Arts & Culture

Kendrick Lamar is a prophet — and a multimillionaire. Through his music, he tells the stories of the oppressed and marginalized, even as his own net worth surpasses $140 million. He calls for spiritual and political resistance to empire yet stood center stage at the Super Bowl halftime show — America’s most-watched spectacle of capitalist excess. At the end of it, he delivered a moment of rebellion, urging viewers to “turn the TV off,” subverting the very platform that elevated him. And yet, the performance also propelled his music sales and deepened his entrenchment within the industry’s elite. At a sold-out Pop Out show, he brought together feuding Bloods and Crips in a powerful gesture of peace and unity — sponsored, ironically, by Amazon, a corporation widely criticized for its union-busting, exploitative labor practices, and surveillance capitalism. 

Isaac Villegas' evocative book opens in the Southwest desert along the borderlands of the U.S. and Mexico as a group of people leave crosses in the places where migrants have lost their lives. These crosses, writes Villegas, are “...an act of devotion to a stranger who should have been our neighbor… Each crucifix remembers a life lost to the violence of immigration policies.

“ON EARTH AS it is in heaven,” wasn’t simply a prayer for the Shakers, a small Protestant sect that practiced communal living and peaked in the mid-19th century: It was the bedrock of their lives. In the mid-1800s, Shaker Sarah Bates depicted this collision of heaven with earth in “Wings of Holy Wisdom, Wings of the Heavenly Father.” In cobalt and inky blues, she drew churning stars and slivered moons, holy scrolls and books cracked open by birds, God’s hand reaching through dark heavens, trumpets and swords among unfurling flowers.

The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming originated in England in 1747 and were guided to America in 1774 by Mother Ann Lee, an illiterate factory worker who became the community’s charismatic leader. Their ecstatic dancing during worship led some to call them “shaking Quakers,” later shortened to “Shakers.” Lee preached ideals such as pacifism and gender and racial equality, and in the new communities in America, she introduced celibacy and no private property. Lee was persecuted and imprisoned for her beliefs, and among many Shakers, she was considered the second coming of Christ in female form.

From about 1837 to 1857, some Shakers began receiving images and messages — many believed to come from Holy Mother Wisdom, who the Shakers saw as the “personified feminine” aspect of God along with the “Almighty Father” as the masculine personification, art historian Sally Promey wrote in her book Spiritual Spectacles. Some people believed the messages came from departed loved ones, and they recorded them in paintings, dances, songs, drawings, and spirit writings, in which a scribe would capture characters and designs that looked like words and letters but whose meaning was unknown — kind of like a “visual equiva-lent for speaking in tongues,” Promey wrote. This period was known as the Era of Manifestations or “Mother’s Work.”

The “gift drawings” of that era burst with geometrical shapes, holy symbols, and heaps of color. The creators of the gift drawings called themselves “instruments,” not artists, and most were women and young people — typically “the least powerful members of Shaker society,” Promey wrote.

BY DESIGN, BODY horror is a genre that’s hard to stomach. It trades jump scares for lengthy exposure to imagery that gets stuck in both your mind and gut. These depictions of the degeneration or mutilation of the body offer embodied critiques of societal problems, like unrealistic beauty standards (The Substance) or online surveillance (Possessor), or, as is the case in Michael Shanks’ forthcoming film, Together, dysfunctional romance.

One moment in particular sticks out. In a scene from the first half of the film, we watch Tim (Dave Franco) and Millie (Alison Brie) kiss tenderly. But as the kiss ends, the couple finds that their lips have fused together. While Together features many gruesome scenes of Millie and Tim testing the adage of “till death do us part,” Shanks’ film has more on its mind than just grossing you out; it explores the dual discomforts of romantic complacency and romantic codependency.

Tim and Millie move to the remote countryside for Millie’s job at a small school. Tim, a musician, has felt creatively stuck and emotionally hollow. And while Millie is hopeful that the move might be a fresh start for their relationship, the transition is looking more like a continuation of moorage. Franco and Brie — who are married in real life — distinctively capture the complacency that can come in a long-term relationship.

BEING A YOUNG girl can be confusing. Perhaps you’ll be adored but not respected. Admired, but only if you suppress your inner longings and become the perfect vessel for your parents’ expectations. Silenced girls can grow to be silent women, stripped of agency, never taught that true power comes from deep within.

“The first time I read the New Testament as a little girl, I broke out in hives,” writes feminist theologian Meggan Watterson in her latest book, The Girl Who Baptized Herself. “With little girl clarity, I was finely attuned to detect inequity.” Into adulthood Watterson couldn’t shake the feeling that her received understanding of God was incomplete. Her understanding of God as a “love that liberates” simply didn’t align with the patriarchal and oppressive power structures she witnessed in the church. Then she discovered the story of Saint Thecla, a young woman who, after hearing the Apostle Paul preach, converted to Christianity and joined him in ministry.

The Girl Who Baptized Herself is a blend of memoir, historical analysis of early Christianity, and fictionalized inner narratives for Thecla. The story begins in Thecla’s bedroom, when she hears Paul’s preaching through her window. Thecla, born into wealth and status in Iconium (in modern-day Turkey), has lived a privileged life. When we meet her, she is soon to marry a powerful nobleman. But as she listens to Paul share the gospel, she sits motionless for three days and three nights. There is an inner shift; Thecla realizes that no matter how beautiful her life may be, a gilded cage is still a cage.

In her personal mission statement, Matthews says she strives “to amplify the voices of the unheard, to shed light on the unseen, and to be a steadfast reminder that hope, and love are the truest pathways to equity and justice." Influenced by Bernice Johnson Reagon, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, Melissa Etheridge, Ani DiFranco, and, of course, Tracy Chapman, to whom she has often been compared, Matthews brings her whole self into her work.

The Mississippi Delta. 1932. A young Black man (Miles Canton) drives up to a small church building. He climbs out of the car, clutching the neck of a broken guitar. He is covered in blood.

As he approaches the closed doors, a children's choir sings "This Little Light of Mine." The doors open and the young man staggers inside. The left side of his face bears deep claw marks. The pastor, unperturbed, opens his arms and demands the young man — Sammie — come forward. A sudden cut transforms the Black preacher into a white creature, its mouth open and dripping blood, its arms spread wide.

So far, this escalating feud is a rather depressing back-and-forth, a cycle of violence for which there doesn’t seem to be any way out. But instead of letting us bask in Ellie’s righteous violence a la John Wick, the series questions the line between justice and revenge, asks whether mercy has any part in the equation, and doesn’t offer any easy answers to these reflections.

PANKAJ MISHRA OPENS The World After Gaza: A History with the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising in German-occupied Poland. The Jews imprisoned in the ghetto fought their Nazi captors for “a few desperate weeks” until they were crushed. Mishra quotes one of few survivors, Marek Edelman, who “was ‘terribly afraid’ that ‘nobody in the world would notice a thing,’ and ‘nothing, no message about us, would ever make it out.’”

The Israel Defense Forces’ ongoing destruction of Gaza following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israeli civilians by Hamas has been livestreamed by journalists, mothers, and teenagers. Globally, many suffered “an inner wound,” Mishra writes, from watching these cruelties: Israel’s bombs targeting children, schools, and hospitals; military dogs mauling disabled Palestinians; and IDF soldiers denying starving people access to food. Despite Palestinian efforts to broadcast the war crimes, Gaza still burns. Mishra contrasts reactions to the atrocities in 1943 Warsaw and in Gaza today to explore Western state-sanctioned violence.

Although Western Allies pledged never to let the genocide of the Holocaust happen again — a promise that has defined Western morality for decades — the violence unleashed in World War II death camps has been repeated across the globe in Japan, Vietnam, Rwanda, Iraq, Syria, and Gaza.

Mishra, a British Indian writer, links the rhetoric of Israel’s ethno-state to the Hindu nationalism of his native India. From a Hindu Brahmin family, Mishra recalls his childhood admiration of Israel’s leaders and how he, and many other Hindu nationalists, admired their macho tactics.