Arts & Culture
The prediction market is booming. In April alone, it was estimated that Polymarket and Kalshi recorded nearly $24 billion in trades.
Amazon Prime’s The Boys wrapped up its fifth and final season last week, and its overarching theme was: faith. After becoming the de facto CEO of Vought and president of the United States, antagonist Homelander—a narcissistic Superman foil, wrapped in the American flag and played to perfection by Antony Starr—still isn’t satisfied.
Craving what he’s craved since lab birth—unconditional love and devotion with no expectation of anything in return—he declares himself a god and uses Vought’s media machinery to convince the American public of his divinity. Guided by visions of his former boss, Madelyn Stillwell—a Mary-esque mother-figure who, before he murdered her in Season One, used to breastfeed him—he ultimately decides to kill (“cleanse”) anyone who doesn’t “in their heart of hearts” believe in his divinity.
“In This Time of Great Reflection” is a hymn that lifts up the theme of the Puritan John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity.” Winthrop talked about the Massachusetts Bay Colony as “a city on a hill,” referencing Jesus’ image from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:14. In his use of this phrase, Winthrop wasn’t giving a sermon about American exceptionalism, as some later historical figures have suggested. As historian Daniel T. Rodgers explains in As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon, Winthrop was actually delivering a warning: The eyes of the world would be on Massachusetts Bay to see if the colony would morally succeed in being loving, just, humble, good, neighborly, and kind.
This hymn is a prayer that, as we reflect on our nation’s 250th anniversary, we will strive to be a morally responsible and community-building people; that we will repent of our sins and become as loving and humble as God is calling us to be.
In All We Say, Ben Rhodes, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama, examines 15 speeches that have defined and shaped the history of the United States. If you were to read the final two speeches back-to-back, Obama’s “race speech” and President Donald Trump’s second inaugural address, you’d likely experience an emotional whiplash. The first is delivered by an acclaimed modern orator, the second by someone who tends toward bombast and offensive tangents.
IN HIS BOOK Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark, author James K.A. Smith traces his own evolution through a personal “dark night of the soul.” Marooned by depression, Smith experiences a crisis of meaning, foreign terrain for him as a philosophy professor and preacher. In the context of what Smith calls our “knowledge economy,” the discipline of philosophy encourages academics to know, define, profess, defend, and win.
Palestinian Insights
From Bethlehem, Rev. Munther Isaac hosts the Christ at the Checkpoint podcast, talking with theologians, pastors, and leaders to share Palestinian Christian perspectives on Israel, Palestine, and what American Christians misunderstand about the ongoing conflict in the region. Across the Divide
“WE MUST BE doin’ somethin’ right to last 200 years,” proclaims the opening song of Robert Altman’s 1975 magnum opus Nashville. Over a dizzying five days, a cast of dozens of characters, all of whom feel true to life, stagger to put together a concert in support of a populist third-party presidential candidate. But the film’s plot is ultimately beside the point; what matters is the spirit Altman captures.
“Do you know what humans call stupid people who can't think for themselves?” one sheep pointedly asks another in director Kyle Balda’s The Sheep Detectives.
The other sheep, a bit dim, responds: “Ducks?”
A murder mystery that casts a flock of talking sheep in the Hercule Poirot role sounds like a mildly diverting kids’ cartoon from one of Disney’s less inspired eras. And yet, my interest was piqued when I saw the script came from Craig Mazin, who’s been delivering television wonders like Chernobyl and The Last of Us. Working off Leonie Swann’s hit novel, Mazin turns this cutesy premise into a profoundly moving meditation on memory, belonging, and mortality. Throw in a game voice cast and a juicy puzzle and you’ve got Babe meets Knives Out, with all the wit, charm, and twists those comparisons invite. It’s a real contender for 2026’s biggest surprise.
Zondervan will put Alan Chambers’s book My Exodus: From Fear to Grace out of print following the news of Chambers’ arrest for solicitation of a minor.
Chambers, a leader and later renouncer of ex-gay ministry Exodus International, was arrested by the Orlando Police Department on May 19. According to case details first reported by ABC affiliate Channel 9 Orlando News, Chambers is charged with three felonies he messaged a detective posing as a 14-year-old boy. The Advocate reported that he “frequently discussed meeting up and engaging in sexual activity during that time, as well as concerns about their age difference and if he would get in trouble.”
Chambers joined Exodus International in 2001, leading the ministry until 2013 when Chambers gave a public apology for the organization’s efforts to promote sexual orientation change. He later supported bans on “conversion therapy” for minors and spoke at Pride events. In 2015, he told Religion News Service that he believed same-sex relationships could be holy.
If you grew up listening to contemporary Christian music in the mid-’90s and early-2000s, brace yourself, I am about to get a song stuck in your head.
You may recall “Testify to Love,” as a bubbly, infectious CCM hit from 1997 by the pop quartet Avalon. Originally a cheery anthem to God’s love, Ty Herndon and former Avalon singer Michael Passons have re-released the song with an added layer: LGBTQ+ affirmation.
For Passons, the re-recording of his CCM hit was a moment for the song to come full circle. The Nashville-based artist left Avalon in 2003, at the time saying it was to pursue a solo career. In 2020, he revealed to Billboard that he’d been fired by the band because he is a gay man. Passons took a long hiatus from singing but kept close friendships in the music industry. One of those friendships was with Herndon, one of the first openly gay male artists in country music. Herndon was the one who invited Passons to re-record the song. At first, Passons wasn’t sure how his voice would respond when he stepped in the booth to record.
As of this writing, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s sci-fi epic, Project Hail Mary, is the third-highest-grossing film this year. For a book adaptation that explores heady sci-fi concepts, that’s no small feat, and it’s clearly struck a chord with viewers. Before NASA’s Artemis II expedition launched, the crew watched a screening of the film.
Space films and space expeditions can both inspire a particular type of awe. I think of the striking photos by the Artemis crew during their expedition, particularly the one where we see Earth partially hidden.
DONALD TRUMP’S APPROVAL ratings are hitting all-time lows, even among white evangelicals. One month into his second term, 55% of evangelicals were “extremely or very confident Trump acts ethically in office.” One year later, that has dropped to 40%.
At long last, could evangelical Christians be coming around to the idea that the 34-count felon president might not be the Christ conduit they hoped? If you are one of those disillusioned Christians, welcome to the other side! It’s not any more fun over here (ICE watches and doomscrolling really eat into hobby time), but at least the food and music are more flavorful.
Biblical Antiracism
“The Antioch Podcast” is a weekly conversation among Christian antiracism educators working to deepen the white church’s reckoning with its long-standing expectation of assimilation.
IN THE FIRST scene of Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8, we meet a young man (Kazunari Ninomiya) headed to work on a crowded subway train. The man gets a shocking call from his ex-girlfriend. She’s pregnant, and they must decide what to do next. A dilemma emerges: Will the man go to the hospital to help his ex-girlfriend navigate their uncertain future, or will he ignore her and go to work?
THE QUESTION OF free will is best approached sideways. Rather than asking head-on whether we have agency in our lives, we should ask ourselves a more consequential question: What happens when we deviate from the life script we’ve been handed, especially when that life script is dictated by religion?
This is the question that novelist and podcaster Caro Claire Burke explores in her debut novel, Yesteryear. The story follows the rise and fall of Natalie Heller Mills, a conservative trad wife social media influencer who suddenly finds herself transported to the 1800s. Homesteading—which had mostly been an act Natalie performed for Instagram, only possible thanks to a plethora of behind-the-scenes hired help—is suddenly overwhelmingly real, isolating, and cold.
Yesteryear is an exploration of womanhood in the U.S. under capitalism and religious fundamentalism. The novel was inspired by real-life Hannah Neeleman, a Mormon influencer who abandoned her dreams of being a ballerina to start a homestead, known as Ballerina Farm, with her husband. Ballerina Farm and the larger trad wife trend of returning to traditional gender roles were scrutinized in a July 2024 profile in The Times of London, which revealed that maybe Neeleman wasn’t as free or empowered as she seemed.
“There’s no opening yourself up to the full depth of joy without also allowing yourself the possibility of destruction.”
I’m talking to folk-punk musician and performer Shaun Bengson on Zoom when he says this. He and his wife Abigail have been performing their latest musical memoir in New York. Entitled My Joy Is Heavy!, the show recalls their experience getting pregnant and then enduring a miscarriage during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, all while caring for their young son.
There’s a moment in The Drama that has stuck with me. In the midst of an existential spiral about his fiancée Emma’s (Zendaya) past, Charlie (Robert Pattinson) talks with some less-than-understanding friends and tries to somehow contextualize and produce empathy for her actions. He latches onto something he heard in passing about Emma’s childhood: that she had a neighbor who died in a car accident. The way that he retells the story, though, makes it sound as though this event was a traumatic origin story that totally reshaped her young psyche—even enough to explain her turn toward fantasies of violence later in childhood.
As Charlie retells the story, images flash on the screen imagining different versions of the event; the car crashing into a tree in a neighborhood; young Emma watching the crash firsthand; Emma grieving alone with no one to help her process it.
“Romantic” may not be the first word that comes to mind when talking about Werner Herzog—known for such charming expressions as “I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony but chaos, hostility, and murder”—yet it is, perhaps, one of the most appropriate.
The German filmmaker can be considered a romantic in both the contemporary-everyday and historical-philosophical sense. Like the poets and painters who emerged from the Sturm und Drang movement of the mid-18th century such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Henry Fuseli, he gravitates toward the fantastical, transcendent, and sublime. His films, documentaries, and books frequently center on characters who attempt to do the impossible for the sake of its impossibility, and in doing so, posit that existence is, at its core, the stuff of feeling rather than thought. After all, reason alone can’t explain why someone would hoist a steamship over a mountain, live among grizzly bears, or—as in his latest documentary, Ghost Elephants—chase a potentially nonexistent herd of proboscideans across the Angolan highlands.
With The Chosen leading the way, we seem to be entering a golden age of Bible prestige television. A recent entry is Fox’s The Faithful, a three-part miniseries that retells the ancestral narratives of Genesis with a focus on the perspectives of woman. While the series at times pushes the envelope on melodrama, it also sincerely grapples with the complexities of these biblical stories. The three-part series, which aired its final episode on Easter Sunday, offers explanations for why characters make the choices they do, but it also doesn’t gloss over the troubled relationships and flawed personalities of the biblical text.
Episode 1 begins with a meet-cute. We first encounter Sarai (renamed Sarah after a visit from God midway through the episode) and Abram in a Haran marketplace. Before they were the covenant ancestors of the Israelites, Sarai and Abram were an aspiring romantic couple, at least as viewed through the lens of The Faithful. Sarai asks about a teal shawl at a market stand and looks crestfallen when she hears the price. But after walking away, someone calls her name, and she turns around to see Abram waving the shawl at her and grinning. She wears this shawl throughout the episode and is buried with it at the conclusion.
THE MAN ON the radio said, “Set your smart speaker to NPR.” Hah. That’ll be the day.
I don’t want Jeff Bezos listening in on my home life, which I assume is how he spends his downtime, along with fantasizing about replacing human workers with robots. I might even get a smart speaker, just to taunt him. “Hey, Alexa, I’m going out shopping now. You know, buying locally. Can I pick up anything for you?” Of course, by not having one of those devices, I can’t spontaneously shout across the room, “Hey [insert name you just forgot], play some Beatles.”