The Faith Reader

This is what we talk about when we talk about God. For six years This Land Press collected stories, ambitiously chronicling life and culture in the middle of America from an independent perspective, untethered by denominational obligations or political affiliations. Many of these stories directly or indirectly relate to faith and show different faces of God told by different voices from different perspectives and different places. One tells us that 47 percent of our neighbors worship the God that Charles Fox Parham found in Kansas at the end of the 20th century. This God is a personal God; He rips “through your viscera like an electric current and make your religious conviction dynamically manifest" when you emerge from a sacred baptismal, writes contributor Mike Mariani in "Tongues of Fire in Kansas."  The "Strange Love of Billy James Hargis" by the late Lee Roy Chapman and Michael Mason shows how the Christian Crusade, which Hargis founded in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the 1950s, brought th