Estimated reading time: 5 minutes, 10 seconds.  I recently visited Manhattan for three days. As I arrived and exited the cab onto West 58th Street, the noise level that greeted me was excrutiating. The abrupt contrast between my wilderness home nestled in a hollow among hundreds of acres of remote Appalachian foothills could not have been…

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes and 6 seconds. I have been an ordained Southern Baptist minister for thirty-eight years and on the executive staff of three of the denomination’s largest mega-churches for seventeen of those years. I have been attending evangelical churches since I was in my Mother’s womb. But I must say the militant…

(*Full Disclosure: They’re Fictional) John Galt (First of Twelve) At age seventeen when my world was young and soft like clay, I spied a book in the high school library—my only place of enlightenment in that damned institution of “education”—whose cover and title grabbed my attention. It was faded and frayed from age not use….

We spend so much energy and time focused on productivity that we no longer recognize fun when we see it. —Margaret Townsend Every day (and I do mean every day) around four or five o’clock in the afternoon, and sometimes three o’clock on weekends—all the sweat of the brow here at Kalien ceases and a…

Some Impromptu and Unedited Thoughts In 2005, during the first Sabbatical of my life, off the grid in a cabin high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, a life coach suggested I go through my life journals to see if anything helpful emerged. As I slowly and tearfully read through my sporadic but thankfully somewhat consistent…

by Randy Elrod I’ve been thinking. Yep, doing more of that these days. Especially this weekend. On Monday, May 1st, 2017, three short days from now, I will be fifty-nine years old. On the cusp of a new era. One that I’ve always equated with old age. Somehow, saying you are sixty-something sounds so much…

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I felt like a journal that had been torn into a thousand pieces and thrown into the wind. This sentence from my memoir A Renaissance Redneck In A Mega-Church Pulpit described my life in the year 2006. My therapist later called this phenomenon fragmentation—a psychological term that describes the separation or the division of something…

1. Fagor Premium Electric Pressure and Rice Cooker—Cooks risotto in 6 minutes, baby back ribs in 35 minutes, black bean soup in 45 minutes, and pho in 2 hours, and yep, cheesecake in less than 30 minutes! Need I say more? I hear it washes windows, too.  2. Spring Mountain Winegrowing District in Napa—This terroir grows what I most desire…

My life as you and I have known it is over. My endless restlessness and questioning, my empathy and sensuality, my liberal and anarchic tendencies; along with the moralism, cruelty and cowardice of the bourgeoisie community of my former hometown Franklin and most of my religious friends and family, all have combined to crucify the old…

In life, I have constantly found myself thinking: “We are using the same words, but do we mean the same thing?” In the field of informal logic, “slippery terms” are words that mean one thing to one person and something different to another. They produce a consensus that is often an illusion, and therefore likely…

Days of rest and relaxation are the norm at Kalien Retreat. The 55 verdant acres of forested Appalachian Mountain foothills have been set aside for solitude and peace. Kalien Retreat features guest cabins of rustic elegance—each sheltered by acres of natural wildwood and verdant meadows. There are hiking trails, private picnic and seating areas, seasonal waterfalls…