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Escape Ordinary?

Two intriguing entertainment venues have recently opened in downtown Asheville: Conundrum and Breakout. They create and offer adventures of escape, journeys from lost to found, and mysteries to explore.  Participants assume new identities as hostages, questers,...

How We Talk and Who We Are

Before much of the new school year goes by, a child will come home with red, puffy eyes, sagging shoulders, and a wounded heart because of some ugly thing someone has said. I hope no one says to that child: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never...

Sometimes and Always

Sometimes we do less in order to be more.Sometimes things have to be simpler so that we may deal with complexity.Sometimes we are quieter in order to say more.Sometimes we become gentler as a way of being stronger.Sometimes we lament our way to laughter and grieve our...

Being a Farmer, Being a Christian

Farmer-poet-essayist Wendell Berry claims that there are things about being a farmer which can only be known by living on the land, tending to it in-season and out-of-season, watching how the wind sweeps across it, observing how water flows over it, seeing the tracks...

In Sure But Contested Hope

My Dad was a salesman who could sell almost anything to almost anybody. As the old clichés have it, he could sell sand to beach dwellers and air conditioning to Eskimos.On days when he was to call on important customers, he had a routine to prepare himself: get up...

Binary Choices?

“It’s a binary choice.” That’s how a lot of people account for the vote they plan to cast for Trump or Clinton.  Given the vast ideological differences between the “bases” of the two major parties, it was inevitable that the choice would present itself as a stark...

Human Community, Human Jesus

“Jesus loves me. This I know, for the Bible tells me so.”Like most children raised by Christian parents in the south, I learned that song before I learned to sing my ABCs. It’s true that the Bible tells us that Jesus loves us, but it wasn’t from the Bible that I first...