
Seeing Clearly & Deeply
The Hollow Lands, Part II
Andrew Wainer
“In the end, local solutions—multiplied by thousands—can become national solutions—if they are allowed to trickle up. It might be that the healing that will come will begin quietly, unspectacularly, when more people refuse to give up and move on even when that’s the reasonable thing to do; even in places the world doesn’t know exist: places like the hollows of these mountains.”
Attention
Susannah Black
If, in January, we thought that we had transcended the limits of our physicality, we know better than that now. All of the things that we’ve been doing to keep each other safe from the COVID-19 virus have been things that acknowledge our bodies: we wash our hands, we...
The Hollow Lands, Part I
Andrew Wainer
The escape to Joara was perhaps the first recorded instance of fugitives using Appalachia as a hiding place from hostile outside authority. For centuries more, the mountains would serve as a refuge for those fleeing authority – first native Americans, and then white colonial and American settlers. Almost five hundred years later, the Appalachian distrust of outside authority persists.
The Holy Trinity, Race, and a Time of Crisis
Ken Herfst
Our societies are in the middle of a crisis. The pandemic is asking us to think about what it means to be human living in community—not only with other people but also with the rest of creation, including animals—especially if it’s true that the virus originated from...
Pick the Right Politics
Peter Mommsen
For those afflicted, it has all the compulsiveness of a guilty habit: repeatedly scanning news headlines; experiencing mood swings based on the latest polling data; responding to scandals, epidemics, or Wall Street gyrations by first wondering how it will affect the...
Ten Theses on Digitally Mediated Worship
Micah Latimer-Dennis
In the era of Zoom church, we know how technology can help bring us together. What are its hidden dangers—and opportunities—as we find ourselves worshiping from the other side of a screen?
Starved for Joy
Anne Snyder
Like many of you, I have crept out of confinement this last month in cautious experimentation with small outdoor gatherings. Six feet apart, guacamole divided per person, it’s not natural, exactly, but it sure is better than Zoom. One thing that’s knocked me off my...
Race, Relationships, and Repentance
Dwan Dandridge, Chris Lambert
Bridge-building and breaking down barriers can sound innocuous enough, even praiseworthy, but what’s the underside of the embroidered tapestry? Dwan Dandridge and Chris Lambert have been doing this work in Detroit for some years now, and aren’t afraid of the mess.
To Prevent Our Falling into Greater Disasters
Phil Christman
At one point in Adrienne Kennedy’s superb short play He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, we hear a quotation that, in another context, might seem tailor-made for the tumult of this year. Here it is: “We must expect reverses, even defeats. They are sent to teach us...