In case you haven’t already guessed, I’ll tell you right up front: Frank Russell is my brother. He was born three years before me, and he’s the one, even more than my parents, who introduced me to the world. Throughout our childhood, he ran interference for me at home, where scoldings and whippings could come […]
L.D. Russell
Posted inNews
Hail Mary
Seems the Southern Baptists have done it again. First, they lobotomized themselves; now they’ve cut out their own heart. I was a student at Wake Forest’s Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in the late ’70s, when the right wing of the Southern Baptist Convention initially gained power. One of their first targets in bringing the fold […]
Posted inArt
When the going gets tough
On a recent sweltering evening I finished a glass of Shiraz at Raleigh’s Tir na nOg and walked next door to a century-old Edward Hopper storefront just a few blocks down Blount Street from the Governor’s Mansion. A poster in the plate glass window read, “Trace Gallery: open since the 1900s.” Inside the high-ceilinged, labyrinthine […]
Posted inNews
Preacher and Poet
“In 1967, the Igbo people seceded from the national government of Nigeria and established the independent state of Biafra. …” Thus begins Paige Reece McCormick’s courageous documentary, exploring the lives of two men whose visions of religion and art intersect as they are caught up in the devastating civil war following the bloody birth of […]
Posted inNews
Pilgrimage to Memphis
Before I was old enough to know what music was, Mom and Dad were listening to Elvis Presley sing “Mystery Train” and “Heartbreak Hotel” on the radio. In the early ’60s, after Dad had left for the second shift down at the mill, Mom would put on her scratchy old 45 records and take turns […]