Arts & Culture

Narnia fans can rest easy. That was my thought upon leaving a sneak peek at Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Narnia adaptation.

When I published a spiritual memoir based on the teachings of a 16th-century saint named Teresa of Avila, my 13-year-old daughter suggested my next writing project should be something “more people would want to read.” 

I LEARNED HOW to build a fire from watching you. Thirteen years ago, in the living room of the Denver Catholic Worker on Welton Street, you’d fill the wood stove with kindling, loosely rolled newspaper, a few logs. Along with a carefully scaffolded collection of the right materials leaning on each other, you also needed patience. You needed to be calm. Steady.

It’s almost one year since your death. At a writing residency in the Adirondacks, I remember how the fire kept you busy. Another writer pauses from her work, carefully places a couple of logs into the fireplace; soon the flames swell, flicker.

Michelle, was tending the fire a distraction from the silence—or from the internal noise, the fire raging inside of you? I have so many questions I never got to ask—questions I likely never would have asked when you were alive. I never knew what hidden wound I might be pressing on with them.

Instead, I’ve been looking through the letters you sent me over the years.

IN CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S film adaptation of The Odyssey, the Greek gods are notably quiet.

For the ancient Greeks, to know better was to do better. The possession of right knowledge would inevitably lead to right action.

“This idea is totally alien to me—I don’t understand it at all,” writes essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn in her bracing new memoir of addiction, Will and Attention. “What I understand is the bewilderment of the apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans: ‘I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.’”

I’M IN HIGH SCHOOL, standing on the football field when my teammate asks me, “How do you have any friends?” It’s a question I’ve prepared for, so, with perfect rhythm, I respond, “I thought we were friends?”

I struggle to answer what it was like to be homeschooled. Not because I can’t describe my own life, but because there are so many variables that make each homeschool experience unique. For decades, the only thing all homeschoolers had in common was how little others knew about our lives. Case in point: My friend could ask me how I made friends at one of the many places where I made friends.

“What would have happened if I wasn’t here?” The question oozes out of Robert Pattinson’s Chris Hansen as a rhetorical killshot. Primetime, Lance Oppenheim’s movie about the rise and fall of Dateline NBC’s 2000s ratings juggernaut To Catch a Predator, depicts Hansen as savoring every syllable. Their “predator”—a creep lured onto a TV set disguised as a suburban home by a grownup posing as a teen in online chatrooms—is stunned by Hansen’s sudden appearance, shrinking under his righteous inquisition, and finally left to ponder his inhumanity as law enforcement swarms.

This was the conceit of To Catch a Predator, the short-lived but enormously popular NBC show that partnered with an anti-child exploitation group called Perverted Justice to ensnare would-be pedophiles into online chatting, sexting, and, ultimately, visiting adults posing as underage teens. Once inside, the faux-teen “decoy” excuses themself before Hansen appears, armed with withering putdowns and transcripts of the lurid text exchanges. “I’m Chris Hansen with Dateline NBC,” he announces. “You see how this looks, right?”

Living in an age where rage is a currency, where anything and everything is a financial stressor, and where our political machine’s main function is to sow division, clinging to positive platitudes like “Things will get better!” or “Just hold out hope!” can feel like an expression of wilful ignorance, or at best, stupid naivety. It’s hard, nearly impossible, to remain hopeful in such uncertain times; a feeling encapsulated in the fifth album from Joy Oladokun (they/she), fittingly titled Hope is a Heavy Thing.

The Arizona-born singer-songwriter’s career has burgeoned from her pensive lyricism, a marriage of the personal and political: their Nigerian-Christian upbringing as a queer person in their 2019 single “Sunday”; the unique pain of the African-American experience in the piano-led pandemic anthem “Who Do I Turn To?”; or her dependence on self-medication in “Drugs.”

The walls are covered in shiplap paneling. Over by the spare toilet paper, an essential oil diffuser hums quietly as it emits Young Living’s “Purification” into the air. Two wide-eyed Precious Moments figurines watch you from the windowsill. A framed Bible verse declares, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord,” but you already knew you were in the bathroom of a white Christian woman; the signs and wonders were all around you. In Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made, Kristin Kobes Du Mez dissects those signs—and their political implications.

Du Mez, a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University, landed on The New York Times’ bestseller list for Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, her scorching dissection of white evangelical masculinity. With Live Laugh Love, Du Mez turns her eye to white Christian femininity. Because, “demographically speaking, women are the center of American Christianity,” writes Du Mez, “we should look beyond denominational seminaries and theological treatises and read Christian romance novels instead.”