We all choose the things in our lives that are worth committing to despite their flaws, and the church has been one of those things for me. Some people put energy into the political system in the hopes of making whatever small improvements they can. I put my energy into the church in that same va...
I Love You, Miss Huddleston was a funny book. I enjoyed the writing style and I laughed out loud a few times as I read about Philip Gulley's exaggerated childhood. I think the book would have been better served to have a consistent theme or purpose. It comes across more as a series of disconne...
A little known fact about me is that I like to read spiritual fiction. Philip Gulley wrote the Harmony series which I loved but then he switched to non-fiction. A Place Called Hope is the start of a new fiction series with most of the same characters as the Harmony series. Utterly charming and...
Now in paperback, in the fifth full–length novel in the beloved Harmony series Philip Gulley reunites us with the quirky cast of Quakers in Harmony, Indiana.
Join the Harmony Friends Meeting once again to see more shenanigans by Dale and Fern. Sam is in desperate need of a break from the day-to-day drama of some members of the Meeting. When a leave is granted after a medical emergency involving Sam's father, the new pastor steps in with amazing eas...
This is one of those books I'd like to give a 3.5It is, as the book jacket indicates, a cross between Jan Karon's "Mitford" series and Garrison Keillor's "Lake Woebegone" tales - a genre I've tentatively decided to call "Nostalic Pastoral Fiction," with "Pastoral" used in its older sense rather t...
I couldn't find the first book of the Harmony Series, so I was advised to just pick this one up and get started, that this series isn't really written to be read in a certain order. This part is true.I loved this. I read it in about two days. It's quite a different writing style than I'm used to,...
Squarely in the crosshairs of the Church's heresy hunters, can Pastor Sam survive? It's a madcap year in Harmony, Indiana, as Sam Gardner struggles through his fourth year as pastor of the Harmony Friends Meeting. Join the thousands of readers who have fallen in love with the charming small town...
Christmas comes to Harmony Friends, and the usual townfolk are all here, Dale and his big ideas for spreading the Gospel to the unwashed masses, Fern with her righteous and holy reasonings for not sharing her pew or straying from any tradition once put forth by her grandmother, the good, the stri...
Sunday school classes are resuming, with one exception. The Live Free or Die Sunday school class, founded by Robert Miles, Sr., in 1960 to guard against Communist infiltration in the meeting, has closed its doors. Dale Hinshaw had taught the class the past four years after Robert Miles, Sr., left...
The farmers worked their fields, the distant rumble of combines could be heard through the day, and at night the drone of grain dryers lay over the land like a blanket. Dale Hinshaw was confined to home, his heart weakened after a frenzied burst of evangelism during which he’d distributed his fak...
It was Miriam Hodge, informing me that a special meeting of the elders committee had been called. There went my dream of a meeting-free month. “I thought we were going to take December off,” I said. Miriam sighed. “Dale Hinshaw asked to have a meeting, and got Opal Majors to go along. According t...
The process of Sam’s being named grand marshal was a circuitous one, having begun the evening before when Harvey Muldock had phoned to report that their state representative, the Honorable Henry Tuttle, had been stricken with the flu. Sam was sympathetic and asked Harvey if he should send a get-w...