Red Clay Blood River

The struggles of an enslaved African woman and two emigrant German farmers generate a sweeping saga of oppression, estrangement, and redeemed memory that binds together America's "Trail of Tears," South Africa's "Great Trek," and our contemporary search for reconciliation.

William Everett has taught in Catholic and Protestant theological schools in the United States, Germany, India, and South Africa. Out of these rich and varied experiences he lays out here in concise manner the main concepts, theories, and commitments that have emerged in his work. From his origins in Washington, DC, to his later research in Germany, India, South Africa, and Cyprus, he reflects on how his experience and life story have shaped his intellectual and religious vision. This exposition of his thought ranges from construction of frameworks for relating Christianity to the behavioral sciences to substantive engagement with concepts of covenant and constitutionalism, the oikos of work, family, and faith, and ecological and restorative justice. Moving beyond the academic, he shows us how his poetry, liturgies, historical fiction, and woodcraft also manifest many of these themes in other forms. In this exposition and interrogation of his life and work, Everett invites us into deeper reflection on the connections that constitute our own.

In this essay collection, Michael Cohen tells us about his surprise encounter with the remains of Frida Kahlo, about his father’s murder, and about his son’s close shave with death on the highway. His subjects can be as commonplace as golfing with close friends, amateur astronomy, birding, or learning to fly at the age of sixty. But he asks difficult questions about how we are grounded in space and time, how we are affected by our names, how a healthy person can turn into a hypochondriac, and how we might commune with the dead. And throughout he measures, compares and interprets his experiences through the lens of six decades of reading. The tools of the writer’s trade fascinate him as do eateries in his small college town, male dress habits, American roads, and roadside shrines. He lives on the Blood River in Kentucky when he is not in the Tucson Mountains.

This harvest of articles drawn from William Johnson Everett’s career of teaching and research on four continents and in a variety of institutions shows the breadth, depth, and diversity of his interests. Like spotlights in the wider field of Christian social ethics, they illuminate the key threads that have held together an emerging tapestry of thought woven around the powerful concept of covenant. Whether lifting up concepts of covenant, federalism, and corporation, the “oikos” of work, family, and faith, the public nature and mission of the church, or the ethical meaning of journey metaphors, his rich and artful style leads us into thinking more deeply about the way our lives are joined in a “covenantal imagination” about a more just and sustainable world.

"If required to summarize my deepest conviction in a single sentence, it would be something like this: I believe that God is more taken with the agony of the earth than with the ecstasy of heaven." So begins the preface to In the Land of the Living: Prayers Personal and Public by Kenneth L. Sehested. What follows from that conviction is a collection of prayers and poems, most of which are "inspired by" one or more particular biblical texts and many of which were originally written for use in Sehested's own congregation. Sehested's lifelong work as a justice and peace organizer informs his "poetic eloquence," which, in the words of one reviewer, produces reflections on Scripture that create "a flash of insight, a bolt of courage, a stretch of imagination, a surprising peek into the heart of God" and "cries out against second-hand convictions." In the Land of the Living (Ps 27:13) represents a significant addition to that tradition of spirituality which takes seriously both the pain of the world and the claim of a God at work disarming both the heart and the nations. Indeed, "These prayers are jumper cables from the pew to the world."

An American ethicist and a South African theologian reflect on their work with wood and how it has helped them find creativity and meaning in experiences of both loss and transformation. Through their friendship, correspondence, and work together they have developed a rich narrative about the way this craftwork has shaped their relationships with family, friends, and their natural environment. Their conversation invites both craftspeople and religious seekers to join them on a spiritual journey toward fresh insight and inspiration.

Like works in wood upon a lathe, these poems are word-turnings that reveal the inner grain of our human experience. They are bowls to catch our turnings of memory, conversion, falling in love, and passing through our seasons and the wrenching turns that mark our lives. Above all these turnings are a shout of praise, a murmur of wonder, a turning away from life as usual, a merciful re-turning to the songs, images, and stories that move our lives.

After a Georgia sheriff’s death, old secrets start to emerge in this “highly satisfying story, strong in color and atmosphere, intelligent and exacting” (The New York Times). Jackson Kinley has returned to Sequoyah, his small Southern hometown, to mourn the passing of his old friend Ray Tindall. But Sheriff Tindall’s death has raised new questions about a very old case. Forty years ago, a man was sentenced to die for murder, even though the body of the victim was never found—only her bloodstained dress. The late sheriff had begun to take another look at the case, before quickly closed it again. Kinley, a true-crime writer, wants to know why. His investigation will lead him into a maze of corruption—and into the darkest corners of the human heart—in this powerful, evocative work of fiction by an Edgar Award winner and “masterful crime novelist” (Toronto Star). “[A] splendid novel.” —Publishers Weekly “[A] gripping Southern drama.” —Kirkus Reviews