Arts & Culture

A vibrant illustration of Mary in a hood holding baby Jesus in tones of violent, blue, orange, and red. A glowing halo surrounds her as she closes her eyes.

Illustration by Ryan McQuade

Compulsively larger than life,
mom swaggered out loud.
Her eyes you could get lost in,
and they gripped like a drug.
The Virgin Mary twerking in a thong,
always herself but never the same,
never quite right
but never completely wrong,
she made me feel proud
and destroyed me with shame.

Laura Traverse 3-09-2023
The poetry book 'Divination with a Human Heart Attached' rests over an orange background. The cover depicts a human eye peering through the middle of a torn page, which is cut in the shape of a bird.

Divination with a Human Heart Attached, by Emily Stoddard

IN EARLY CHRISTIAN gnostic texts, you can read the story of St. Peter’s daughter, who would come to be known as Petronilla. Legend has it that Petronilla was so beautiful that her father prayed she be paralyzed on one side (so that she would not “be beguiled”). In Emily Stoddard’s debut collection of poetry, Divination with a Human Heart Attached, Petronilla is a fruitful companion and the voice of several poems. They appear alongside poems voiced by a contemporary speaker who we assume to be Stoddard herself. In this way, Petronilla serves as a sort of spiritual ancestor for Stoddard. Both look for and lose faith. Both find signs of divine presence everywhere.

While Petronilla’s God speaks in things like “fish and flower,” Stoddard’s confessional work finds God in interior, negative space — not in religious institutions: “I cut away from my body ... slice myself awake to numb arms ... too big to fit inside the church.” She tentatively hopes that “if it’s true, if god is there at all, she kicks us from the inside.” Faith finds form here in ovaries, dreams, the “dark joy” of Stoddard’s dying grandmother finding beauty in “the sunset on the highway.” Unlike Petronilla, whose father fears her seduction by men, the poet-speaker is seduced by poetry — the power of naming things “without the restraint of a scientist.” Names for plants, names for God: “we are not done yet / inventing names / for what will save us.”

Josina Guess 3-09-2023
A woman with brown curly hair and a cardigan is sitting on a couch and holding her baby, who has dark hair and wears a white longsleeve footie onesie. Piles of boxes, baby supplies, and furniture surround her on all sides.

From Love & Stuff

“WHERE WILL THE Judaica go?” a friend asks Judith Helfand, in reference to the material objects of her faith. Helfand is an Ashkenazi Jewish documentarian who turns the camera on herself and her family to tell larger stories. Here, she’s telling a story of becoming a “new old mother” the year after her own mother dies. She takes a deep breath of her newborn daughter’s hair and turns to her friend, who is trying to help her store and organize the too many things in her New York apartment. “That is such a good question,” replies Helfand, who embraced motherhood by adopting at age 50. “It’s the age-old Jewish question,” she continues. “Once we left the desert we were like, s---, now we have to find places for our stuff!” She breaks into laughter, that special laugh of the sleep-deprived and overwhelmed new parent, and never answers her friend’s question directly.

Love & Stuff, a POV documentary available on PBS, based on Helfand’s shorter New York Times Op-Doc with the same name, is full of age-old questions about holding on and letting go. Love & Stuff doesn’t offer easy answers or quick fixes, instead revealing the struggles and choices we make in curating our living spaces.

The Editors 3-09-2023
A group of Mennonite women are standing and sitting in a barn filled with crates and hay bales in the film 'Women Talking.'

From Women Talking

Do We Stay or Do We Go?

Women Talking centers on Mennonite women wrestling with how to respond to serial sexual assault by men from their colony. The film explores the complexity of forgiveness and touchingly reminds viewers that leaving one’s community can be an act of faith.
United Artists Releasing

Abby Olcese 3-09-2023
A photo of actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi as fictional journalist Arezoo Ramimi in the film 'Holy Spider.' She is cast against a red flag in the background and staring just off camera at something.

From Holy Spider

THE OPENING SCENE of Holy Spider is brutal. We see a woman — a sex worker — leave her child at home to go to work. Walking through Iran’s holy city of Mashhad, she stops at a public restroom to adjust her headscarf and apply bold lipstick. She goes on her first call of the night and does some opium. As she prepares to go home, a man approaches on a motorcycle. He offers her money. She joins him. Shortly after arriving at their destination, he strangles her.

Writer-director Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider is a fictionalized account of Saeed Hanaei, known as the Spider Killer, who targeted female sex workers in Mashhad from 2000 to 2001. The film, which premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, examines the killer’s life and the process of capturing him, led by (fictionalized) female journalist Arezoo Rahimi (Zar Amir Ebrahimi).

Joey Thurmond 2-23-2023

Colm (Brendan Gleeson) and Pádraic (Colin Farrell) in the film Banshees of Inisherin. Image credit: Photo by Jonathan Hession. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

The Banshees of Inisherin has received several awards from the Golden Globes and multiple nominations for the forthcoming Academy Awards. It’s not hard to see why: Martin McDonagh’s film captures the complex, deep turmoil of a friendship falling apart. The friendship falls apart because the characters don’t have the framework to work through misunderstandings due to their depressive state.

Joe George 2-22-2023

Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett) sit by a fireplace and eat a meal in the HBO TV series, The Last of Us. Image credit: Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO.

The Last of Us has some of the characters you’d expect in an end-of-the-world series, including Bill, a survivalist portrayed with comical stoicism by Nick Offerman. Only one word can describe the look on Bill’s face when he emerges from his stately New England home, lowers his pistol, and pulls off his gas mask: relief. Not relief that his neighbors were still there, saved from the disaster that government officials had been warning them about, but quite the opposite: Bill’s relief comes from the fact that his neighbors have gone, evacuated to a quarantine zone while he hid in his heavily fortified safe room. With the entire town to himself, Bill indulges in his new life and gets what most doomsday preppers only dream of: an actual doomsday.

Michael Woolf 2-16-2023

Image: Warwick Davis, Amar Chadha-Patel, Ellie Bamber, Erin Kellyman, Dempsey Bryk, and Ruby Cruz in Diseny’s ‘Willow’ (2022).

Willow has all the themes you’d expect from a fantasy adventure: The party is assembled, there’s a quest, and they go on a rescue mission. The party has a rogue (Amar Chadha-Patel as Boorman), a wizard (Warwick Davis reprising his role as Willow), a bard (Tony Revolori as Graydon ), a paladin knight (Erin Kellyman as Jade), a princess (Ruby Cruz as Kit), and a chosen one (Ellie Bamber as Elora). Notably missing from the 1988 cast is Val Kilmer as Madmartigan (Kilmer is recovering from throat cancer.) The enemies are mainly the Crone, who live in the immemorial city, as well as an unseen quasi-deity that lives below ground — simply titled “the Wyrm.” As with any good fantasy, it’s less concerned about the plot than it is about showing the characters interact, grow, and change, along with a decent amount of throwbacks to the original movie.

Amar D. Peterman 2-03-2023

Image credit: Image of Lizzy McAlpine from Lizzy McAlpine's Five Seconds Flat, the Film (2022).

The opening words of “doomsday” set the tone for the remainder of McAlpine’s sophomore album, Five Seconds Flat. It is an intense, gut-wrenching journey of love, loss, grief, and the complexities that come with each emotion. McAlpine leans into imagery of death, murder, reckless driving, and other macabre realities to describe this story. Through lyric and melody, she invites us in. I, like millions of others, am here for the ride.

Like the author Miriam Toews, I remember when I heard the news about the “ghost rapes” in Bolivia. I was in seminary training to be a Mennonite pastor. Toews, an ethnic Mennonite who fled her closed community decades before, was living in Toronto. But we shared a visceral and knowing horror as we learned of the events that unfolded in the Bolivian Manitoba Community, events that later inspired Toews’ 2018 novel, Women Talking, and a recent film by the same name.

Jordan T. Jones 1-30-2023

Image of Otis Moss III's book, Dancing in the Darkness (2023). Image credit Betsy Shirley.

In Dancing in the Darkness, Moss urges readers to move through the sorrow of the blues to what he calls “jazz politics” — one of collaboration, community participation, and dialogue: “If we had a jazz version of democracy in our politics, where each of us could play all our notes, even the blue notes, and contribute them to the music of the whole, then dialogue and honest debate would be the norm rather than demonization and incivility.”

Abby Olcese 1-25-2023
A human-like figure with angel wings rears it's head toward the sky.

A scene from 'The Devil Conspiracy.'

Here’s the setup: A shadowy biotech conglomerate and a cabal of satanists (gasp!) are planning to release Lucifer from hell by… wait for it… stealing the linen cloth used to cover Christ’s body during his entombment, using it to clone Christ’s DNA, and then implanting it into a surrogate mother, allowing Lucifer to possess the fetus. The Devil Conspiracy is like a mix of Rosemary’s Baby, Demon Seed, and the surrogacy mix-up romcom The Switch.

Michael Woolf 1-20-2023

Puss from DreamWorks Animation's Puss In Boots: The Last Wish (2022). Courtesey of DreamWorks Animation.

Being unafraid of death is easier said than done. Death is one of the great fears that stalks the minds and hearts of human beings. That being said, there are times when Paul still dares to mock death: “‘Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’” (1 Corinthians 15:55). As a pastor, I have held plenty of hands as people die, yet I have never heard such boasting. What I have heard are regrets, contentment, fear, and any number of emotions. How we face death is complicated.

JR. Forasteros 1-18-2023

Brendan Fraser in the role of Charlie, in ‘The Whale’

Darren Aronofsky’s latest film The Whale has made a splash, both for Brendan Fraser’s heart-wrenching portrayal of the 600-pound Charlie and for critics’ accusations of fatphobia in the film.

An illustration with an orange background of a vibrantly colored rooster cawing.

CSA Images / Getty Images

This morning it is minus six degrees.
The old woman at the corner with her bundles
says yes to a ride, but is, at first, unwilling
to say where. Then she does say and tells me
as a girl her grandmother kept three hundred chickens
which she tended every morning before school.

She says a Chinese man would come to separate
the roosters from the hens. Apparently they look alike.
In storybooks there’s no mistaking, but it seems
in real life, one must be outed by his crow.

Karen González 1-19-2023
The book Grace Can Lead Us Home by Kevin Nye has a cover showing a maze in the shape of a house. The book is floating in the air, cast against a pale yellow background.

Grace Can Lead Us Home: A Christian Call to End Homelessness, by Kevin Nye / Herald Press

NEARLY ALL OF us have encountered a person on the street who is unhoused and asking for help. Perhaps we have felt conflicted about how to respond: Should we give them cash? Should we offer to pay for a meal instead? Will the cash we give cause further harm through the purchase of alcohol or drugs? It can be difficult to know how to engage responsibly at the personal or the policy level with the growing problem of homelessness in the U.S.

Enter Kevin Nye’s illuminating book, Grace Can Lead Us Home: A Christian Call to End Homelessness. Nye offers a new lens through which to view homelessness and, more importantly, our neighbors experiencing homelessness. For him, this is not just another justice issue, but rather his calling: He has devoted much of his adult life to working with unhoused people in Los Angeles.

Grace Can Lead Us Home explains the macro-level causes of homelessness and contributing factors. And it reveals micro-level approaches to engaging with our unhoused neighbors in a way that centers our mutual need for connection and belonging. He discusses the lack of affordable housing that drives this crisis; the inadequate mental health support available to unhoused people; and the surprising truth about substance abuse and addiction affecting homeless populations.

Jenna Barnett 1-19-2023
A teenage girl holds her boyfriend around the waist from behind, while the boyfriend hugs a golden cross from the front.

Illustration by Melanie Lambrick

“I’m getting into you / Because you got to me in a way words can’t describe.”

WHEN I FIRST heard these lyrics in the early 2000s, I was smitten. I pressed the soft foam of my headphones against my ears to better hear the lyrics of Relient K. My crush, who we’ll call “Jamie,” had chosen this song as track one on the mix CD he burned for me. Near the top of the CD, he sharpied the name of the song: “GETTING INTO YOU” (emphasis Jamie’s).

Surely this was confirmation that Jamie didn’t just like me as a classmate — he was, as Paramore sang it best, into me. But I was naïve; I was mainline; I interpreted Relient K’s lyrics romantically when I should have approached them hermeneutically. Reader, I was so Presbyterian Church (USA) that I had never heard of the PCA. I knew there was an old rugged cross on a hill, but I’d never heard of Hillsong.

The Editors 1-19-2023
A son embraces his mother from behind, who lift up their hands together to clap.

From God's Creatures

Communal Sin

The psychological thriller God’s Creatures follows a mother who chooses to hide her son’s secret, a decision that has damaging ripple effects in her remote fishing village. The film explores how a community’s complacency in covering up sin can systematize and amplify evil.
A24

Da’Shawn Mosley 1-19-2023
Uncle Clifford (Nicco Annan), the owner of The Pynk strip club, stands beside Lil' Murda (J. Alphonse Nicholson) as they look off in the distance.

From P-Valley

P-VALLEY IS A DRAMA about employees of a fictional strip club in Mississippi called The Pynk. Watching the show, which Starz has renewed for a third season, gives me déjà vu. In the opening minutes of the first episode, we see a neighborhood overtaken by a flood, the camera eventually focusing on a floating suitcase — which a woman who looks like she just survived a hurricane grabs. I’m reminded of Toni Morrison’s titular character Beloved, who “walked out of the water”; it’s all instantly reminiscent of the Southern, sin-filled aura of stories by Flannery O’Connor. A few minutes later, I’m hit with production design as colorful as that of the TV show Pose — unabashed theatricality.

This description should feel as dizzying as twirling around a stripper pole — that’s the inevitable impact of the artistic and spiritual heft P-Valley wields. The show, which is an adaptation of a play by Pulitzer Prize winner and Tony Award nominee Katori Hall, is about nothing less than free will. Hall explores complex topics such as sex work, abuse by men, abortion, and homophobia. Here in the Mississippi Delta, viewers get to know a mostly Black community trying to live as freely as the Constitution of their nation built by slaves declares white men should.

Zachary Lee 1-19-2023
A woman is pictured holding up a fork full of noodles to her smiling mouth while posing for a photo

From 'Triangle of Sadness'

IT WOULD HAVE been tough to be both a disciple of Jesus and a foodie. Don’t get me wrong, Jesus certainly valued food — his earthly ministry was filled with meals: The gospel of Matthew describes Jesus as one who “came eating and drinking” (11:19). As Robert J. Karris wrote in Eating Your Way Through Luke’s Gospel, Jesus was “either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal.” But what the Chosen One had in meal frequency, he lacked in meal diversity.

A “foodie” is someone who eats food as a hobby — a passion, even. The more exotic the better. If you pull up to your local boba shop, why settle for regular milk tea when you can order one infused with butterfly pea flower that turns it bright blue?

However, for Jesus’ meals, at least the ones recorded in scripture, the fish is served broiled (Luke 24:42), not creatively deconstructed. And if you’re rolling with Jesus, you better like eating bread.

Though his plate may have lacked the splendor of the centurions’ or high priests’ spreads, Jesus viewed the table as a radical place of inclusion. For many powerful religious leaders of the time, dining was yet another way to shun the outcasts. In contrast, Jesus intentionally invited those very same “unclean” people to dine with him, breaking bread (because of course it was bread) with tax collectors, sinners, and prostitutes.

In the past year, several films have articulated a hunger for the type of table Jesus championed. Flux Gourmet, Triangle of Sadness, and The Menu critique class inequality through stories revolving around fine dining. In each movie, wealthy people have rich flavors but a dearth of meaningful relationships. The exclusivity of the table seems more important than the actual food served on the plates. Jesus’ table, on the other hand, lacked variety but overflowed in inclusivity — a true palate cleanser to meals that symbolized selfish consumption.