“We’re just women, talking.” Read my review of Miriam Toews’s new novel at The Christian Century.
A look at a housecleaner’s intimate labors. Read my review of Stephanie Land’sMaid at The Christian Century.
What does reading have to do with virtue? Read my review of two recent books at The Christian Century.
Do editors ever get jealous of their writers? Heck, yeah! Read more at Collegeville Institute’s Bearings Online.
Selfies and the sacred: my review of Craig Detweiler's Selfie. Read more at the Christian Century.
Can small bookstores and publishers survive in an era of the big? Read more at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Postapocalyptic fiction is our culture’s handwriting on the wall. In this case, it’s in the script of an Amish farmer. Read more at the Christian Century.
Twice a year I take a day off to undo the work I get paid to do. Read more at The Christian Century.
This season our garden taught my sons less about the virtues of hard work and more about letting your mouth hang open. Read more at the Los Angeles Times.
In 2003, one new romance novel with an Amish theme was published. This year at least 86 are being released. Read more at The Wall Street Journal.
Picking up the empty laundry basket, I pause to look at the socks and pants and shirts strung in a sentence across my yard. Read more at the Chicago Tribune.
The Pequea Creek scrawls a looping signature through the farmland east of the city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Read more at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
At what age does writerly cheerleading—“Everyone here is a writer!”—need to become “Dude. Change your major to accounting”? Read more at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Christians concerned about poverty and the environment aren't used to sitting at the popular table in the cultural cafeteria. Read more at Sojourners.
We became a predictable vision on their Tuesday morning route, a bleary-eyed mother holding a baby in blue pajamas, standing on our front porch or at the gate to the back alley. Read more at Sojourners.
Their peony-smacking managed to do what few of us grandchildren had accomplished: make our sweet-natured Mennonite grandmother angry. Read more at Christian Science Monitor.
This rejection of mass culture has earned the Amish a reputation of being set apart, inviolate, and even virginal: in the modern world but not of it. Read more at First Things.
Bored by too many evenings of roller skating and Truth or Dare, we, like teenagers everywhere, landed on thievery as the solution to adolescent ennui. Read more at Sojourners.
We adults trade smiles, remembering when we too thought we were exactly what the world needed. Read more at Orion.
