Arts & Culture
IN THE EARLY 2000s, Christian women were flooded with commentary about female bodies, both from secular and religious camps. A societal fixation on weight filled tabloid and magazine covers in grocery stores. Pastors preached against premarital sex by comparing teenage bodies to dirty water.
“So many sermon illustrations compared my body to food waiting to be consumed by men,” writes Anna Rollins in her new memoir, Famished. Rollins, who grew up in a white Appalachian fundamentalist Christian community, situates cultures of diet and sexual purity on the same continuum.
I’ve never seen spiritual ecstasy put to screen in quite the unvarnished manner as director Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee. The film follows the life of Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried), tracing her ascension to matriarch and religious leader of the Shakers, a religious sect in the 18th century. Fixtures of the Shakers’ expression of faith include religious rhapsody, often manifesting with their members shaking, shouting, dancing, and singing as a way to express prayer and communion with God.
Lee’s theology may be questionable to those who cling to orthodox views of Christianity. Known by the Shakers as Mother Ann Lee, the trailblazing leader was regarded as the female manifestation of God’s dual nature (i.e., the female equivalent of male divinity) and was regarded by her followers as the second incarnation of Christ. Yet the community Lee strove to create was one of radical inclusivity and belonging—a lesson churches today could stand to learn from.
ON A HILL in occupied East Jerusalem, there’s a large mural of brown-green eyes: They are the eyes of the blind man who consented to be healed by Jesus at the Pool of Siloam, known by many locals today as Silwan pool. Silwan is a Palestinian village just outside the Old City. Painted by Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour, the eyes gaze at the pool where the biblical figure gained sight, now surrounded by soldiers with guns. He gazes at the rubble of demolished homes, surveillance cameras, children walking to school. Do you see? I felt this biblical ancestor asking me, the question hanging ripe in the tangled-wire air. Do you see?
Resistance and Reverence
The State of Belief podcast aims to deliver “a potent mix of spiritual wisdom, political strategy, and hopeful commentary.” Weekly, Paul Brandeis Raushenbush talks with faith leaders and activists about topics ranging from book bans to religious liberty to nonviolent resistance. Interfaith Alliance
WHEN MARTIN SCORSESE’S Silence was released in 2016, many reviewers invoked the “L” word: legacy, a capstone for a lauded director with nearly five decades of films under his belt. But looking back, Silence is less like a summation and more like a fresh exploration of the themes that had always fascinated the director.
Scorsese, who based the film on the 1966 novel by Shūsaku Endō, spent more than 25 years laboring over its script and production. Two Portuguese Jesuit priests, Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver), journey into fog-shrouded Japan to find their former mentor, who seems to have abdicated his evangelizing responsibilities under fear of persecution and death. To restore his name and maintain their own faith, the two venture into a country where the government offers large cash rewards for exposing hidden priests.
CLEO SOL STANDS center stage at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. It’s March 2025. Her flowing red ball gown doesn’t detract from her grounding presence. Her forehead glistens under the warm beams. My arms are outstretched and tears stream down my face. The room swells as Sol and her backing vocalists sing these words in the song “Build Me Up”:
“Am I invisible? / I’m not invincible”
After the show, I see three young Black people holding hands in a circle. “We’ve gone to church, y’all,” one says, the other two friends guffawing while slapping her shoulders. That’s how it felt, a mass witnessing of divine intervention.
Sol and I were both born in London, yet there we were, thousands of miles across the Atlantic, sharing space with a community whose history is not our own. Her music made strangers kin, and it made me, a Black British woman, feel at home not through place, but through sound. That spiritual high faded soon after I left the venue. An unhoused Black man was sleeping on a bench in the subway carriage, untroubled by the shakes and screeches as the train descended into Brooklyn. We passengers were also unperturbed, giving him at most a quick glance before staring at our phones.
As a lifelong resident of Minnesota’s Twin Cities and a minister trained in deescalation, Matt Moberg has spent many of his past mornings at the Whipple Building in Minneapolis alongside those protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement descending on their cities. He’s spent his nights at the 19,000-seat arena in the Target Center, as a chaplain to the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves.
“Sports can be done and sports can be held—and I think the Timberwolves in particular do it well—not as a distraction from real-life unfoldings,” Moberg told Sojourners. “It's a way to go, we’re still going to come together, not in spite of that, but because of that, and figure out how we can move forward together.”
Now, Moberg’s found himself in a small spotlight after his words reflecting on faith and social justice went viral on social media, where he chastised churches for “posting prayers for peace and unity today while my city bleeds in the street.”
“Don’t dress avoidance up as holiness. Don’t call silence ‘peacemaking,’” he wrote. “Don’t light a candle and think it substitutes for showing up.”
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is the newest installment in a horror franchise that continues to demonstrate how gut-wrenching terror can invite viewers to ponder questions about politics and human nature. The Bone Temple, directed by Nia DaCosta and currently playing in theaters, will certainly make you scream your guts out, but it will also invite you to consider: What is my ultimate concern?
For those who have seen the previous three films, some of these questions will be familiar territory: Will humanity’s violence ultimately lead to a societal and environmental collapse? What does it mean to be human? Why do some humans label others as “non-humans”? But The Bone Temple is asking new questions, a lot of them revolving around spirituality and whether there is ultimately a benevolent (or malevolent) deity. Previous movies in this series—especially 28 Years Later (2025), which preceded The Bone Temple—gestured toward religion, but DaCosta’s installment puts religion front and center, and then turns things up to 11.
2025 was a banner year for movies nestled at the intersection of faith and justice. Many of those films that Sojourners authors covered, from Sinners to One Battle After Another to KPop Demon Hunters, will continue to be in the cultural conversation this year, especially with the Academy Awards looming.
Below is a list of films that Sojourners can’t wait to watch this year. It is by no means exhaustive; as excited as I am for The Mummy and Supergirl, for instance, I won’t know if those blockbusters have a faith angle until they hit the screen. You never know, Supergirl’s terrier Krypto might turn out to be a caped Christian pacifist. What follows, then, isn’t a catalogue of certainties, but a watchlist shaped by hope, curiosity, and the expectation that questions of faith and justice will keep finding their way onto the big screen—sometimes from the most unexpected places.
If you ask TV writer and producer Vince Gilligan what his latest show, Pluribus, is about, he’ll turn the question right back around on you.
“I really like the idea of making a show and letting viewers tell us what it’s about,” Gilligan told Sojourners. “I don’t know that there’s any one answer to that question other than what the individual thinks.”
“This world is intricately stitched together, boys. Every thread we pull, we know not how it affects the design of things,” muses William H. Macy’s Arn Peeples, an aging tree logger in Train Dreams. Throughout their ongoing work on the construction of the Spokane International Railway, laborers like Arn occasionally ruminate on their place in a broader human tale of hubris and glory, though they don’t have all the answers.
Indeed, the world is intricately stitched together. And the same could be said about the film itself, though, moment by moment, it gives the feeling of a wandering walk in the woods. Much like Arn, director Clint Bentley and screenwriter Greg Kwedar seem aware of their lack of answers—but find asking the questions worthwhile anyway.
In Rental Family, Brendan Fraser’s character Phillip does a lot of pretending. While looking for gigs as an American actor living in Tokyo, he lands a strange role: “token white guy.” And it gets weirder, the more Phillip learns about it: His new employer, a company called “Rental Family,” doesn’t cast for the stage or the screen. They hire actors—“surrogates”—to play roles in people’s lives, to “help people connect to what’s missing.”
Phillip becomes whatever the company’s clients need him to be: a mourner at a staged funeral, a groom for an anxious bride, the dad who’s finally part of the picture. Sometimes he pretends to be these people for 30 minutes, sometimes he has to pretend for weeks on end. Soon, Phillip comes to love the job he was initially so skeptical of.
One of the stranger moviegoing experiences of my life was walking out from The Last Jedi and feeling sure I’d experienced a masterpiece. I’m not the most devoted Star Wars fan, but I thought I’d seen something special. I still do. So, you can imagine my surprise when the rest of the world was, shall we say, a little divided on The Last Jedi.
I’m not here to relitigate that whole exhausting conversation now. But while watching that movie, I felt a connection to the filmmaker, Rian Johnson. Something in the way he navigated the power of belief, the handing down of received wisdom, and the challenges of carving new paths in old traditions spoke to me. I was not surprised to later learn that Johnson had been raised in the church, and I was delighted when he decided to take that as both the theme and setting of the third Knives Out film, his wildly popular murder mystery franchise starring Daniel Craig’s Foghorn Leghorn-throated detective Benoit Blanc.
FOR MONTHS, I’VE tried to understand the outrage over the selection of rapper Bad Bunny as headliner of the Super Bowl LX halftime show. What’s not to like about the Puerto Rican reggaeton star? He’s won three Grammys, boosted Puerto Rico’s economy by at least $400 million with his concert residency, and through his “Good Bunny” foundation annually delivers thousands of Christmas gifts to Puerto Rican children—even though it would be far more on-brand for him to deliver Easter baskets.
Still, after the announcement, conservatives across the country revolted (sent out angry tweets on X, which somehow still exists). They wanted a Christian, American halftime show, not a secular, Puerto Rican halftime show! Soon they learned that every Puerto Rican is a U.S. citizen and that by nearly every metric of religiosity, Puerto Rico ranks as the most Christian jurisdiction of the United States. These facts didn’t assuage their anger.
Sufjan Stevens’ Songs for Christmas boxset includes a memoir essay about how the smell of a burning spatula sent him tumbling into old Christmas memories and, eventually, something like a spiritual revelation—“a tragic-comic-sentimental shock that was simultaneously mundane and supernatural.”
In the vision Stevens describes, the smell of melting plastic becomes a portal to the whole universe, past and present, and “at the very center of the universe I saw the Christ Child … This was the mysterious Incarnation of God. It feels about right that Stevens would treat Christmas like both a theological mystery and a craft-store accident.
IN HER NEWEST novel, Katabasis, R. F. Kuang straps the mythic baggage of Dante and Orpheus onto two graduate students, Alice Law and Peter Murdoch. After accidentally killing their tyrannical professor, Grimes, the two sneak into hell to resurrect him. What they find there is barely distinguishable from their graduate studies. Kuang’s underworld is no cartoon inferno; it is a chilling landscape of extreme isolation, where the circles of punishment are the final expressions of the sins that isolate us in life.
The world of Katabasis (meaning “journey to the underworld”) is nearly identical to our own, save that magic is real. It has been institutionalized and is studied at the world’s premier universities. Grimes rules the Magick school at Cambridge with an iron fist, his abusive behavior excused as a function of his genius (and the price graduate students must pay for success). Alice and Peter are Grimes’ current star students, but this makes them more subject to his tyranny, not less. Alice “was of course underpaid and overworked, but this condition was common among graduate students and no one cared much about it,” Kuang writes. Neither Alice nor Peter (“the nicest guy in the world … who always holds you firm at arm’s length”) can see their suffering for what it is: a deluded isolation so complete that even hell seems preferable.
Teachers’ Mounting Pressure
The tight, gritty drama Steve offers an intimate look at a last-chance reform school in the 1990s. As determined head teacher Steve (Cillian Murphy) slowly unravels, we are reminded that we can’t take care of others until we take care of ourselves. Netflix
EARLY JANUARY MARKS the start of the season of Epiphany, during which Christians recognize the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Scriptures point to the disruptive nature of Christ’s messiahship: Jesus asks John to baptize him (Matthew 3:13-17), an act that surprises John, who believes he’s unfit to baptize the son of God. Then Jesus delivers his first miracle when he turns water not just into wine, but the best wine, upsetting the tradition of serving good wine first, and cheap wine later (John 2:1-12).
Both acts signal that Jesus’ ministry won’t be what people expect. Rules will be challenged. Abundance, not scarcity, will reign. These stories remind us to seek the living God in unexpected forms.
EARLY IN THE musical Saturday Church, the endearing teenage protagonist Ulysses prays to God. His father has died, his mother is always working, and his church community keeps pushing him to be less effeminate. “I’m in here, a prisoner of all my thoughts,” Ulysses sings. “Can anybody help?”
Onto the stage—wearing a long wig, a shimmering dress, and knee-length boots—steps “Black Jesus.” “Are there any queens in the house?” they sing to the room, before proceeding to do a dance number in the style of queer Black and Latino ball culture. “I come in many forms,” they tell Ulysses. “But this is my favorite.”
Black Jesus is one of several biblically inspired characters and events to have recently debuted in new musicals in New York. And while their plots vary widely, each has mined the Bible in ways that offer fresh resources for the Christian imagination.
PUERTO RICAN MUSIC star Bad Bunny had quite the run this past year. In September, he was announced as the headliner of the Super Bowl LX halftime show. In October, Billboard recognized him as the top Latin artist of the 21st century. All of this was on the heels of his 31-concert residency on the island of Puerto Rico. The residency infused close to $400 million into the Puerto Rican economy, centering, and, for many, revealing the music and culture of Puerto Rico.
The act of revealing the beauty of humanity and culture is very much tied to the Christian season of Epiphany. Many Christians consider this season to mark the revelation of God enfleshed, encultured, and embedded in time and place. God chose to participate in human life in a little-known territory occupied by the Roman Empire. In choosing the obscure village of Nazareth, the Divine presence signified that Love, in the world, begins at the margins.