Blog Archives
Making It Plain: Deconstructing a Fictitious and Vicious Story About Racism
Ronald S. Bonner’s Making It Plain is a faith-rooted examination of racism that brings together history, theology, social science, personal experience, and practical reflection. Bonner establishes his vocabulary early and uses it consistently: White supremacy is the belief in the innate superiority of White people, racism is the system of power that sustains that belief, and bigotry is the hate-filled prejudice that fuels the system. From there, his central argument is that racial hierarchy is a constructed story that became embedded in American institutions, culture, education, and everyday assumptions. Because it was constructed and learned, he believes it can also be dismantled and unlearned. The Christian framework isn’t simply decorative. Bonner repeatedly returns to love, the renewal of the mind, truth-telling, and the moral obligation to reject ideas of human superiority. His larger purpose is practical: he wants readers to understand how these ideas took hold and then become capable of having more honest conversations about race.
The book’s seventeen chapters cover an unusually wide range of territory, moving from the historical construction of race and the economics of enslavement to White privilege, equality and equity, trust, colorblindness, stigmatized language, reparations, racial trauma, conversations between Black parents and their children, bias in artificial intelligence, friendship, and strategies for changing entrenched beliefs. Bonner has a teacher’s instinct for analogy. Highways illustrate the difference between racism, bigotry, and White supremacy; poker hands become a way of explaining unequal starting conditions; a sunburn illustrates the lingering effects of historical injury; “black light vision” describes the ability to see racial patterns that others may miss; and later, “heretical friendships” describe relationships formed across familiar racial and cultural boundaries. The personal stories are especially useful because they move the discussion out of abstraction. His memories of interracial workplace conversations, encounters with police, church life, and conversations with White friends show what his ideas look like in ordinary relationships. The historical photograph and caption documenting the 1892 lynching of four Black men on page 109 also reveal the book’s documentary impulse. Bonner wants readers to encounter the human reality behind the concepts, not just their definitions.
Bonner’s method is cumulative and deliberately repetitive. He keeps returning to a small group of ideas such as bigotry, power, false narratives, trust, language, and learned behavior, examining them from different angles until they form a connected framework. That gives Making It Plain the feel of an extended seminar or church study led by someone who expects the reader to participate. Nearly every chapter closes with review questions, and the writing regularly shifts from historical material to scholarly citations, personal memories, scriptural reflection, contemporary examples, and direct questions to the reader. The strongest passages come when those elements reinforce one another, particularly in the chapters on building trust, reparations as more than financial compensation, “the talk,” and cross-cultural friendship. By the final chapters, the many strands converge around one of Bonner’s clearest convictions: racist narratives can be unlearned, and relationships that cross racial, religious, or ethnic boundaries can play a meaningful role in that process. His voice throughout is pastoral, insistent, personal, and frequently provocative, with the expectation that learning should lead to changed behavior.
I recommend Making It Plain to people who want to explore racial justice through a combination of Christian ethics, American history, personal testimony, and guided discussion. Church groups, adult education classes, community organizations, workplace discussion groups, antiracism facilitators, and book clubs would probably get the most from its structure because the book is designed to generate conversation, not just private reflection. It would also appeal to readers interested in the intersection of faith and racial reconciliation, especially those willing to examine how inherited stories and everyday language shape what people believe about one another. Bonner makes his intended use especially clear at the end, when he challenges readers to have three conversations about race in the coming year and to form three new friendships or acquaintances outside their usual social circle. That closing challenge captures the character of the whole book. Making It Plain is a teaching book about changing minds through historical understanding, honest speech, self-examination, trust, and relationships that make it harder to keep seeing other people through inherited stereotypes.
Pages: 198 | ISBN : 978-1662962165
Fundamental Pillars of Life
A Poetic Wandering is a reflective collection spanning four decades in which you explore memory, family, Kansas history, travel, nature, faith, humor, and the experiences that shape a life. What role has poetry played in helping you process emotions, develop self-awareness, and make sense of your experiences?
Growing up as an only child, I wasn’t able to compare life experiences or receive guidance from a sibling. There were times I felt lonely, times I felt life was unfair, times when anger reared its ugly head. Writing became a means to document and work through some of life’s instabilities. The process eventually created opportunities for stronger self-confidence and self-esteem.
How has becoming a parent—and later reflecting on family across generations—influenced your poetry?
As one ages, we realize more and more the true importance of faith, family, and friends. I was truly blessed to grow up with parents who believed in these tenets. As parents, my wife and I tried to instill these beliefs in our own children. Sharing these fundamental pillars of life through family generations only makes sense.
Your collection moves comfortably between serious subjects and humorous poems about aging, grilling, toilet paper, and everyday life. Why is humor important to the overall balance of the book?
Poetry should be reflective at times, entertaining at times. I want readers to understand what I am sharing without having to dissect obscure, remote, or hidden meanings. Regarding humor…didn’t Ficino say “Humor Is the Spice of Life.”
What do you hope readers—especially parents, grandparents, travelers, and people reflecting on their own lives—take away from A Poetic Wandering?
I hope that by sharing my thoughts and experiences, it may help others to BE POETIC themselves.
Author Links: Website
A Poetic Wandering
Kevin R. Peterson’s A Poetic Wandering feels much like its title suggests: a long, personal walk through memory, family, Kansas history, travel, nature, faith, humor, and the ordinary experiences that accumulate into a life. The collection reaches back to poems from Peterson’s 1980s chapbooks and then moves into work written across the following four decades, so the reader gets something close to a poetic autobiography. Peterson explains that poetry became a way for him to work through emotions, develop self-awareness, reflect on experience, and share what he’d learned, and that purpose remains visible throughout the book. The result is a collection that’s interested less in maintaining a single mood than in recording the things a person notices and carries with him over many years.
The most affecting section is the group of poems drawn from Kendra: A Father’s Feelings. Here Peterson writes about his young daughter’s grave illness, survival, deafness, and the family’s adjustment to a frightening new reality. The poems are plainspoken and emotionally immediate. In “Hospital Paradox,” the birth of one child and the medical crisis of another exist almost side by side, while “Can It Be” captures the complicated mixture of gratitude and sorrow after his daughter survives but loses her hearing. “Roller Skates” then turns a Christmas gift into something far larger, because having their daughter home and alive has changed what the family values. These poems are strong because Peterson trusts the events themselves to carry the emotion. That directness gives the family material an intimacy that stays with you.
Elsewhere, the book widens considerably. Kansas appears again and again through prairie landscapes, pioneers, bison, Dust Bowl memories, sunflowers, local history, and Peterson’s sense of generational connection to the land. Travel adds another dimension, with poems about Yellowstone, Florida, wilderness hiking, canoe country, sunsets, campsites, and the decades-long project of visiting all fifty states with his wife. Nature often becomes a doorway into something spiritual. Peterson says explicitly that it’s where he feels most comfortable and where he most strongly connects with God. There’s also a welcome streak of playfulness, including poems about toilet paper, aging, grilling, and other subjects that keep the collection from becoming uniformly meditative. Near the end, Peterson brings poetry and photography together in what he calls a “poetograph,” combining his own images with brief poetic responses. That makes the closing pages feel like a natural culmination of two lifelong interests.
I’d recommend A Poetic Wandering to readers who enjoy accessible, personal poetry rooted in recognizable experiences rather than poetry that needs to be decoded before it can be felt. It should have particular appeal for Midwestern readers, nature lovers, travelers, parents and grandparents, people interested in family or regional history, and readers who’ve reached an age when looking backward and looking forward begin to happen at the same time. Peterson writes with the perspective of someone interested in preserving memories while he still has the chance to name them, whether those memories involve a hospital room, a Kansas field, a campsite, a marriage, a family tragedy, or a ridiculous question about which way the toilet-paper roll should face. That range is the book’s real character. It reads like one man opening several decades of notebooks and photographs and inviting you to wander through them with him.
Evenings on the Edge of Death
Evenings on the Edge of Death is a deeply personal work of poeticized nonfiction about the long afterlife of family trauma, the erosion of memory, and the complicated work of loving people who have also caused pain. Theodore McDowell builds the book as a series of collages centered on his mother, father, sister, marriage, and finally the experience of saying goodbye. The form suits the subject beautifully. Memory rarely arrives as a clean narrative, and McDowell doesn’t force it into one. Instead, a beach, a baseball glove, a glass of whiskey, a rosary, a wheelchair, a field of wheat, or the sound of water can suddenly open a door to another time. The result feels less like being told the story of a life than being invited inside the way that life is actually remembered.
At the center of the book is a family wounded by an abusive father and by the silence that grows around abuse. McDowell returns to those wounds from different angles, especially through his relationships with his mother and his sister Rachel. The opening poem establishes the emotional vocabulary immediately, placing a father’s violence beside wheat fields, church bells, maternal tenderness, and a child’s bewildered questions about God. What gives these poems their staying power is McDowell’s willingness to let contradictory feelings occupy the same room. He can rage at his father and still search for the damaged man inside him. He can adore his mother while admitting resentment, exhaustion, and even the terrible wish for her suffering to end. He can grieve Rachel’s suicide while continuing to wrestle with guilt over not saving her. Forgiveness here isn’t a neat resolution. It’s an ongoing argument between memory, love, anger, faith, and the child who still wants an explanation.
The book widens considerably in the poems about marriage. Here, McDowell brings the same searching attention to intimacy, addiction, estrangement, reconciliation, aging, and the fear of losing the person who has witnessed your life. In one poem, a couple plants seeds while wondering whether they’ve truly fallen in love; in another, thirty-nine years of marriage are remembered through happiness, miscarriage, addiction, recovery, service, and the simple act of holding hands on a porch as death approaches. These poems show one of McDowell’s strongest gifts: he finds emotional weight in physical things. Hands, weather, flowers, rooms, rivers, photographs, and worn objects keep carrying the story when abstract language would be too easy. His recurring Christian imagery sits alongside Buddhist meditation, blues music, nature, and art, giving the book a spiritual restlessness that feels earned.
By the final section, death has become less a single event than the book’s constant horizon. McDowell writes about hospice, nursing homes, dementia, the indignities of the body, forgotten names, and the fear that a whole human life might vanish when nobody remains to remember it. Yet the book keeps moving toward preservation. Again and again, writing becomes an act of keeping faith with the dead, with the damaged self, and with moments of beauty that would otherwise be lost. The closing poems return to the book’s rivers, grief, childhood wounds, faith, and questions of identity, but the final movement is toward grace and self-creation. Evenings on the Edge of Death turns the fragments of a wounded life into something enduring: a fierce, tender testament to memory, love, and the grace of still becoming.
Pages: 171 | ASIN : B0CVJ4PR85
Drinking From God’s Well
Theodore McDowell’s Drinking From God’s Well: Exploring the Journey From Trauma to Renewal and Recovery is a book-length poetry collection shaped as a spiritual and autobiographical account of addiction, mental illness, family trauma, grief, recovery, and faith. Its three-part structure moves from “The Struggle to Survive” through “Releasing the Pain” and finally to “Life on Life’s Terms,” giving the collection a clear emotional progression from crisis toward a more settled form of acceptance. McDowell writes repeatedly from the most difficult regions of his life: homelessness, substance abuse, a traumatic brain injury, bipolar disorder, estrangement from his children, the deterioration of his marriage, his sister’s suicide, his mother’s dementia, and his own encounters with suicidal despair. Yet the collection treats these experiences as parts of an ongoing spiritual life. The result is poetry that functions at once as memoir, confession, prayer, lament, and meditation on how a damaged life can be gathered into meaning.
McDowell’s strongest poetic feature is his recurring network of images. Jazz is especially important. Saxophones, improvisation, rhythm, silence, and blues become ways of understanding marriage, grief, mental illness, and recovery. Nature serves a similar purpose. Redbud trees, morning glories, egrets, lakes, storms, and falling leaves give physical form to emotional states that might otherwise remain abstract. These repeated images also create continuity across poems written from different stages of life. A storm can embody marital conflict in one poem, while morning light becomes an image of reconciliation in another. Water shifts from danger and uncertainty to cleansing, grace, and renewal. McDowell’s Christian imagery is equally persistent, but his faith is rarely presented as effortless certainty. God is questioned, resisted, cursed, sought, and finally experienced through suffering, forgiveness, human intimacy, and ordinary moments. This tension gives the spiritual dimension of the book much of its substance.
The collection is particularly effective when McDowell turns from his own suffering toward the people who endured its consequences. Poems about his wife and children complicate the recovery narrative by insisting that sobriety alone can’t repair years of injury. In “An Amends to My Daughter,” the speaker tries to listen without defending himself as his daughter describes the damage addiction caused during her childhood. The emotional turning point arrives not with easy reconciliation but with her quiet statement, “I finally feel heard.” That moment captures one of the book’s central understandings of forgiveness: healing requires attention, accountability, time, and the willingness to remain present before another person’s pain. Throughout the collection, marriage is treated with similar seriousness. Love appears as desire, memory, resentment, caretaking, endurance, physical intimacy, companionship, and spiritual shelter. McDowell’s imagery can be highly concentrated, sometimes layering biblical, musical, natural, and erotic references within the same poem, but that density reflects the way the book understands memory itself. The past is continually resurfacing inside the present, transformed by age but never entirely erased.
Drinking From God’s Well has broadened from survival and recovery into a meditation on aging, mortality, gratitude, and the sacred character of ordinary life. Grandchildren, morning coffee, gardening, family meals, walks, music, a wife’s presence in another room, and the simple experience of waking sober acquire the significance that earlier poems gave to catastrophe. McDowell doesn’t portray renewal as the disappearance of trauma. In “Trauma and Grace,” he describes the continuing work of recovery as “finding the miracle / within the marrow of suffering,” while accepting wounds and scar tissue as part of the foundation of renewal. That idea provides an apt description of the entire collection. Drinking From God’s Well is a sustained poetic attempt to integrate suffering into a life that can still contain faith, intimacy, beauty, responsibility, and joy. Its final achievement is not a declaration that the past has been conquered, but a vision of a person able to inhabit his whole history and still recognize grace within it.
Pages: 310 | ASIN : B0D48ZDSRL
Evenings on the Edge of Death
Evenings on the Edge of Death is Theodore McDowell’s deeply personal work of poeticized nonfiction, built from memories of childhood trauma, dementia, family violence, mental illness, marriage, addiction, faith, and grief. McDowell arranges the book as a series of emotional collages, moving through his relationships with his mother, father, sister, wife, and finally toward his own reckoning with aging and death. The form suits the subject beautifully. Memory rarely arrives in neat chronological order, especially when trauma and dementia are involved, and these pieces return again and again to certain images, gestures, places, and wounds. A nursing home window, a childhood beach, a glass of whiskey, a cathedral, a river, a garden, a hand reaching for another hand. The repetition gives the book the feeling of someone sorting through a lifetime and asking which memories have shaped him, which have damaged him, and which might still save him.
Some of the book’s strongest writing comes from McDowell’s willingness to hold love and injury in the same frame. His father can be frightening, abusive, wounded, and finally vulnerable. His mother is nurturing and beloved, but she also becomes inseparable from the complicated family history she helped sustain. His sister Rachel carries the scars of abuse into mental illness, addiction, and suicide, leaving her brother with grief that refuses any easy resolution. The poems about her are particularly haunting because McDowell keeps reaching past the manner of her death toward the girl she once was, the sister who danced, painted, dreamed, and made him feel safe. That movement is central to the whole book. He keeps trying to recover the person from the tragedy. Even forgiveness remains complicated. It isn’t presented as a clean moral achievement, but as something unfinished, painful, necessary, and sometimes beyond reach. The book understands that family love can survive alongside anger, and that grief often keeps both alive.
The later sections widen the emotional range as McDowell turns toward marriage, aging, illness, and the possibility of losing his own memory. His marriage becomes another place where the past keeps pressing on the present, but it’s also where tenderness, endurance, physical intimacy, disappointment, forgiveness, and companionship are allowed to coexist. The spiritual dimension grows richer here as well. Christianity is central, but McDowell’s religious imagination is restless and searching, filled with cathedrals, crucifixes, resurrection, Buddhist meditation, prayer, nature, doubt, and an almost physical hunger for grace. He repeatedly finds the sacred in ordinary things: cards played on a porch, hands joined during a walk, flowers in a garden, a wife waiting beside a hospital bed. One of the book’s most affecting ideas is that remembering someone can itself become an act of love. After his mother’s death, the speaker understands himself as her “memory keeper,” carrying her forward through stories and gestures passed to another generation.
By the final pages, Evenings on the Edge of Death has become more than a record of what happened to one family. It’s an inquiry into what remains after memory fails, bodies weaken, relationships fracture, and the people who knew our stories disappear. McDowell doesn’t leave the reader stranded in that darkness. His final movement toward self-creation and grace feels earned precisely because the book has spent so much time among bruises, hospital rooms, graves, addictions, regrets, and unanswered prayers. In the closing poem, fly fishing becomes an image of casting back into memory and trauma while still standing in the living current, and the book ends with the possibility of being made new even in old age. Evenings on the Edge of Death turns a lifetime of bruises, broken memories, love, and loss into something enduring: a testament to the stubborn grace that can still find us when almost everything else has slipped away.
Pages: 171 | ASIN : B0CVJ4PR85
The Invisible Soul Anthology: Healing With Words
The Invisible Soul Anthology, by George Beasley, is a deeply personal and inspirational Christian memoir built from nearly fifty stories, reflections, memories, and poems about trauma, faith, family, grief, mental health, and healing. Beasley describes the collection as a journey from hidden struggles toward emotional healing and redemption, and that idea gives the book its shape. Readers are led through memories as they surface, taking them from childhood abuse and group homes to marriage, fatherhood, ministry, therapy, loss, and the quieter moments that have helped him make sense of it all. As a faith-based memoir, the book feels personal in the way a long conversation with someone can be personal. Beasley isn’t standing at a distance from these experiences. He’s writing from inside them.
One of the most compelling parts of this trauma recovery memoir is the way ordinary places and objects become containers for much larger emotions. A sandbar becomes a place of belonging, a river becomes an image of grief and the undertow of despair, a childhood closet holds both terror and an imagined fire of hope, and a catfish pond becomes a mental refuge first learned in a group home and rediscovered decades later through therapy. These recurring images give the book its own language. Beasley also writes openly about suicidal thoughts, childhood trauma, triggers, therapy, and the difficult work of recognizing emotions he spent much of his life avoiding. That makes The Invisible Soul Anthology as much a mental health memoir as it is a Christian testimony. Faith and professional help aren’t treated as competing ideas here. They become parts of the same healing journey.
The heart of the collection, though, is connection. Beasley returns again and again to the people who helped him survive and grow: his wife Lisa, his daughters and grandchildren, his brothers, old friends, therapists, house parents, ministry partners, and even people encountered briefly along the way. Some of the strongest pieces look at relationships from the distance of many years and allow an old memory to take on a different meaning. In “Was It Love or Was It…,” for example, what he carried as childhood betrayal gradually becomes an understanding of his mother’s desperate attempt to protect him. That willingness to revisit the past is central to this Christian healing book. The prose is direct, emotionally exposed, and often devotional, with scripture and faith woven naturally into the author’s interpretation of what happened and why those experiences still matter.
What stayed with me most is the book’s conviction that words can become part of the healing process. Beasley repeatedly shows writing as a way of bringing buried memories into the light, giving language to pain, and leaving something useful for the people who come afterward. Late in the collection, he writes about opening himself to emotions while spending time with his grandchildren and discovering that something as simple as giving them his time can become an expression of love and a repair of what was missing in his own childhood. That captures The Invisible Soul Anthology well. It’s a Christian memoir about healing, but it’s also an anthology about being seen, listening closely, loving people while there’s still time, and finding meaning in memories that once seemed too painful to revisit. Readers drawn to inspirational Christian books, spiritual memoirs, and trauma recovery stories will find plenty here to sit with long after the final page.
Pages: 275 | ASIN : B0HD3W8G2V
Can Anything Good Come Out of Jim Crow?
Jacqueline Smith’s Can Anything Good Come Out of Jim Crow? is a faith-centered memoir built from family stories, historical reflection, practical wisdom, and photographs. Smith traces her upbringing in segregated Port Arthur, Texas, where her parents ran several small businesses and raised her within a demanding culture of work, discipline, service, and Christian belief. Rather than treating Jim Crow only as a historical backdrop, she shows how it shaped the family’s ambitions, fears, responsibilities, and ideas about survival. Her central question receives a deeply personal answer: goodness appears in what people build, preserve, teach, and pass along despite oppressive circumstances.
The strongest presence in the book is Smith’s family. Her father, Jack, is a tireless entrepreneur and forceful storyteller whose repeated instructions teach her to prepare early, work harder, and never surrender her sense of possibility. Her mother, affectionately called Muh, embodies patient, sacrificial care, especially in tending to Smith’s two profoundly disabled siblings when support services were largely inaccessible to Black families. Their household feels vivid and lived-in, filled with customers, taxi calls, music, business lessons, church teachings, and constant activity. Smith’s affection for her parents gives the memoir warmth, while her willingness to describe disappointment, anger, pressure, and family sacrifice keeps that affection grounded.
Smith writes much as she seems to speak: directly, energetically, and with a teacher’s instinct for drawing a lesson from every experience. Biblical passages frame the chapters, and personal episodes often develop into reflections on marriage, patience, responsibility, loneliness, education, perseverance, and trusting God’s timing. Faith isn’t a decorative theme here. It’s the lens through which Smith interprets childhood segregation, a devastating surgical injury to her vocal cords, professional changes, her long wait for marriage, motherhood, and the life she eventually built with her husband and children. The final photographic chapter brings the argument into focus by presenting later generations, college graduates, an expanding family, and interracial friendships as visible continuations of a life that began under Jim Crow.
This book will resonate most with Christian readers who enjoy testimony-driven memoirs, as well as families interested in preserving stories across generations. It should also appeal to readers who want an intimate account of Black family life during segregation, particularly one centered on entrepreneurship, caregiving, education, and spiritual inheritance. Smith’s frequent repetition gives the book the feeling of sitting with an elder who wants to make absolutely certain the lesson stays with you. That conversational persistence is part of its character. The result is a sincere family record and devotional memoir that invites readers to examine not only what they’ve endured, but what their lives may allow them to give the next generation.
Pages: 132 | ASIN : B0H72LCQ52
