Arts & Culture

The Editors 12-09-2021

Travis Lupick's Light Up the Night and Katie Pruitt's new podcast, The Recovering Catholic

Rediscovering God

Katie Pruitt’s debut album, Expectations, explored growing up gay and Catholic in the American South. On her new podcast series, The Recovering Catholic, she speaks with comedians, religious leaders, and other artists about how they see God and what spirituality means today. Osiris Media.

Da’Shawn Mosley 12-09-2021
A woman stands in a kitchen with objects piled all over a table and along the walls

From Hoarders

SOME TV SHOWS are as great as our greatest literature. Programs such as The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad are Dickensian in their sprawl and Shakespearean in their tragic characters’ deceptions. But one show in this current Golden Age of television is the most oft-overlooked of its peers, one whose greater feat—or unfairness to screenwriters—is that it’s not scripted. I’m talking about A&E’s reality show Hoarders.

I’m not kidding. What often draws people to watch those suffering from hoarding disorder and the psychologists, professional organizers, and loved ones trying to help them overcome mental illness is the typical reality TV magnet: Seeing the life of someone worse off than you. But there’s more to Hoarders than that. A good episode is nothing less than a short story similar to those by Alice Munro, vivid in its deep analysis of real life, family dynamics, and psyches in danger and repair. Almost every night for the past month, watching has been like studying fiction writing in some of the best (and cheapest) creative writing courses I’ve ever taken.

Robert Hirschfield 12-09-2021
Lawrence Joseph gestures with his hand as he looks off camera

Lawrence Joseph during an interview in 2002 / Chester Higgins Jr. / The New York Times

HISTORY HAS PAID personal attention to Lawrence Joseph, a Maronite Catholic from Detroit. In 1967, when Joseph was 19 and just finished with his freshman year at the University of Michigan, his father’s grocery-liquor store was looted and burned during the Detroit Rebellion. The five-day uprising of Black people reacting in part to police abuse and brutality and its fierce suppression by law enforcement and the National Guard made him “acutely conscious of America’s deeply systemic violence.”

Joseph, a poet who was also a lawyer who taught at St. John’s University in Queens, N.Y., and at Princeton, was living a block from the World Trade Center in 2001 when the two planes attacked. He and his wife had to evacuate their apartment. It was weeks before they could return. In the title poem of his 2017 volume So Where Are We?, Joseph writes:

flailing bodies in midair
the neighborhood under thick gray powder—
on every screen. I don’t know
where you are, I don’t know what
I’m going to do, I heard a man say;
the man who had spoken was myself.

A Black woman leans to speak to a masked Black child amid a sea of small, white flags

A mother and son visit In America: Remember on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. / Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images

Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg, creator of In America: Remember,” is a social practice artist in the Washington, D.C., area. She spoke with Sojourners' Jenna Barnett.

“[‘IN AMERICA: REMEMBER’] was a vast field of flags: one for each person who died from COVID-19. The installation began [in mid-September] when there were 666,624 deaths. Each day, I changed the number on the large sign. When the installation closed [in early October], there were 701,133 deaths.

People came thousands of miles to write words on 5-by-4-inch poly film attached to a steel stem. Each time somebody dedicated a flag, they were my co-artists. To have the privilege of watching strangers console strangers—that was the magic of the place. It was important to us to make sure that people had equal access to this art. Many people who had suffered losses could not afford the time or the expense of coming. So, we announced that the art was coming two months in advance so that people could plan. And we made sure that people could dedicate flags through our website.

Jenna Barnett 11-16-2021

In the metaverse, you don’t just curate your surroundings — you also curate your own avatar. One of Zuckerberg’s poker pals, for instance, arrived at the virtual party as a robot wearing a baseball cap.

Jenna Barnett 11-16-2021

Photo by Andrew Johnson on Unsplash

Loving him is like
floating the Euphrates toward a dead-end stream:
faster than the wind, passionate as sin,
winding so serpently.

Mitchell Atencio 11-12-2021

By Gabriella Clare Marino via unsplash.com.

I know enough to know what I don’t know.

Betsy Shirley 11-05-2021

The stories we're reading this week offer a binary-rejecting spin on a classic riddle.

Josiah R. Daniels 10-29-2021

Writer and actor B.J. Novak in 2012 | photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Have you ever noticed how certain things seem to have a life of their own? Let me explain: From time to time, a piece of art, a song, a book, or even a face unexpectedly receives universal approval and then there seems to be no end to how it can be referenced, advertised, TikToked, or memed.

Rebecca Riley 10-27-2021

In a scene from Colin in Black & White, Colin Kaepernick watches actor Jaden Michael play a teenaged Kaepernick. Image courtesy of Netflix.

The six-episode series available to stream on Oct. 29 is the co-creation of Kaepernick and celebrated director Ava DuVernay (Selma, 13th, When They See Us). The series tells the story of Kaepernick’s teen years, when he grew both as an athlete and an individual. Kaepernick must repeatedly decide if he’s going to be true to himself or to who others want him to be, whether it’s how he wears his hair or what sort of future he pursues. It’s a relatable coming-of-age story, but the racial dynamics that Kaepernick confronts make for a more complicated high school narrative.

Josiah R. Daniels 10-22-2021

I’ve never been a fan of Halloween. I’ve always been more of an All Saints’ Day kinda guy. Just joking; truth is I try to resist the impulse to constantly make distinctions between “the world” and “the church.” The lines between sacred and profane, monster and human, are not easily distinguishable.

Caroline McTeer 10-20-2021

‘The Vale of Rest’ by Sir John Everett Millais, Bt. Oil paint on canvas, 1858-1859. Photo via Tate / CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported)

In Lauren Groff’s newest novel, Matrix, monastic life in the High Middle Ages serves as a stunning backdrop for the story of Marie, a nun who feels “her greatness hot in her blood.” Marie arrives at an English abbey as a reluctant teenager, at the appointment of her queen, Eleanor, who expects Marie to become abbess and save the Crown from the public shame of a royal abbey where nuns die of starvation and disease.

D.S. Martin 11-05-2021
Illustration of the silhouette of a bird in the night sky with its wing surrounding the moon

Illustration by Colleen Tighe

Each word I choose
carries a different rucksack load        for each of you
like I’m the fox        slinking along rail lines
        thinking by instinct & appetite        & you’re
        the commuter passing through
like I’m the moon whose same beams call
        to a weeping child        to a prowling owl
        to shivering rodents in the grass

Myles Werntz 11-05-2021

How to Have an Enemy: Righteous Anger and the Work of Peace, by Melissa Florer-Bixler. Herald Press

THE WORK OF peacemaking has been long beset by the stereotypes of it being “nice” work, polite to the point of being inoffensive. In her new book, Melissa Florer-Bixler wants to disabuse us of the idea that making peace means having no enemies. If anything, as she argues, Christians should have enemies well. Having enemies does not mean that the Christian who pursues justice incurs the resentment of others, but that their witness is direct, pointed, and takes sides.

The church, she writes, is “not to unify as a way to negate difference or to overcome political commitments,” but to sharpen those disagreements between the gospel and the world, particularly where reconciliation conceals power inequities. It does no one any favors, she suggests, to resolve moral disagreements within the church in a way that “disregards how coercion and force shape the lives of enemies.”

Ryan Stewart 11-05-2021

How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, by Clint Smith. Little, Brown and Company

THE STATUE OF Liberty, author Clint Smith tells us, was supposed to celebrate the abolition of slavery. Early models depicted the iconic copper lady holding a raised torch in one hand and a pair of broken shackles in the other, but the final version included only a piece of broken chain at the lady’s feet. With slavery shifted to the periphery, Ellis Island’s visitors could imagine liberty was, and is, possible without abolition.

In How the Word Is Passed, Smith visits multiple historic sites to offer a mosaic portrait of how different places tell, or do not tell, the truth about slavery. The book meditates on the capacity of our collective symbolic infrastructure to prepare us to rectify persistent material inequalities. If we frame slavery as something that “happened a long time ago” or leave unchallenged the warping of the Confederate commitment to enslavement into myths of honor and heritage—if, in a word, we misremember the wound—then we will not summon the will nor the proper know-how to heal it.

Faith-Marie Zamblé 11-05-2021
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stands with her back to the camera, displaying a ball gown that says "Tax the Rich."

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attends the Met Gala 2021 / Kevin Mazur / Getty Images for the Met museum / Vogue

THE MET GALA is fascinating. Part chaos and part fundraiser, the Gala has created a treasure trove of cultural touchstones and meme-worthy content over the past few years. Created in the 1940s to benefit the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, the Gala is, at its core, a paean to the sartorial arts. In many ways, it’s the gift that keeps on giving, especially if you, like me, are not opposed to a lot of pomp and very little circumstance. However, in the thick of my 2 a.m. behind-the-scenes-at-the-Met video binge, a thought occurred to me that I’ve been turning over ever since: America may not have bread, but it sure has circuses.

The Editors 11-05-2021
A black and white photo of two women wearing 1920s era outfits and carrying flowers

From Passing / Picture Films

Shifting Identity

Adapted from Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing explores a Harlem Renaissance-era relationship between two reunited childhood friends, one of whom now passes as white while the other lives as a Black woman. The black-and-white film, which debuted at Sundance, moved to Netflix on Nov. 10. Picture Films.

Abby Olcese 11-05-2021
Two similar-looking small girls carry a raft together through a woody path

From Petite Maman

OVER THE LAST year we’ve had to reconsider our definition of what makes a “sacred space.” When churches and temples closed due to the pandemic, our homes became places of worship for many of us.

This cemented what’s always been true: Sacred space is a fluid thing. It can be a place of deep personal meaning or shared memories with people we care about. A sacred space doesn’t even need to be a physical location. It could also be the spiritual space created whenever we’re with those we love or remember people we’ve lost.

Céline Sciamma’s tender film Petite Maman speaks to this. A little girl, Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) and her mother, Marion (Nina Meurisse), grieve the death of Marion’s mother and clean out Marion’s childhood home. Sciamma’s movie becomes a meditation on everyday sacred spaces, including those that can exist within mother-daughter relationships.

Andrea M. Couture 11-05-2021
Jumaane Williams walks in front of a group of masked Black people crossing the Brooklyn Bridge

Jumaane Williams (center) leads a silent March for Black Lives across the Brooklyn Bridge in June 2020 / Shutterstock / Kevin RC Wilson

AS NEW YORK CITY'S elected public advocate since 2019, Brooklyn native Jumaane Williams is the ombudsman for more than 8 million people in all five boroughs, charged with overseeing city agencies and investigating citizen complaints. And, starting in 2016, when he was a member of the New York City Council, he has performed in more than 40 staged readings of plays, most of them classical tragedies, with Theater of War Productions.

Starting in 2009 with a performance of scenes from “Ajax” and “Philoctetes” by Sophocles that highlighted the issue of military PTSD, Theater of War Productions has presented dramatic readings of classical Greek tragedies and other plays followed by guided discussions linking their themes to contemporary social issues. It now has a repertory of more than 20 works addressing a wide range of complex social issues—from racism to refugees, gun violence to sexual assault, frontline medical worker mental health to criminal justice, and more. Essential to the experience are post-performance discussions in which audiences engage with the play’s themes, creating cathartic release and deepening understanding. During the pandemic, Theater of War has gone online, reaching a vast international audience.

George Gavriel poses for a portrait after an interview with Reuters in his home studio in Kokkinotrimithia, Cyprus, September 22, 2021. REUTERS/Yiannis Kourtoglou

Cypriot artist George Gavriel almost lost his job as a high school headmaster after his works depicting Jesus in unconventional settings and also taking a swipe at politicians drew the wrath of religious and government leaders.

Gavriel, 62, uses his art as a protest medium to take aim at what he considers the ills of society.