They prefer to describe it as “a quiet revival,” but the army of evangelical Christian missionaries descending on New England more resemble a crusade. Self-styled Warriors for Christ, these spiritual carpetbaggers come North to plant churches and convert the “unchurched” and “gospel-parched” to fundamentalist Christianity. Wielding big smiles and inerrant bibles, they claim to be…
Category: Stories
July 1, 2012
“I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” The famously harsh opinion as voiced by anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist some years back. Tracy Hall may not fit in Grover’s bathtub, but it’s as small as government gets,…
June 7, 2012
Four million steps from Georgia, Appalachian Trail thru-hiker Smooth Sailin’ is heading North to Katahdin in Maine, about 400 miles away. Behind him lies 1700 miles of simple needs: food, shelter, laundry, occasional showers. Next stop is Hanover, an AT hiker favorite with its cheap restaurants, ample services, and a rich history of AT involvement.…
June 7, 2012
Equal parts gingerbread cookies and painful reminders of our hectic and commercialized lives, there’s no getting around the Holiday season. For starters, it is a ritual that requires an intimidating amount of shopping. This is ‘the big one’: 20 percent of all retail sales happen over the Christmas season. You can take on that particular…
June 7, 2012
Covering the entire Midwest and Northeast, the early February storm had the weather channel prophets airing doomsday predictions with headlines like “Colossal Winter Storm Takes Aim.” In fairness, schools in D.C. did shut down for almost a week. But for Andy Hodgdon and his intrepid Norwich highway crew, it simply meant more business as usual.…
June 5, 2012
No, that’s not the recipe for a Dartmouth College fraternity party, it’s auction time at Smith’s Auction Gallery in Plainfield, NH, an old school New England auction house where computer bidding is unheard of, but where a brisk business is being done in donuts and coffee as hundreds of potential buyers cram into the gallery…
February 12, 2012
After 10 years at the helm, Library director Lucinda Walker reflects on the place of the public library in Norwich. The federal Institute of Museums and Library Services describes libraries as “community anchors.” The public/private joint venture that is the Norwich Public Library meets that definition perfectly. Within a library, the librarian is the anchor.…
December 5, 2011
Prishtina Hostpital is a dodgy place to be, especially if you´re sick. But for Kosova´s prematurely born babies a regular checkups at the hospital after discharge may well be the singlemost important factor for increased chances of survival. Prishtina hospital is the biggest in the rural region known as Kosova to the Albanians and Kosovo…
December 5, 2011
The images went around the world. In August 1995 convoys of civilians mostly elderly people and children, walking along the roads of Yugoslavia under the scorching sun. By then, Balkan fatigue had made most western observers oblivious to the real meaning of yet another mass exodus of refugees in the Balkans, and few seemed…
December 5, 2011
Kosova is a mess. Not just politically, but physically. Crossing a muddy stream in a small village near the Macedonian border a local guy points to the plastic bottles, rusting metal and other junk floating along with the current. “See this stream?” he asks me rhetorically. “When I was a child not so long ago…
