Arts & Culture
IVP Books
“O LORD, HOW long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen?” (Habakkuk 1:2). Ruth Everhart opens her heart-wrenching new book, The #MeToo Reckoning, with this lamentation. In a nation where, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than one in three women are sexually assaulted in their lifetime, lamentation and tears seem a fitting place to start. But Everhart reminds us that to lament is not merely to cry out in anguish. To lament is also to bring pain to light, to air wrongs suffered, and, in the same impassioned breath, to call for justice.
It is this more fulsome form of lamentation that frames Everhart’s book and undergirds her prophetic pronouncement against churches, calling on them to become braver and safer spaces, spaces more protective of the vulnerable, more supportive of victims and survivors, and more committed to seeking justice on their behalf.
Throughout The #MeToo Reckoning, Everhart, a Presbyterian pastor, recounts the incidents of sexual assault that she and others suffered and survived. From being raped inside a church to being assaulted by an elder on an overnight youth trip, these stories make for difficult reading. But they are important reading. Until we face the reality and extent of sexual assault, we will neither be able to properly support its victims nor bring this predatory behavior to an end.
Lookout Books
IS THERE A difference between being committed to one’s faith and being obsessed with it? This question is indirectly posed in Cameron Dezen Hammon’s debut book, This is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession, which connects the hope, despair, and desire that someone can feel about a love interest or God.
The memoir spans about 15 years of Hammon’s life and describes her relatable parenting, money, work, and marriage hardships. Equally relatable is her struggle with the approaches to these issues presented by a series of Houston megachurches for which she and her husband act as music ministers. These churches preach a hierarchical (as well as homophobic and misogynistic) version of Christianity in which obedience to God will lead to success and happy marriages. An inclusive feminist, Hammon doesn’t wholeheartedly subscribe to this doctrine, but neither does she know how to find meaning outside of it.
About her marriage, she writes, “I believe, or think I’m supposed to believe, that God will fix this. Fix us. Fix my loneliness, meet my needs. Or if God is not meeting my needs, then the fault lies with me.”
Netflix
ACCORDING TO ARISTOTLE'S Poetics, art is supposed to imitate life. However, Oscar Wilde claimed that life more often imitates art. In the case of the recent Netflix movie The Two Popes and warring camps within the Catholic Church, it may be hard to tell which is which.
The Two Popes —which depicts an imagined relationship between Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and his successor, Pope Francis—was bound to inflame tensions between those who believe that Francis wants to toss out historic church teachings on marriage and sexuality and those who suspect that anyone with a soft spot for the Latin Mass wants to bring back the Inquisition. Then, within weeks of the movie’s release, we had the spectacle of Benedict appearing as co-author on a book about priestly celibacy that seemed like a timed rebuke to the limited openness to ordaining married men expressed at the Amazon Synod that was called by Francis. Benedict later asked that his name be removed from the book.
Brazos Press
Departures and Arrivals
The Penguin Book of Migration Literature, edited by St. John’s University professor Dohra Ahmad, with a foreword by the Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat, includes fiction, poetry, and memoir from the 18th century onward. From abolitionist Olaudah Equiano to Zadie Smith, this anthology honors the lives of migrants. Penguin Classics.
Singer FKA Twigs performing a track from Magdalene
TWO WEEKS AFTER Kanye West released a gospel album with watered-down theology in October 2019, British singer-songwriter FKA Twigs dropped a marvelous piece of sparse electronica with a spiritual tenor. Twigs’ album is gospel in its theological significance. West’s record is not.
Titled Magdalene, the 32-year-old Twigs’ second album is a “revelation,” according to Pitchfork. Throughout the album, the dancer-turned-R&B-genre-bender finds strength in the story of Mary Magdalene. The record’s title track focuses on the Magdalene and the social implications of Jesus’ relationship with her.
Twigs frames the album as a feminist reconsideration of Mary’s story, pushing back on the fact that her narrative was ultimately told by male writers. Outside of Jesus’ family, she is the woman most mentioned in the gospels. She was a patron of Jesus’ ministry and among the first to have seen him resurrected. However, throughout much of history she has been conflated with the “sinful woman” in Luke 7 and, as a result, seen as sexually promiscuous. Twigs pushes against this patriarchal gaze and turns to the Magdalene for inspiration.
Members of The Many / Gregg Webb
AT THE TIME most people head home after a typical workday, four musicians are just getting started. In a living room filled with holiday decorations and religious artwork, with inspirational phrases on the walls and bookshelves, Darren Calhoun, Leslie Michelle, Hannah Rand, and Gary Rand are rehearsing.
Together, with Leonora Rand, they are The Many, a Chicago-based, social justice-focused worship band that pulls from gospel and indie pop to sing about topics not usually mentioned in worship music or church. Their songs touch on police brutality, LGBTQ and immigrant inequalities, economic hardship, identity and uncertainty about faith and God, and doubt and justice amid violence.
“We were trying to find some songs that could give honest voice to our congregation, to what we were dealing with,” says producer Gary Rand, a longtime musician and former director of worship at LaSalle Street Church in Chicago, as well as former director of worship and adjunct professor at McCormick Theological Seminary for 20 years. He says the band always felt a need for this kind of music, but once the group solidified in 2016 with its current members, its mission of speaking truth with a social justice lens to community issues took off.
Mexican American writers render their world — unrecognized and illegible — visible and legitimate.
Image via Candace Sanders.
When who you are has been defined by outside representatives, to keep from slipping away you have to grasp onto what is tangible, what is real, what you know to be you. There is a consistent reconciliation of self, from you to your audience, you to your work, and you to yourself.
Photo via The Inheritance on Facebook
In The Inheritance, currently on Broadway through mid-March, a century-old English novel (E.M. Forster’s Howards End) gently soundtracks, or perhaps orchestrates, the lives of gay men in their 30s during the period when President Obama was moving out of office, President Trump was moving in, and many of us wondered just where on earth we were.
Integrity Music
Words of Life
More than 50 songwriters, musicians, pastors, and theologians collaborated to create Neighbor Songs. This second project from The Porter’s Gate brings people from different backgrounds and traditions together to explore themes of justice, doubt, and lament through musical worship. Integrity Music.
Dorothy Day in New York City, circa 1969, protesting the Vietnam War / Getty Images
WHEN POPE FRANCIS addressed Congress during his 2015 visit to the U.S., he named four great men and women whose legacies helped shape the fundamental values of the American people: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day, the Catholic social activist and pacifist. It was among his most audacious statements during the trip, and he got away with it because—outside of churches and the peace movement—Dorothy Day, the woman who could become America’s next saint, is largely unknown.
Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story, a new documentary film by Martin Doblmeier, wants to put that right. More than a biography, this tapestry of archival footage and new interviews—which include Day’s granddaughters, plus devotees such as Martin Sheen and Sister Joan Chittister—is narrative theology, an argument for why an anarchist grandma could be a patron saint for those countering Trump’s America. “Dorothy Day spoke out publicly and forcefully in support of fair pay for workers, against the great imbalance of wealth, excessive expenditures for weapons, nuclear proliferation, and unjust wars overseas. We struggle with these same issues today,” Doblmeier tells me. He believes her life story is a roadmap, a spiritual guide for troubled times.
The film opens not with Day’s birth in 19th century Brooklyn, nor the years before her conversion, which she spent darting from bohemian parties to inner-city Masses, but in the 1950s, when the Catholic Worker movement she co-founded as a network of “houses of hospitality” took to the streets to protest the arms race. We see Day’s Catholic personalism—her belief that Christians must take personal moral responsibility for injustice—in action, and it is bracing and alienating. We meet her isolated from the Catholic Church: a voice crying in the wilderness. Doblmeier’s nods toward contemporary politics make this a challenging introduction. “I think Dorothy Day presents a direct path that we all can take,” he explains. “She believed if you see someone in need, you fix it yourself. You don’t wait for the government or a social service agency to intervene.”
IVP Academic
THE NOVEL BEGINS with a nightmare from the 10th year of Nero’s reign, 64 C.E. “Rome was burning, would not stop burning ... the screams of adults and children, burning.”
Priscilla, or Prisca, is just waking up from a bad dream. An early Christian believer from “Roma,” wife of Aquila, a leatherworker like “Paulus,” and a house church leader (Acts 18:18-28; Romans 16:3-5; 1 Corinthians 16:19), Prisca is now a widow with an adopted daughter. The nightmare encourages her to record her life story.
Author Ben Witherington III is a professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary and a prolific writer. With his imagination, New Testament mentions of Prisca, and knowledge of the culture and politics of the Roman Empire, Witherington creates a dramatic account of the first century church, as told by an early leader.
He first portrays Prisca as a young freedwoman adopted by her childless mistress. She is named Priscilla after her adoptive mother and given Roman citizenship. The elder Priscilla was a Jewish adherent, so devout that she traveled to Jerusalem for the feast of Shavuot (in Greek, “Pentecost”), taking her adopted teenage daughter with her. By coincidence, the festival that year ushered in the descent of the Spirit and the birth of the church. Thus Prisca became part of the Jesus movement from the beginning.
Random House
THE FINAL WORDS of Sister Helen Prejean’s new book River of Fire are the first lines of her most famous book, Dead Man Walking. But it is a different Prejean we meet in the River pages: Not the heroic anti-death penalty activist we hear on the news, but a young Louisiana woman on fire for God.
Raised in a loving Catholic family, Prejean entered the novitiate in the strict 1950s. Her descriptions of almost military-like training—no friendships allowed, eyes modestly downcast, sinners wearing vices written on cards around their necks—made me grateful I never became a nun. Once Prejean took her final vows, however, she only had a few years to adjust to the restrictive life before the Catholic Church experienced the seismic shift of the Second Vatican Council.
Prejean makes this transformative time come alive, even relaying how two men almost came to blows over the changes at a parish discussion group she facilitated. Vatican II meant no more Latin Mass or memorization of the catechism. Catholics were now expected to be truly educated about their faith and motivated more by love than fear.
Brazos Press
FOR MANY OF us, Romans is the most comforting and infuriating book of scripture. We rest easy in God’s grace in chapters three through five and the assurance that all will be well in chapter eight. But we chafe at chapter one’s exclusion of certain people and chapter 13’s apparent baptism of worldly power.
Sylvia C. Keesmaat and Brian J. Walsh are here to help. In their book Romans Disarmed: Resisting Empire, Demanding Justice, they read Paul’s letter through the lens of homemaking. All the discipline and love of the letter centers on God’s people making a home in the center of a home-breaking empire, and on God’s invitation to humanity to come home to God. Following the strategy of their book Colossians Remixed, Keesmaat and Walsh paraphrase passages of Romans to clarify its application to readers’ lives, and provide a fictional account of how two members of the ancient Roman congregation received the letter.
Wait a minute. They include fiction in nonfiction?
Yes, and here’s the most noticeable interpretive move they make: inserting questions and comments from an artificial, skeptical dialogue partner.
Illustration by Ric Carrasquillo
I can tell from the way
they are staring at shadows on the ground
that the voice-bearers have come
from that place where
trees are not life-giving.
Two nights ago, One was here with them
Whose longing, love, and pain woke my soul,
deep-buried,
which sleeps through winter,
moth-like.
He is not here with them now.
The cast of The Amen Corner. Photo by Scott Suchman
When’s the last time you saw a play in which the main character was a black woman? If you’ve never seen one, you’re likely not alone. Although it’s the year 2020, and within the past year Slave Play and American Son were on Broadway, the number of American plays with black women as their leads staged in America still has immense room for improvement. As of today, zero are slated to appear on Broadway during the rest of the 2019-2020 season and the entirety of the 2020-2021 season. That’s why it’s shocking that, 55 years ago, The Amen Corner, a three-act play about a black woman pastoring a Pentecostal church in Harlem, N.Y., opened on Broadway, albeit more than a decade after its birth.
A commitment to justice or equality cannot be purely voyeuristic or touristic.
Shakira and Jennifer Lopez perform during the Super Bowl LIV Halftime Show Feb. 2, 2020. REUTERS/Mike Blake
The prevailing stereotype of unpredictable and hypersexualized brown women’s bodies.
Photo by Benjamin Voros on Unsplash
Many psychologists fear awe is receding from our lives and that a vital social resource is disappearing.
Illustration by Jon Krause
BY NOW THE sins of Facebook, as a social media platform and megacorporation, are well-known. You’ve got invasions of privacy, data breaches, viral falsehoods, livestreamed rapes and murders, and the list goes on.
Well, a few months ago, the volunteer technology committee at the Catholic parish where my wife, Polly, works as social responsibility minister did something about it. They asked their parish council to consider taking the congregation off Facebook entirely and no longer using the platform as a medium of communication. When Polly told me about this, I was a little surprised. Maybe I missed something, but, amid the sporadic calls to “Delete Facebook” in the wake of the company’s various scandals, I hadn’t heard of a religious community actually implementing a boycott.
Once you think about it, the arguments for boycotting Facebook are pretty obvious. When we lend our eyeballs to that platform, we bring it advertising dollars, helping to fund its corrupt and dangerous practices. And what’s worse, the company’s business model makes every person or organization with a Facebook page a recruiter for the company and turns every posted detail of our lives into a product (consumer data) that the company can sell to commercial and political advertisers. When a congregation encourages parishioners to log onto a church Facebook page and share what they find there with interested friends, the church places its members and friends at risk of having personal information exposed to bad actors.