Arts & Culture
I mispronounce my body as if
the architecture of the spine
were soft, as if this poem could
start here,
in the space between open lips,
even though it resists a title.
To be means to exist
with a name. To be means
to have a body worth defining.
I HEARD HIM loud and clear and ran as quickly as my little legs could carry me through their field, across the street, and up my driveway, straight into my house, where I hid in my room. I was seven. The very next day at school, my friend said nothing of the encounter between her dad and me. She never spoke of it, and neither did I. I, as a young brown girl, was inferior, and that white man, forty years my senior, with his shiny black gun, was superior. I would not be convinced otherwise.
After I graduated from high school, my understanding of a woman’s place in the world expanded as my grip to justice tightened, but I still held to this conscious, and subconscious, belief that if I held even a shred of power, it was because someone with privilege (in my case, white male privilege) had given it to me. Many of my pastors, bosses, teachers, and mentors, to their credit, were outrageously gracious, kind, and generous. To them I owe so much. They believed in women, married strong women, and gave me opportunities I would have never had otherwise; however, they still remained in charge of women. Many of them treated that power with the utmost respect; others abused it beyond what I could have ever imagined.
WHEN I WAS in divinity school, we had cliques. And what often separated these cliques, these little theological gaggles, if you will, was what each prized as the decisive foundation of Christian faith. For some it was scripture; for others, orthodox or anti-orthodox tradition; for still others, charismatic revelation, or the experience of the marginalized, or some cocktail of all the aforementioned. Sometimes we said Christ united us, but then we’d wonder, with charity or suspicion, “Who is ‘Christ’ to them?” Isolated on our little islands of perpetual disagreement, we nonetheless seemed secure.
In After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging, Willie James Jennings has written a love letter to theological institutions, warning against the pursuit of such security. Our knowledge of ourselves, our God, and our world comes to us creatures only in fragments, he writes, and it is in those fragments that we must always work together. Jennings weaves story and poetry to expose how the allure of “white self-sufficient masculinity” has tempted Western educational institutions, especially theological ones, to use knowledge and people to establish control in the face of fragments. Theological education may initially crack the foundations of budding ministers, but it often aims to form self-confident possessors of particular truths. This vision proceeds from whiteness, what Jennings calls “a way of being in the world that aspires to exhibit possession, mastery, and control of knowledge first, and of one’s self second, and if possible of one’s world.” Such whiteness “strangles,” he writes, “the possibilities of dense life together” for Christians.
DENNIS C. DICKERSON brings two competencies to the writing of this history. One is secular: He is a historian at Vanderbilt University, specializing in African American religious history, labor history, and the U.S. civil rights movement. The other is sacred: He is a retired general officer of the AME Church. In that capacity, he had access to the church’s extensive archives and served in the church’s leadership councils in Nashville, Tenn. With these gifts, Dickerson captures via superb research how the AME Church became a major social and denominational force in the construction of the African American religious experience — a narrative that includes the community’s enduring struggles for racial freedom, equality, and uplift. Dickerson writes:
The AME Church, located throughout its history within the Atlantic World, faced the forces of subjugation, which fixed the status of its large colored constituencies. Though AME ministers and members were themselves vulnerable peoples, they focused on the dual tasks of developing and maintaining an independent religious body and confronting powerful national, political, and economic structures aimed at black subordination. While institutional governance was itself a liberation activity, it competed and, at times, undermined equally important efforts to defeat oppressive systems of slavery, segregation, colonialism, and apartheid. The history of the AME Church is a narrative about these tensions.
IN AUGUST 2019, The New York Times published a special edition of its magazine, with an accompanying podcast, to note the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans in the Virginia colony. They called the total work “The 1619 Project.” As a Times blurb for the project put it, “American slavery began 400 years ago this month. This is referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s true origin.”
Almost a year later, “The 1619 Project” became a school history curriculum, and in the waning days of his presidential administration Donald Trump pushed back with plans for a “1776 Commission” to promote “patriotic education” and counter the claim that “America is a wicked and racist nation.”
It’s not surprising that a nation in which everyone has a right to their own facts may end up with two foundings. However, while those who emphasize the centrality of African enslavement in the American story are certainly closer to the truth, both the champions of 1619 and 1776 are missing something crucial. For all the things it got right, “The 1619 Project” over-simplified the origins of the U.S. slave system. As the eminent African American historian Nell Irvin Painter wrote in The Guardian, “People were not enslaved in Virginia in 1619, they were indentured. The [first] Africans were sold and bought as ‘servants’ for a term of years, and they joined a population consisting largely of European indentured servants, mainly poor people from the British Isles.”
Love, Home, and Longing
Named after the hardy Korean herb, Minari follows a multigenerational Korean American family as they relocate to rural Arkansas to pursue the elusive “American Dream.” Lee Isaac Chung’s film is a stunning, visceral portrayal of creating roots of one’s own. A24 Films.
Called to Ministry
In Out in the Pulpit: The Lived Experiences of Lesbian Clergy in Four Protestant Mainline Denominations, Pamela Pater-Ennis uses theological and social work frameworks to highlight lesbian clergy, following 13 women as they reconcile their Christianity, gender, and sexuality. LifeRich Publishing.
A GENUINE HEART can overcome many a fault in the television landscape. I don’t just mean from a plot perspective, in which a character’s good nature helps them exit a situation their good nature got them into in the first place. But also from the perspective of capturing viewers’ attention—protagonists whose warmth we feel through the screen in a way that makes us forget a show’s turnoffs: occasional weak jokes, predictable storytelling, trite dialogue—all of which the Netflix show Gentefied contains.
And yet Gentefied, a half-hour comedy with a title that plays on the words gente (Spanish for “people”) and gentrified, has quickly become a favorite. The Mexican American Morales family at its center are hilarious and relatable. Casimiro (or “Pop,” as his grandkids call him), owner of a taco restaurant in LA’s Boyle Heights neighborhood, struggles to keep his establishment open as he falls further behind on its rent and gentrification makes the neighborhood less and less familiar. Meanwhile, Casimiro’s granddaughter Ana seeks to become a successful artist; grandson Chris, a trained-in-Paris chef; and other-grandson Erik, a dependable dad. Haunting their family home are Chris’ financially stable yet estranged dad and memories of Pop’s late wife. In these tough situations full of grief (Donald Trump’s xenophobic presidency does not help), Gentefied’s creators Linda Yvette Chávez and Marvin Lemus highlight the humor and love of the Morales family journey.
AS THIS PANDEMIC rages on and people are isolated in their homes with their intimate partners, many are more vulnerable than ever to violence. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 1 in 4 women and nearly 1 in 10 men experience sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime. In addition, an average of 24 people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in the United States—more than 12 million women and men during a single year.
Odyssey Impact, an interfaith nonprofit that addresses social issues through storytelling and media, hopes to change this with a four-part Healing the Healers video series, directed by Kirsten Kelly, that features interfaith peer-to-peer conversations about domestic violence. It is scheduled for a January 2021 release on healingthehealers.org.
This is the second series under the Healing the Healers name. The first was a five-part video series that grew out of a pastor’s efforts in Newtown, Conn., to deal with the aftereffects of the Sandy Hook school massacre; it includes conversations with clergy, social workers, and first responders who have been on the front lines as different communities have dealt with traumatic events. The second Healing the Healers series on domestic violence likewise addresses a crisis by modeling honest conversation about a difficult topic across faith lines.
Artist Makoto Fujimura uses materials and techniques from nihonga, a Japanese style of painting. The pigments are pulverized minerals and precious metals applied in multiple layers, in what he describes as “a slow process that fights against efficiency.” Prayer and contemplation are woven into the work. The tiny mineral particles refract light, often creating subtle prismatic effects. It is a style of art made for the type of long, unforced gaze that slowly reveals evermore depth. Deceptively simple and quietly extravagant.
Fujimura’s thoughts on art, theology, and culture are, like his paintings, many-layered and refractive, celebrating God as love, beauty, and mercy while also contending with pain and desolation. He is a mystic as well as a painter, and in his latest book, Art and Faith: A Theology of Making, he speaks out of his spiritual and his artistic practice.
But Fujimura also builds on three decades of reaching far outside his studio to evangelize on the necessity of art for human thriving and the call to shift from fighting over culture to caring for and nurturing it. He founded the International Arts Movement in 1992, which facilitates connections and communication between groups seeking to creatively and positively impact the culture, whether they are from the arts, music, business, education, or social change organizations.
Lori Greene is a mosaic artist living in Minnesota. She spoke to Sojourners' Jenna Barnett about creating the first permanent memorial to sexual violence survivors in the United States.
“WHEN SARAH Super asked if I would help create a memorial to survivors of rape and sexual assault, I said ‘yes’ immediately. I’m also a survivor, so it was a no-brainer. Burying pain will not help us recover.
The memorial [in Minneapolis] is painful, but it’s not just pain. I call the first [of the five] panels ‘Sorrow.’ A person in red is curled up in the snow. It’s dark; there are trees everywhere. In panel two are two figures: the same figure, who is clearly crying, and a purple figure holding them. There’s a little sunrise on the horizon. We have a memorial to Holocaust victims. We have the new lynching memorial. And these things are making a difference.
WHEN THE CHAOS gets too much, I listen to jazz. I’m not an aficionado. I just know that brave jazz refreshes my freedom. Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of jazz.
The stay of execution offered by a COVID-19 vaccine allows for a giddy, perilous optimism. Even a minute crack in our coronavirus armor brings up emotions too dangerous, too chaotic to express: A trembling wave of the suffering we have endured, heavy across the shoulders like the splintery weight of the cross.
For ballast against overwhelming rage, I turn to The Five Quintets by poet Micheal O’Siadhail: “Be with me Madam Jazz I urge you now, / Riff in me so I can conjure how / You breathe in us more than we dare allow.”
Pixar’s latest film Soul, opens to the sound of a Queens, New York, middle school’s band class, led by Joe Gardner, a middle-aged, aspiring jazz musician. As someone who played the trumpet in my Queens middle school’s band, the discordant, yet earnest attempt at music immediately transported me back to Mr. Stier’s classroom in I.S. 109, circa 1992. Just as in Joe’s class, the walls of Mr. Stier’s room were covered with jazz posters; he wore a ponytail and, by my memory, he also had an earring.
Reading was the safest way to travel this year — sometimes to another decade and another brand of violence, sometimes to a different continent or a different galaxy altogether. Below are Sojourners' editors' favorite books of the year. Most of these books came out years ago, but by reading them through the lens of 2020, we found new wisdom, escape, resonance, and hope.
While Godmothered and its fairy are far from cinematic perfection, by the time the credits roll, Eleanor and Mackenzie have helped each other step more fully into who they both truly were meant to be. In this way, their relationship — minus the wand, the fairy dust, and any promise of true-love-happily-ever-afterness — more realistically resembles actual godparenting.
When I sat down to watch Netflix’s film adaptation of August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, I was hoping to be uplifted by the Black excellence I was sure to find in a film helmed by Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman. I was ready to exhale and escape. But while the anticipated excellence exceeded my high expectations, it didn’t take me long to realize that the uplift I’d hoped for would not be found in this story: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a tragedy.
The scripture-inspired title of Obama’s latest book comes from the idea that a better America ― one that lives more fully into its democractic promise ― is still possible. “[E]ven if we experience hardships and disappointments along the way, that I at least still have faith we can create a more perfect union. Not a perfect union, but a more perfect union,” Obama told CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley in a Nov. 16 interview.
I rub my hand across the stone font
Where Jon Meacham took on the water
Of baptism and signed on to the cross
In an olive oil signature made for words.
The empty sanctuary now quiet for prayer echoes
With last night’s lecture on the future of democracy.
Light pours through the stained glass window
With a narrative of Saul, struck down blind
Tom Sine has served as a futures innovation consultant for various denominations and organizations and Dwight J. Friesen is associate professor of practical theology at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. They spoke with Sojourners associate editor Da’Shawn Mosley about their book 2020s Foresight.
Sojourners: What motivated you to write this book?
Tom Sine: Essentially, a desire to write a more compelling book on the changes we’re facing in this pandemic and recession. Churches rarely do forecasting. As a consequence, they’re not ready for the next crunch. They care about their people, but they’re not thinking, “What’s going to happen to them as the recession gets worse?”
Dwight J. Friesen: Our book intends to say, “Listen, we don’t have to be passive bystanders to whatever the new normal’s going to be.” We can be proactive.
AS A LATINA, I waited with eager anticipation for the publication of Robert Chao Romero’s Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity . As a historian, Romero is the best person to take us through the history of the Latin American church, and he tells it truly, not wishing to shield the reader from the horrors of colonization. He begins with the exploitation and conversion “by the sword” that began under the rule of the Spanish conquistadores, who brought to the Americas their Roman Catholic faith—along with their hunger for gold and other resources. Early Catholic missionaries such as Friar Antonio de Montesinos and Bartolomé de las Casas sought to divorce the faith from the Spanish colonial project and condemned the latter with courage and fervor.
It is worthwhile to note that Romero brings his readers all the way to the present, introducing them to living Latinx theologians and their work. For many readers, his chapter on “Recent Social Justice Theologies of U.S. Latinas/os” will be a great resource for delving deeper into the works of living Latinx scholars and practical theologians. While the book heavily features male scholars and theologians, it was heartening to see this section highlight Mujerista theology and the work of Latinas doing theology—women such as Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, Sandra Maria Van Opstal, Noemi Vega Quiñones, and Zaida Maldonado Pérez.
2020 WAS A YEAR of ecological breakdown. Simultaneous climate disasters have roared, including the worst wildfire season in the history of California and, as I write this, the most active hurricane season on record in the Atlantic. Meanwhile, freak wind storms called derechos plagued the Midwest and heatwaves baked the Southwest. In the midst of such devastation, it can seem downright irresponsible to search for hope. Yet, the paradoxical call of the cross is that, in the deepest darkness, joyful and beautiful transformation might be possible.
In The Green Good News, T. Wilson Dickinson does not settle for platitudes of hope. He does not affirm, as is so tempting for Christians, that all will be fine because of faith in God. Instead, Dickinson finds good news in the possibility of a beautiful and joyful set of responses to ecological breakdown. With humble writing grounded in stories of his own life, Dickinson offers a reading of scripture that does not separate the liberation of creation from the liberation of the poor but follows the vision of Jesus, in whom all creation—human and more-than-human—holds together. In a refreshing move, The Green Good News sheds the romanticism of creation care in favor of a biblically based environmental justice from the margins. Dickinson unequivocally offers a call to conversion from neoliberalism to solidarity with all oppressed creatures. This ecological conversion takes place at the heart of the Christian witness: the table.