Broken Ground

July 21, 2026 · 4 min read

I Watched a Man Explain Chickens to Me for Twenty-Two Minutes

The man used the word 'sovereignty' four times. About chickens. My grandmother never named her chickens. She said if you name them you can't eat them, and if you can't eat them they're just pets that smell bad.

July 21, 2026 · 5 min read

Barbara Brown Taylor Left the Parish and Went to the Farm

She was named one of the twelve most effective preachers in the English-speaking world. Then she left the parish, moved to a farm in North Georgia, raised chickens, and wrote about what she found there.

July 21, 2026 · 5 min read

Dolly Parton Is a Theologian

She grew up Pentecostal in a one-room cabin in Sevier County, Tennessee, performing in her grandfather's church at six years old. Everything she has done since is a continuation of that formation. This is not a metaphor.

July 21, 2026 · 5 min read

Flannery O'Connor Kept Peacocks

She raised over a hundred peafowl at Andalusia Farm. She was also dying. The two facts are not separate.

July 21, 2026 · 5 min read

Fred Craddock Drove to the Small Churches for Free

He retired from Emory and announced he would preach for free in any small church in Southern Appalachia that asked. Churches without a seminary-trained pastor only. He gave his expertise to the places academia had bypassed.

July 21, 2026 · 3 min read

I Wrote Joel Salatin a Letter

I asked him for an interview. He has said yes to essentially every interview request for twenty years, so my odds are good. Here is the letter, published before I know if he replied.

July 21, 2026 · 3 min read

I Wrote Justin Rhodes a Letter

He went back to his grandfather's farm in Western North Carolina when most homesteaders were buying new land. That is the part of his story I want to ask about. Not the YouTube channel. The returning.

July 21, 2026 · 4 min read

I Wrote Wendell Berry a Letter

He is ninety-one years old and still on the farm in Henry County, Kentucky. I am a flower farmer in Calhoun County, Alabama. I mailed him a letter. I do not expect a reply. I am publishing the letter here because it is honest and because that is enough.

July 21, 2026 · 5 min read

Jesmyn Ward Stayed in DeLisle

She has won the National Book Award for Fiction twice. She is the only woman and the only Black writer to do so. She still lives in DeLisle, Mississippi, where she grew up, where her brother was killed, where her house flooded in Katrina. The staying is part of the work.

July 21, 2026 · 5 min read

Joel Salatin Is What Happens When Wendell Berry Gets a Megaphone

Salatin farms the same Shenandoah Valley land his parents settled in 1961 and has spent forty years arguing that industrial food is both an environmental catastrophe and a theological failure. He is loud about this.

July 21, 2026 · 4 min read

Justin Rhodes Went Back to His Grandfather's Land

His grandfather bought the family farm in 1932. Justin left, went to Honduras and Australia to study permaculture, came back broke and sick with Lyme disease, and started farming the same land again. He now has a million YouTube subscribers.

July 21, 2026 · 5 min read

Rhiannon Giddens Is Returning What Was Stolen

The banjo is a West African instrument. Square dance is not a white tradition. The Appalachian folk canon that Nashville built a genre around was assembled from Black and Indigenous sources and then attributed elsewhere. Giddens is doing the archaeological work of giving it back.

July 21, 2026 · 5 min read

What Sinners and Jason Isbell Know About Alabama That Alabama Won't Admit

Ryan Coogler's film and Jason Isbell's catalog are doing the same thing: telling the truth about the South's beauty and its violence without letting either one cancel the other out.

July 21, 2026 · 5 min read

Wendell Berry Has Been Saying This for Sixty Years

He is ninety-one years old. He is still on the farm in Henry County, Kentucky. He was right about most of it.

July 21, 2026 · 5 min read

What Wendell Berry Knew

Wendell Berry has been writing about the South's real wound for sixty years. Not the wound of violence or poverty, the wound of leaving. The thing that happens to a place when everyone smart enough to leave does.

July 18, 2026 · 4 min read

The Market at Six-Thirty

The vendors who show up at six-thirty don't come because it's profitable. They come because it's theirs. I ran a market long enough to learn the difference between a business and a calling.

July 18, 2026 · 3 min read

I Was Just Trying to Sell a Bag

Before the big windows on Quintard, before the brick and mortar, Jerod Snider was slinging espresso out of a van at the downtown farmers market. He was just trying to sell a bag.

July 18, 2026 · 6 min read

The View from the Boat

Jean Ellison is the kind of entrepreneur who makes people in Calhoun County wonder how she does it. She does it because she knows what the floor feels like.

July 18, 2026 · 4 min read

Noble Street Is Making Things Again

The Art Deco building at the corner has been empty for years. The gift shop next door opened in December. The coffee is roasted two blocks over. Nobody planned this together. But it has a name now.

July 17, 2026 · 4 min read

Does God Have an Opinion About Artificial Intelligence?

The Hebrew Bible from Genesis through Judges is one long argument against concentrated power. The algorithm is the new king.

July 17, 2026 · 3 min read

I'm Writing a Memoir. Here's What It's About.

Losing a flower farm, leaving a church, surviving a mental health crisis. In that order. More or less.

July 17, 2026 · 2 min read

The Book About AI and Faith That I Didn't Know I Was Writing

My manic mind tried to build an AI formation community. Here's what it looked like in daylight.

July 17, 2026 · 3 min read

I'm Writing a Book About the One Thing Most Businesses Get Backwards

Message first. Brand second. Website last. Almost no one does it in that order.

July 17, 2026 · 2 min read

The Book I'm Writing for the Year Before the Wedding

Most premarital prep is about the wedding. This one is about the marriage.

July 17, 2026 · 5 min read

What the Triskelion Means

There is a stone at Newgrange, carved before the pyramids. Three spiral arms, a hollow center. I have been living under that shape my whole working life without a name for it.

July 16, 2026 · 7 min read

Everything Is Running Under the Same Shape

I grew up behind a Walmart. One world ran on six crops. The other ran on ten thousand. It took me thirty years to find the through-line.

July 14, 2026 · 7 min read

Trust the One Who Walks With a Limp

Never trust a leader who doesn't walk with a limp. The wound is the credential. Not despite. Because.

July 12, 2026 · 3 min read

I Called Every Number. Here Is What I Found.

I sat in a chapel listening to a sermon about people in the mental health system and wondered privately if I was one of them. I was.

June 12, 2026 · 3 min read

The Church Ladies

Candy Sefcik held the building. Evelyn Thompson held the table. I served at Weaver First for seven years and didn't understand what they were doing until I tried to replace it.

June 2, 2026 · 6 min read

The Digital Gym: A Somatic Practice

May 31, 2026 · 9 min read · Jacksonville First United Methodist Church

A Seed Must Die

I haven't been in a pulpit in about a year. Andy invited me anyway. So we're both living dangerously.

May 29, 2026 · 3 min read

Five Fifteen

This morning I drive to Annual Conference for the first time in seven years. Sunday I preach for the first time in twelve months. I haven't arrived anywhere. I'm just going.

April 25, 2026 · 13 min read

Chief Ladiga, 1832

I used to call it 'la-dee-ga.' I didn't know how else to say it. I also didn't know whose land I was running on.

April 20, 2026 · 8 min read

The Hospital

I left the ER with a spring in my step. The next day, I called Dad to take me back.

April 17, 2026 · 7 min read

No Shade

Last Easter I was manic. This Easter someone handed me a cup.

April 15, 2026 · 3 min read

The Same Domain

Bipolar. Hospitalization. Business failure. And a website I built to find clients. All on the same domain.

April 14, 2026 · 2 min read

Attempt 73

I'd read that after you've done it about 72 times, you're starting to get the hang of it.

April 14, 2026 · 2 min read

I'm Not Going to Disappear

I thought I was disappearing. I'm not going to disappear.

April 14, 2026 · 1 min read

My Writing Has a New Home

This was my final post on Patreon. It's here now because this is where the writing lives.

October 1, 2025 · 3 min read

A Letter Never Sent

Written in October 2025. Never sent.

October 21, 2024 · 6 min read · Anniston Star

Hope in the Wilderness: A Pastor's Journey Through Depression

Severe depression feels like being lost in total darkness. This is what it took to find my way back — and what I've learned since.