Arts & Culture

IN PEACEBUILDING AND THE ARTS, practical theologians Theodora Hawksley and Jolyon Mitchell ask readers to imagine peace: “It is all too easy to reach for clichés” — doves or peace signs come to mind — or “to think of peace as a sort of absence, a not-happening.” In our violent world, we readily picture conflict and injustice, but not peace or conflict transformation. The arts help us fill this empty space, revealing the true nature of peacebuilding as “an ongoing, dynamic process, a journey that sets human relationships on the road to life.” Through bolstering the moral imagination, the arts rehumanize dehumanized contexts.

Mitchell explains how the arts give us “realistic visions of how to create peace” and foster “an environment in which the ‘moral imagination’ can be cultivated.” He shares the example of Mozambican Anglican Bishop Dinis Sengulane, who, in the mid-’90s, established the Transforming Arms into Tools project after the end of Mozambique’s long civil war. This project asked local artists to “glorify peace” through refashioning decommissioned weapons into art. Compelling works such as “Throne of Weapons” (2001) and “Tree of Life” (2004) emerged: metallic sculptures made from assault rifles welded together in a way that preserved the outlines of the weapons. The “Throne of Weapons” has a back, arms, seat, and legs made clearly from the barrels, triggers, and heels of AK47s. The viewing experience is a dance between the parts and the whole, which underscores the meaning of the project itself. The sculptures represent the specific horrors of the past and broader hope born from peacebuilding. Displayed in public places in the U.K., these works have served as a caution against gun violence and an inspiration to activist-artists across the globe.

AFTER MY GRANDMA died, I began to pay attention to cardinals. She loved watching birds through her kitchen windows, and the memorial cards at her funeral displayed an illustration of a cardinal. After that, every cardinal I saw felt like a message sent by my grandma from heaven, reminding me that she was looking out for me, and that she wasn’t really gone, not fully.

So, when I listened to “Cardinal,” the first track on Kacey Musgraves’ latest album Deeper Well, I felt like Musgraves wrote the song for me.

“Cardinal,” she sings, “are you bringing me a message from the other side?”

With songs about finding peace and falling in love, growing up and maturing, Deeper Well is spiritually grounding. A reminder to slow down, go outside, and appreciate what we have.

A WILL IS an important document that protects your family and ensures financial security for children who have yet to pay back the 300 grand you spent on each of them growing up. You definitely should not wait until you’re 73 to write one. In my case, I was waiting for the wisdom that comes with age. Failing that, I was also waiting for the lawyer we chose to grow up and go to law school. Because, when we first met him, I thought he was a teenager.

It’s like when I go to the doctor these days and she looks like she’s just been dropped off at soccer practice by her mom. Nothing like the white-haired doctor who used to frighten me with dire predictions of the health problems that every aging man confronts. But now that all those predictions have come true for me, I need to make my will.

In ABC’s workplace comedy Abbott Elementary, Barbara Howard (Sheryl Lee Ralph) provides one example of what it looks like for Black Christian women to live out their faith in their everyday lives. 

IN HIS LATEST book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, Christian Wiman is not concerned with suspense. Two paragraphs into his first “entry against despair,” he discloses the fiercest nemesis of that tried-and-true doom and gloom. “The only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute — and perhaps even annihilating — awe,” he writes.

That’s probably why Wiman, writer, translator, and professor of communication arts at Yale Divinity School, begins Zero at the Bone by mining the wisdom of the world’s biggest experts on awe: children. His latest collection leans on the “visionary innocence” of a child “whose unwilled wonder erases any distinction between her days and her dreams.” Wiman has had daily access to two such visionaries: his twin daughters Eliza and Fiona.

Unfortunately, he has also had steady access to despair, most visibly through his 19-year battle with a rare, aggressive form of bone cancer. He is currently in remission.

ONE OF MY favorite literary quotes comes from David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas. When Adam Ewing, a 19th-century notary from California, decides to become an abolitionist and protest the transatlantic slave trade, he imagines his father-in-law declaring that Ewing is condemning himself to a meaningless life that will amount to nothing more than a drop in the ocean. Ewing responds, “Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”

I thought about that quote while watching One Life, a 2023 film based on the real life o fNicholas Winton, a British stockbroker who, in the year before World War II, rescuedmore than 600 Jewish refugee children in Prague by relocating them to England in what came to be called the Czech Kindertransport. Winton’s determination was indeed amazing, but as the drama shows, his efforts depended on many people who did what they could to help — many drops in an ocean of good.

Daneen Akers faced a dilemma: After moving away from fundamentalist Christianity, what books about God could she read to her kids? She went through the boxes in her parents’ basement, full of the books she’d grown up with — books that used exclusively male pronouns for God and talked about Jesus’ blood satisfying a debt owed for humanity’s sins. “The faith stories I had inherited, a lot of us had inherited, were just not sufficient. I wanted something expansive,” Akers said.

WHEN I MOVED to Washington, D.C., the second thing I noticed was the rats. (The first was that D.C. drivers are more aggressive than those from Indiana. I’ve since learned to use my horn liberally.)

I’m not proud of my initial response to these furry children of God. I shrieked. I complained. I was frightened to go outside at night, because with every step I took, I heard them scurrying. I could practically feel their long, pink tails tickling my ankles. I filled their burrows with dirt and rocks, covering them with bricks. I was proud of my resourcefulness, until I found the bricks shoved aside and the burrows reestablished. These rats were strong and resilient. Touché, rats. Touché.

As winter approached, the rat population shrank. Small communities could still be found dwelling near dumpsters, and I realized that like me, the rats were just trying to survive. I began learning about the plight of the urban rat and became convicted that as Christians committed to social justice, we must open our hearts to Rattus norvegicus.

You might roll your eyes and ask, “Is a Christian response to rats really necessary?” I assure you, it is. We don’t bat an eye at squirrels (also rodents), yet we are universally disgusted by rats, which are, in case you’ve forgotten, also part of God’s creation. We are so possessive over our trash that we would rather kill the rats than let them enjoy our chicken bones. We must do better.

That’s why I’m launching NIBBLE (Nonviolent Interventions By Bible-Loving Evangelicals), a nonprofit focused on improving human-rat relations in accordance with the gospel. Here’s a preview of our five-step plan for building Beloved Community with neighborhood rats: