Commentary
I’ve never been a fan of Halloween. I’ve always been more of an All Saints’ Day kinda guy. Just joking; truth is I try to resist the impulse to constantly make distinctions between “the world” and “the church.” The lines between sacred and profane, monster and human, are not easily distinguishable.
A man wearing a homemade raccoon hat at the Justice for J6 rally hosted by Look Ahead America at the U.S. Capitol on Sept. 18, 2021.Photo by Allison Bailey/NurPhoto
As Christians, we are citizens of the kingdom of God. But a common roadblock to dedicating our lives to the kingdom of God by loving our neighbors to the best of our ability is the temptation to allow our allegiance to the country in which we live supersede our allegiance to the kingdom of God — to succumb to nationalism.
Amanda 'Butta P' Small is a hip-hop music maven combining her faith, business prowess, and heritage to change the culture.
Pastor Bert Bocachica and his wife lead a church called El Santuario, a Spanish congregation in the Bronx borough of New York City.
Vanessa Martinez Soltero is an activist bridging her Christian faith and Indigenous traditions to sustain herself and community.
Nabsico workers with the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union Local 364 strike outside their bakery owned by Mondelez International in Portland, Ore., on Aug. 21, 2021. Photo by Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA
The latest headlines are filled with news of worker shortages, delayed supply chains, and labor strikes. Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations strike tracker reports more than 181 strikes so far this year, with 38 of them taking place in the first two weeks of October, spurring the AFL-CIO to name this month “Striketober.” These strikes span all kinds of industries, from hospital workers to whisky makers.
Photo by Dan Burton on Unsplash
Should Christians have anything to do with horror? Is there anything commendable or worthy of praise in the genre?
As a pastor whose love of horror has only deepened over the years, I offer a resounding yes. Horror is a genre uniquely able to invite us into spaces of confession and lament, if only we have ears to hear.
‘The Vale of Rest’ by Sir John Everett Millais, Bt. Oil paint on canvas, 1858-1859. Photo via Tate / CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported)
In Lauren Groff’s newest novel, Matrix, monastic life in the High Middle Ages serves as a stunning backdrop for the story of Marie, a nun who feels “her greatness hot in her blood.” Marie arrives at an English abbey as a reluctant teenager, at the appointment of her queen, Eleanor, who expects Marie to become abbess and save the Crown from the public shame of a royal abbey where nuns die of starvation and disease.
A photo of the type of Hasselblad cameras used on the moon, in the “NASA - A Human Adventure” exhibition at the ArtScience Museum in Singapore. By superjoseph, via shutterstock.
The most incredible part of landing on the moon is not the making it there, but the safely making it back. NASA’s missions to the moon and back were feats of engineering, math, and creativity. The stories are oft retold from a variety of angles and perspectives, and I will never tire of it.
Some people may not know that when we went to the moon, we left a lot of junk there. Lighter space crafts can escape gravity easier, so anything that didn’t need to come home didn’t. Included on the list of things that didn’t need to come back from Apollo 11 through Apollo 17: Twelve Hasselblad camera bodies and lenses. (Another fun fact: Until recently, one of the cameras that was supposed to return had been missing for nearly 50 years.)
Jason Isaacs and Martha Plimpton in ‘Mass’ / Courtesy of Sundance Institute
What kind of parent raises a mass murderer? What would the aftermath of a school shooting be like for the parents of the child who shot his classmates and then took his own life. Unimaginable? Mass, Fran Kranz’s writing and directorial debut, immerses viewers in these questions, challenging us to consider our capacity for forgiveness.
Most of the U.S. public doesn’t “know anything at all” about congressional Democrats’ Build Back Better infrastructure plan, according to a CBS poll released this week. Even though the provisions the plan contains could help countless families, the language of “infrastructure” is both distant from our daily lives and too obscure to generate a sense of urgency. “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge,” the prophet Hosea warns (Hosea 4:6). How true that rings now.
As Christians, I believe we must reject the project of the melting pot. In the Bible, the church is not portrayed as an ambiguous, homogeneous entity. Instead, difference and diversity are understood as a strength — as God’s gift to the church (Acts 2).
Ah, the sweet escapism of sci-fi and fantasy. From The Hunger Games to The Force Awakens, women and people of color are presidents, space commanders, and leaders of the resistance without protest or fanfare from those around them. Dystopian America and a Galaxy Far Far Away know no racism or sexism, it seems. But that’s not necessarily a good thing for those of us in the audience. As Atencio wrote of For All Kind, “The willingness to embrace fictional diversity … but an unwillingness to deal with the tensions that would follow, is maybe the farthest stretch on the show.”
Father Paul in 'Midnight Mass' / Courtesy of Netflix
Midnight Mass is the latest from horror filmmaker Mike Flanagan (creator of The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor), who excels in slow-creeping, character-based horror. It’s also a project through which Flanagan, a former Catholic, processes his feelings about scripture, religion, and the church. As an artistic representation of someone deconstructing their faith, Midnight Mass employs horror tropes to explore the ways religion responds to pain, both in ways that heal and ways that destroy.
Hundreds of New Yorkers rally against vaccine mandates in New York City on September 27, 2021. Photo by Mohamed Krit/Sipa USA
The FDA’s full approval in late August of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, known commercially as Comirnaty, has led to a spate of government and corporate vaccine mandates for employees and patrons — as well as the inevitable backlash. Much of that backlash has been on religious grounds, with some Christians claiming exemption from the mandates using what journalist Mattathias Schwartz describes as the “rhetorical Swiss Army knife” of religious freedom.
Pauli Murray / Coutesy Amazon Studios
What does a trailblazing Episcopal priest, a lawyer whose work helped to shape the Brown v. Board of Education case, a founding member of the National Organization for Women (NOW), and a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt all have in common?
They are all the same person. And My Name Is Pauli Murray, a new documentary from Amazon Studios, tells the fascinating story.
When we do not take care of the earth and allow powerful individuals or companies to plunder the land God has called good (Genesis 1), the people who are disproportionately impacted are the marginalized. This discrepancy between those who benefit and those who suffer highlights the way our society is structured to benefit oppressors at the expense of people who are poor, hungry, and disenfranchised.
Opponents of critical race theory attend a packed Loudoun County School board meeting in Ashburn, Virginia, on June 22, 2021. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Perhaps you have seen the photos: Protesters at school board meetings holding signs that say “Stop Teaching Critical Racist Theory To Our Kids” or “I Am Not An Oppressor.” At the heart of these protests is opposition to teaching children about the United States’ shameful racial history — a history that repeats itself in systems and structures today. Many of these protests appeal to white parents’ fears that reckoning with our nation’s past sins and injustices will make their kids feel ashamed or that — in some twisted logic — this reckoning is itself “racist.” I’ve watched this growing campaign with anguish; I believe that cultivating a greater commitment to anti-racism within the next generation will empower our kids, not instill shame.
Photo credit Daniel Becerril via Reuters Connect | A Haitian migrant seeking refuge in the U.S., sits outside the Casa INDI shelter as they try to reach the border with United States, in Monterrey, Mexico September 28, 2021.
In the United States, white supremacy has made it impossible to see immigrants — but especially Haitian immigrants — as siblings who God commands us to love as though they were our neighbors. The U.S. has long resisted seeing Haitians not only as neighbors but as humans.