Arts & Culture
'Wicked' / Universal Pictures
Prophets, by nature of their calling, are not well-liked. They must tell a community or nation what they’re doing wrong. In biblical times, modern times, and Ozian times, people don’t like to be told that they need to change their ways. So when Elphaba is called to disrupt the oppression that many have become complacent with, she is rejected for it.
'The Penguin' / Max
Over the course of the HBO series The Penguin, Sofia Gigante transforms from abused daughter of Gotham City mobster Carmine Falcone to a proper supervillain, the head of her own crime family. Sofia has chosen a new surname for herself. By going from Falcone to Gigante, she signals that she’s different from her father. Sure, Sofia’s still committing crimes (like he did) and killing people (like he did), but she's convinced there’s something righteous in her ascension: Her rise to power represents a rejection of the misogyny that’s always plagued her.
Graphic by Ryan McQuade / Sojourners.
Perhaps more than any other medium, books can simultaneously sharpen our suspicion and enlarge our imaginations. Sojourners’ best books of 2024 do both with style.
Silkroad Ensemble performing 'American Railroad' / David Bazemore
“What happens when strangers meet?” is the driving question of the Silkroad Ensemble, an instrumental group conceived in 1998 by cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Musicians from around the world connect and communicate through music in response to this question. Lines between East and West, classical and folk blur as musicians work together to give old sounds new life. When musician and historian Rhiannon Giddens became artistic director of Silkroad in 2020, she focused the musical conversation on railroads. What emerged, and is still emerging, is American Railroad: A Musical Journey of Reclamation — a multiyear collaborative project including performances, residencies, an album, and a podcast exploring the untold stories of the people who helped lay the tracks connecting the United States.
Graphic by Ryan McQuade / Sojourners
The films below feature characters — real and fictional — who doubt, who sin, who ask for forgiveness, and who try to carry on and seek justice in a universe full of violence, corruption, and sickness, but also humor, love, and reconciliation.
Observations From a Crowded Room, by Joy Oladokun / Verve Forecast/Republic Records
I WANT TO believe there’s a live band at a church somewhere in the U.S. playing Joy Oladokun’s latest album, Observations From a Crowded Room. After all, Oladokun is no stranger to sanctuaries: By the time she was 16, Oladokun was leading the worship music at the charismatic nondenominational church her family attended. But around the age of 24, she quit, explaining in an interview with NPR, “I just felt like so much of my attention was going towards taking care of people and singing the right songs and not saying the wrong thing on Sunday.”
I think, for a long time, I’ve been looking for a church willing to risk singing the wrong thing on Sunday—to risk singing something like these lyrics from Oladokun’s “Dust/Divinity”: “I’m a skeptic who still prays / ... ’Cause though it hurts me to believe / It kills me not to / And I am trying to find my way through the middle / And I am desperate to receive every good thing / From now until eternity / From dust until divinity.”
From Hard Truths
Love is Patient
In the film Hard Truths (written and directed by Mike Leigh), the main character yells at strangers — Pansy is angry at the world. But her sister Chantelle sees the sadness behind the rage, offering Pansy the unconditional love we all need: “I don’t understand you,” says Chantelle, “but I love you.” Bleecker Street Media
From Nickel Boys
Trauma changes your memories. When I think of traumatic experiences in my life — what happened, how I felt before that moment, how I felt afterward, the changes I’ve noticed in myself since — they often play in short bursts. Those bursts are rarely sequential, and the length of time they last depends on how long I allow myself to linger on a memory.
Filmmaker RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is a record of trauma. It tells the story of two Black boys’ experience at an abusive reform academy in Jim Crow-era Florida. The fictional Nickel Academy is inspired by an actual place, Florida’s Dozier School for Boys, where students received brutal treatment at the hands of staff. A 2012 investigation by the University of South Florida uncovered dozens of human burial sites on the property.
Ross does something unique with this story about trauma, memory, and how they relate to each other: He makes it feel authentic.
Even After Everything: The Spiritual Practice of Knowing the Risks and Loving Anyway, by Stephanie Duncan Smith / Convergent
IF YOU WROTE down your past year’s most significant personal joys and losses on a timeline, how might they line up with the liturgical calendar — Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Eastertide, and Ordinary Time? Placing these two calendars side by side, what might you find? Stephanie Duncan Smith digs into these questions in her memoir Even After Everything. For Duncan Smith — and likely for most of us — “Sometimes our personal moments converge with these natural and sacred seasons in profound, meaning-rich ways. And sometimes they clash with unbearable disparity.”
Duncan Smith shares her own story of loss and love with unflinching honesty, even and especially where it seems to clash with the Christian story. The places of dissonance are, for her, both a “dizzying problem” and a “place of divine encounter.” She invites us to dive into the dissonance with her as she wrestles out a sort of reconciliation — a renewed understanding of the Christian story that makes room, so much room, for every human grief. “The promise has never been smooth nor safe passage,” Duncan Smith writes. “The divine promise is presence.”
From America's Got Talent Season 19
IN HIS FIRST performance on season 19 of America’s Got Talent, Richard Goodall was shaking. The 55-year-old middle school janitor from Terre Haute, Ind., pushed his glasses up from his perspiring face. “Whew,” he said.
“Are you a bit nervous?” Simon Cowell, one of the judges, asked.
“This has been a long time coming,” Goodall replied. He patted his chest and took a deep breath.
My husband, Michael, sitting beside me on the couch, was nearly in tears, and Goodall hadn’t even started to sing.
Illustration by Melanie Lambrick
STUDY AFTER STUDY and book after book tells you that modern society has a community-support problem. People are lonelier and more isolated than ever and are expected to solve these collective and societal problems by themselves. But you don’t have to do this alone. You can do this with the support of my handy guide to community building!
Allow me to propose some ideas for how to create your own community-support network when every thread in the fabric of American society seems designed to keep you from it.
□ Search relevant terms on Google such as: “What is community?” and “What is community support?” Start a discussion group to answer these questions. Congratulations! You now have a community of people who love to argue in circles. Consider turning this into a Bible study.
Mason Mennenga. Photo courtesy Mennenga. Graphic by Ryan McQuade/Sojourners
If you’ve encountered Mason Mennenga online, it’s likely due to one of his viral tweets.
Gems like “bible college girls are like ‘marriage is so hard’ yeah, you married a 19-year old evangelical man” and “christians will name their kids after old testament prophets and then are shocked that their kids eventually speak out against injustices.” Occasionally, he dunks on a conservative personality, or he becomes the punching bag for conservative voices frustrated by his progressive theology.
But Mennenga is more than a social media account. He hosts two podcasts, writes about theology and culture, and works as director of admissions at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities.
'The Piano Lesson' / Netflix
The Piano Lesson is a film about what we pass on from one generation to the next: family heirlooms, deeply embedded wounds, and — as is the case for the Charles family — deeply embedded spirituality.
Kendrick Lamar live at Rolling Loud Germany, Messe Riem Munich on Aug. 7, 2023. IMAGO/Stefan M. Prager via Reuters.
Since his critically acclaimed album, To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar has been wrestling with the devil. But on GNX, his surprise album released last Friday, Lamar stops wrestling and writes a reconciliation between Satan and God.
Katie Brayben in 'Tammy Faye.' Photo by Matthew Murphy, courtesy Polk & Co.
A musical about Tammy Faye Messner, more widely known by her former name, Tammy Faye Bakker, seems odd at first. But the Broadway stage feels like the right place for the rise and fall of televangelism to play out. Televangelism, after all, is meant to be a spectacle. And its shadow of corruption, sex, and money only add to the theatrics of it all.
'Knives Out' / Lionsgate
The season is stuffed (pun fully intended) with stress, loved ones, and remembering to share our blessings with others. These films remind me of those feelings.
'Heretic' / A24
Heretic is a litany of theological inquiries wrapped in the skin of a horror movie. Like Legion, the frights of directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ film are many, but its biggest scare isn’t demonic or paranormal or gory: It’s the unique terror of being caught in a theological conversation with a self-righteous man.
I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin
MAYBE YOU FIRST saw it while sitting in the waiting room of the doctor’s office — a Fox News banner update across the bottom of the screen. Or perhaps you saw the hashtag on X or Threads. Maybe you’re following the story as internet sleuths exchange theories on Reddit. Here’s what you know: There’s an SUV making its way from California to Washington, D.C., driven by a man and a woman in their 20s. They’re transporting some sort of nuclear device, and they plan to blow up the president. And, for some reason, law enforcement isn’t taking this very seriously.
It’s the story of the moment. Even though nobody has any real facts. Everyone just knows we’re collectively watching a disaster unfold.
Such is the setup for Jason Pargin’s I’m Starting to Worry About this Black Box of Doom, a parable of the dangers of the information age. Pargin’s witty, incisive novel illustrates how social media has eroded our ability to trust each other.