Arts & Culture
Two queer pastors, Anna Blaedel and M Jade Kaiser, were having dinner together in 2017, when they posed a question to each other in the spirit of meaningful fun: What would it be like if they could create a public space for conversations about and liturgical resources for transformation, at the outer margins of Christianity and beyond?
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power returned for its second season, bringing viewers back to a sprawling story inspired by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.
In her forthcoming book, Films for All Seasons: Experiencing the Church Year at the Movies, Abby Olcese guides the church through the liturgical season via spiritual reflection on movies. Rather than tell readers how a movie is to be interpreted, Olcese guides participants on watching, considering, and discussing 27 films, each aligned with the liturgical calendar.
Loosely inspired by the experiences of Latoya Ammons in Gary, Ind., Netflix’s The Deliverance follows single mother Ebony Jackson as she battles demons, her past, and systems entrenched with racism and sexism — all to save her family.
Tia Levings made a decision for herself and her children on October 28, 2007. With the help of a priest, she planned for an escape from her abusive husband. “I heard a voice say, ‘RUN,’” she writes in her memoir, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy.
THE VEGETABLES ARE trying to kill me. I am drowning in vegetables. I clock out of my home office, and there are the vegetables. I take weekend trips, come home, and there are the vegetables. I can’t sleep, because deep in the corners of my mind, the vegetables are there — slowly rotting, mocking me, blaming me for their inevitable demise.
This is not a horror movie. This is a CSA subscription.
Short for “community-supported agriculture,” CSAs provide subscribers a selection of farm-fresh seasonal produce every week. They are a sustainable and often cost-effective way to eat local and give back to your community. They are also a terrific way to spend hours chopping vegetables and Googling “kohlrabi.”
In the pre-pandemic years, I, a black-and-white-moral-thinking-trying-to-do-right no-matter-the-cost twentysomething, signed up for a CSA every spring. Rarely have I experienced more anxiety, more rage, and more helplessness than when faced with a brand-new “single-sized” (but still enormous) bag of produce while most of the previous week’s veggies remained untouched and rapidly softening. Yet I, ever the Good Consumer, stressed myself silly over produce season after season, because what choice did I have? I couldn’t destroy the planet.
IN SOME WAYS it’s hard to appreciate today the significance of Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Much of what he wrote that was then viewed as heresy by the Catholic Jesuit Order — that the story of Adam and Eve is not scientific fact; that God’s creative work did not end with Genesis, but rather continues through evolution; that the entire material universe is at its core spiritual and grace-filled — are ideas that are now widely accepted within the church. In fact, Teilhard’s thoughts on the sacramentality of the world lie unabashedly at the heart of much of what Pope Francis has said about the environment.
The new PBS documentary Teilhard: Visionary Scientist paints a masterful and unexpectedly emotional portrait of this French priest who spent his life suffering for his love of the church and the world. Beginning with his youth and drawing frequently on his own words, Visionary Scientist walks with Teilhard as he is dazzled by the wonders of nature around his family’s home in Auvergne, then follows him into the Jesuits, where he’s taught that a religious vocation requires one to shun the world, to view it with contempt.
LYDIA WYLIE-KELLERMANN HAS a large cemetery in her backyard. There lie “weeds and tulips and a few homemade tombstones ... beloved fish, brutally attacked chickens, stray cats, and two beloved rabbits.” In this cemetery, her two preteen sons, Isaac and Cedar, and wife Erinn Fahey host a lot of funerals. Why? Living during climate collapse means we must face death with dignity.
Approaching mortality with gentleness is just one of many lessons woven throughout This Sweet Earth: Walking with Our Children in the Age of Climate Collapse. Reading the book feels like listening to stories shared by a friend over a glass of sweet tea.
This Sweet Earth is filled with narratives from Wylie-Kellermann’s life as an activist, parent, and watershed-dweller. Every chapter is benedicted by corresponding prayers and blessings, which affirm that Wylie-Kellermann was brought up on a diet of poetry and anti-nuclear pamphlets. Former editor of Geez magazine and daughter of protest prophet Bill Wylie-Kellermann and organizer and writer Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann, Lydia chooses words with precision, power, and a bit of whimsy.
IN 2015, I visited two plantations in rural Louisiana to write a college paper on white supremacy. One, Whitney Plantation, centered the experiences of enslaved people by sharing “firsthand accounts” and including statues of and memorials to them. The other, Oak Alley Plantation, romanticized the Antebellum South. Filled with indignation, I could not fathom how tourists at Oak Alley drank mint juleps where brutality, violence, and terror once reigned. Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed, studies sites of racialized violence in the U.S. to help form a more accurate American “public memory.” We need Smith’s poetic-sociological vision to help us tell the true, humanizing stories of our — often ugly — history.
During my visit, Oak Alley sold copies of Little Black Sambo by Scottish author-illustrator Helen Bannerman in its gift shop (the shop no longer sells this title). A racist children’s book about a family that is widely understood to be Tamil, the 1899 children’s book portrays dark-skinned Indian people through heavy “pickaninny” caricature. In the book Racial Innocence historian Robin Bernstein explains, “The pickaninny was an imagined, subhuman black juvenile who was typically depicted outdoors, merrily accepting (or even inviting) violence.” The dangerous trope desensitizes us to violence against Black and brown children, evidenced throughout history from slavery to police brutality. My family is part Tamil, and I nearly choked when I saw this “artifact” of dehumanization dressed up as nostalgia.
Our Muslim Neighbors
In an era defined by ideological silos, it’s as important as ever to understand our neighbors. The podcast Me & My Muslim Friends invites listeners to do just that, with host Yasmin Bendaas leading thoughtful conversations about the broad spectrum of American Muslim experiences. WUNC
IT'S HARD TO understand what motivates Owen, in part because he is almost always alone. The lead in I Saw the TV Glow (played by Ian Foreman and later Justice Smith) is near-always inert, save for when it comes to his favorite television show: The Pink Opaque.
When the lonely seventh grader discovers that a disaffected girl two grades older than him, Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), also stays up late to watch the monster of the week show, he sneaks out to watch it with her. It is one of the most radical acts he takes.
Set in an anonymous suburb in 1996, the two gather every Friday to watch the show, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twin Peaks composite about supernaturally empowered teens who defend their suburban county against the evil Mr. Melancholy. Together they fall into the show’s immersive lore to escape their own hardships — an abusive stepfather, a chronically ill mother. As Maddy explains, the show “feels more real than real life.”
WE STOOD AT the base of a sticky, bright mountain, a 50-foot-high altar of hay and clay and thousands of gallons of paint proclaiming “GOD IS LOVE” in chunky letters. We shaded our faces from the hazy-sizzling sky to see the white cross at the very top, blue stripes streaming down the sides, a parade of happy flowers at the base. “Say Jesus I’m a sinner please come upon my body and into my heart” is written into a giant cherry-red heart.
My friends and I were 19 years old and seeing Salvation Mountain, the folk-art stronghold, for the first time. We learned about Salvation Mountain the way most people do these days: through friends on Instagram. We drove three hours east from San Diego to Niland, a tiny census designated place in Southern California’s Imperial Valley, a desert landscape of sagebrush, sand, and brassy wind. Salvation Mountain’s artist, Leonard Knight, began building the mountain in 1984 and maintained it every day until his health began to fail in 2011. He died in 2014.
The prayer in the big red heart was what Knight prayed on the day he experienced a born-again moment and heard God call him to build a mountain proclaiming universal love to the world. When we visited, he’d been dead for a few years, and the mountain was getting cracked and worn, the paint tearing up in chunks. Knight built other structures next to the mountain, including a shaded “forest” of what he called “car tire trees”: stacks of tires for trunks and crisscrossed poles for branches, mixed with adobe and straw and painted bright colors. We quietly moved among them. “God is love” appeared again and again on the crevices and lumps, like a psalm. I felt it in my chest, that ache it takes to devote all of one’s creativity and being to God.
THE DRIVER [WHO killed a counter-demonstrator] at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was from Ohio. I kept thinking “This is the picture people are going to have of people from my area.” I offered to do 10 racist [tattoo] cover-ups for free. We had a large outpouring, and we haven’t stopped. We’ve done hundreds in the past six years.
All kinds of people have approached us: reformed prison inmates, Aryan Brotherhood — dudes and women alike — who got prison racial gang tattoos, almost as a means of survival, and now they’re out; ex-Klan members, ex-white nationalists, and militia party members; people with human trafficking tattoos [or] self-harm scars.
In the queer, young adult novel She Drives Me Crazy, author Kelly Quindlen employs a couple of my favorite romance tropes: A fake-dating scenario and an enemies-to-lovers story arc. But when I first read the novel a few years back, I was also delighted by all the plotlines and character traits I’d never encountered in a sapphic YA romance: The two main characters — high schoolers Scottie (star of the girls’ basketball team) and Irene (captain of the cheerleading squad) — are both Catholic, and, most significantly, their Catholicism is not in conflict with their sexuality. Both Scottie and Irene’s parents are affirming; their queerness is a nonissue for their families and their church.
“To me being Christian means f---ing s--- up,” Layshia Clarendon told ESPN’s Katie Barnes. “That’s what Jesus came to do. It means disrupting and fighting for the most marginalized people.” During the 2020 WNBA season, they helped lead players in protesting police violence against Breonna Taylor and other Black women. Clarendon helped launch the WNBA’s Social Justice Council, alongside players like Sydney Colson, Breanna Stewart, Tierra Ruffin-Pratt, A’ja Wilson, and Satou Sabally. Clarendon signed on to the Athletes for Ceasefire in Gaza, and they launched a foundation to provide grants that help transgender people access health care and other services.
As a dedicated sports fan, I am extremely excited to watch this year’s lineup of the 2024 Summer Olympics, starting in Paris on Friday, July 26. The U.S. women’s basketball team is competing for their 8th consecutive gold medal; Simone Biles may just win it all — again; and though I know nothing of the sport, I am always excited to catch a fencing bout. However, as a Christian, I am also paying close attention to the ways in which religion is being utilized — for good and for bad — at this year’s Olympic Games.
In recent years, the work of librarians has been sucked into the center of the “culture wars” as fascist and authoritarian movements in the U.S. attempt to censor materials, especially about queerness and racial justice. Meanwhile, justice movements have recognized how libraries are a shining example of public-funded community goods.
I MISSED SEVERAL church services growing up, but I rarely missed quarterly potluck Sundays. As Jesus modeled through his ministry and miracles, free food is an essential motivator. But alas, not all free food is created equal. So here is my definitive ranking of church potluck staples — the good, the bad, and the divisive. Because this is a Christian ranking, we’ll go in ascending order: The first shall be last.
7. Lemon Sugar Water
Don’t trust an aluminum container labeled “lemonade,” especially if it’s beside the dispenser of “coffee,” aka “coffee-flavored water” (I said what I said). The deacons thought two packets of Country Time Lemonade mix could multiply for the masses, but it is a diluted miracle, at best.
6. Stone Soup
I loved the parable the first time Pastor Jerry shared it during the children’s sermon: A stranger comes to town with an empty pot, throws in some stones, and stirs it with such prolonged passion that neighbors begin showing up, adding carrots, potatoes, and more until the soup is big enough to feed the whole town. A good lesson on how to trick strangers into being hospitable. But you can’t keep bringing a vat of stones to the potluck, Jerry. It’s a choking hazard, and the rocks look suspiciously like our parking lot gravel.