Arts & Culture

On Sunday, I tuned in to watch my first football game in over a year as part of my discipline toward Christian nonviolence. That may seem odd, especially since I’m the person who wrote about quitting the NFL as an act of nonviolence just last year. But this weekend I tuned in for the NFL’s Pro Bowl competition, including the flag football game, to signal my support for player safety and wellbeing.

Scorsese, talking about his upcoming film on the life of Jesus, told the Los Angeles Times: “I’m trying to find a new way to make it more accessible and take away the negative onus of what has been associated with organized religion.”

More than 23 years after the box office hit Chicken Run came out, Aardman Animations has finally released a sequel: Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is a punny, thrilling, and slightly disturbing homage to the art of claymation, with abundant lessons about collective liberation, trauma, and parenting.

Director Jeymes Samuel’s newest movie, The Book of Clarence, is not just a biblical epic but a Black biblical epic.

YOU THOUGHT YOU were going to be selected for the trial of some of the fascists who staged an insurrection at the nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. You went through jury selection and everything! But for some reason (maybe your use of the word “fascists”), they turned you down. What’s next?

Here’s what to expect when you’re expecting Jan. 6-jury-related grief:

1. Denial

C’mon. There’s no way. Why wouldn’t they want me? I am a morally upright and very impressive person who has all the right opinions and does all the right things. I am a good Christian who believes that God’s law is what matters most, and I will do the right and just thing even when it is against human law. I am the most law-abiding citizen of the United States re: God’s law. Which is totally relevant to what the judge is looking for. Totally.

PASTOR ALEXIS (narrated by Stephanie Hsu) is a recent divinity school graduate who has been hand-selected by Pastor William Hoyt (voiced by Bill Irwin) to succeed him at Trinity Grace Church in Ohio. Alexis has been working alongside Will, learning the rhythms and rigors of pastoring a small-town church. She’s young, radical, and fearless. These qualities — the very reasons Will chose her — are exactly what make a significant and influential portion of the congregation certain she’s the wrong choice. Then Will dies by suicide. Alexis is thrust into the role of lead pastor far sooner than she expected, and in apocalyptic conditions. All this is merely the first episode of Six Sermons, a 12-episode fiction podcast written by Asa Merritt (a journalist and author of the 2015 play True Believer about the Arab Spring).

Six Sermons is the story of how Alexis navigates this intense crisis: How will the cause of Will’s death impact the congregation? What should the memorial service entail? How is Alexis caring for her own mental health in the wake of her friend and mentor’s death?

Alexis, in particular, experiences God’s absence acutely. Six Sermons powerfully illustrates the humanity of pastors; both Will and Alexis are raw, vulnerable, and flawed. Early in their mentoring relationship, Will tells Alexis, “You don’t really know God until you meet him at night.” This is a story of meeting God at night.

Bodies of Thought

In the podcast Weight For It, host Ronald Young Jr. explores “the nuanced thoughts of fat folks, and of all folks who think about their weight all the time.” These vulnerable, reflective episodes carefully address how fatness intersects with topics such as gender and health care. Radiotopia

THE DEVIL IS irresistible horror bait, the central figure in some of the best scary movies ever made. A tour through Satan’s oeuvre finds plenty of examples of an outside force of evil, such as Al Pacino’s diabolical attorney tempting Keanu Reeves in The Devil’s Advocate (1997) or Elizabeth Hurley’s sensual temptress raising hell for Brendan Fraser in Bedazzled (2000). These movies generally have the theological heft of a Carman music video, but occasionally, Hollywood tries an angle on Satan that’s a bit more sophisticated, spooky, and, ultimately, instructive. Take, for instance, John Carpenter’s low-budget 1987 box-office flop Prince of Darkness. 

The movie follows professor Howard Birack (Victor Wong) and his students as they investigate a mysterious green ooze in a monastery’s basement. The team discovers that the slime is the literal embodiment of Satan, a twisted take on the consecrated host. While we get a brief glimpse of a giant red figure with black fingernails, Prince of Darkness doesn’t focus there. Instead, the danger is far more immediate. Anyone exposed to the slime is possessed by its essence, transformed into a mindless murderer. The true adversary remains in the shadows, sowing mistrust and division. The only thing our heroes can attack is each other.

EVEN SIX YEARS later, it reverberates as one of the most striking segments on cable television in recent memory. Near the conclusion of her show on Feb. 15, 2018, Fox television personality Laura Ingraham chose to upbraid NBA stars LeBron James and Kevin Durant for their political commentary. She framed her comments as a “jumb dock alert” about the athletes’ “barely intelligible” and “ungrammatical” observations on how then-President Donald Trump was fanning the flames of racism.

“Must they run their mouths like that?” Ingraham asked rhetorically. “It’s always unwise to seek political advice from someone who gets paid $100 million a year to bounce a ball.” Protesting that “millions” voted for Trump to be “their coach,” she continued, “so keep the political commentary to yourself, or as someone said, ‘Shut up and dribble.’”

The segment was remarkable for many reasons, not least because Ingraham later praised NFL quarterback Drew Brees for stating that he “will never agree with anyone disrespecting” the United States flag, a reference to Colin Kaepernick and other athletes who knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality. Ingraham’s full-throated defense of Brees in the face of criticism? “He’s allowed to have his view about what kneeling and the flag means to him,” she declared. “He’s a person.”

The obvious inference is that neither LeBron James nor Kevin Durant is a person. And when we pause to remind ourselves that Brees is white and James and Durant are African Americans, we plunge once again into the cauldron of sports, race, society, and politics.

Aside from the inherently racist nature of Ingraham’s remarks — she later denied any such intent — the segment is remarkable for the simple fact that a television personality who typically traffics in conspiracy theories and ideological rants devoted an entire segment to sports figures. That attention speaks to the cultural capital of athletes in our society, some of whom have assumed the role that religious figures once played in American life, that of moral conscience.