Arts & Culture

The first cast in the ochre light of the dawning sun is a morning prayer, filled with hope and faith that ceremonies sought in earnest will feed the soul. I reel dutifully, waiting for a faint tap on the end of my line. My father stands at the front of the boat, scanning for ripples on the water in the low light. “Wachale!” he exclaims in joking Spanglish as he reels in the first largemouth of the day. Two Mexican-Americans bass fishing in Texas. This is the face of the Reconquista.

IN MY FIRST week of design school, I found myself riding Austin’s notoriously limited public transit system, asking fellow riders why they used it, what would encourage them to ride more often, and what they would change about the service.

After a handful of interviews, my rides yielded an unexpected insight: Users didn’t like Capital Metro’s expanded hours and new bus routes. The changes, implemented in June, were ostensibly for the riders’ benefit. But people’s routine included a strong aversion to change. And for a population already dealing with a rapid rate of change in their city, the new routes were especially disorienting.

Any externally forced change can represent an existential threat—as we know all too well from our daily news cycles. Even something as small as the sudden restructuring of our—or our kids’—commute can throw our perceptions of relational, financial, or political safety into jeopardy.

We’re in a wearying time. And looking at CapMetro users’ responses, I began to wonder whether we can build levity into a daily commute as a form of comfort blanket for these users. How can we offer delight as an antidote to people who are really, really weary of change?

As a poet, I used to compartmentalize my poetry. Christian poetry, poetry of the body, and Spanglish poetry all had their unique boxes until I came across the term theopoetics in academic scholarship. We all know how language and scholarship work. While white men are busy naming theopoetics to utilize in scholarship, women, women of color, black women, and indigenous peoples have been theopoeticizing since before Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to the time of Macuilxochitzin.

At the Art Institute of Chicago, James Webb has fit the sound of Chicago’s religious devotion into one room. The city’s religious life spouts from speakers fixed to the floor. Museumgoers shuffle across the expanse of red carpet, pausing over one mushroom shaped speaker and then another — like bees gathering pollen, intent on producing cultural understanding and greater empathy.

In two stunning interactive visualizations, individuals are able to examine workplace diversity state by state - controlling for factors such as race, sex, and occupation. One visualization ranks states according to representation, with red and green bars showing what percent under and overrepresented certain populations are in relationship to their presence in the labor force. The other visualization allows users to compare states - giving a clear breakdown of representation at  each occupation level.

TWO NEW ADVENT-THEMED books bring deep wisdom for this liturgical season.

Peter B. Price is a retired Church of England bishop with decades of experience advocating on the ground and in the halls of power for peace and reconciliation in conflict situations around the world. His new book, A Shaking Reality: Daily Reflections for Advent, takes its title from a mediation written by a German priest, Alfred Delp, S.J., while imprisoned by the Nazis.

Price reflects on Delp (who was later executed for being in the resistance) and the “courage and witness” of others in these graceful meditations for each day of Advent. He writes about the world’s brokenness from his sensibilities as a pastor—acknowledging structures that harm and oppress, while guiding readers toward what Delp called “God’s promise of redemption and release.”

IN THE FILM BLAZE, directed by actor Ethan Hawke, happiness is rare and meaning always seems slightly out of reach, just around the corner. An unconventional, compelling biopic of Blaze Foley, a country musician who died too young, and violently, Blaze is a challenging alternative to familiar rags-to-riches tales. It’s rags-to-slightly-more-fashionable-rags, where the loneliness of the road is never salved by the acclaim of a crowd, the price of art being the very life of the artist.

As a movie about the pain of making music, it’s up there with Tender Mercies, Coal Miner’s Daughter, and Dreamgirls. As a biopic it gets closer to the inner life of its subject than most—Ben Dickey’s hypnotic lead performance embodies the drive to write, to sing, to perform, even if no one’s watching. “He knew the value of zero,” says iconic songwriter Townes van Zandt in the film. Van Zandt is played by Charlie Sexton, one of van Zandt’s cultural heirs and a frequent member of Bob Dylan’s band. The value of zero here is the notion that what we’re most called to in life is authenticity, whatever the reward.

"WE ARE WHAT WE PRETEND TO BE,” Kurt Vonnegut once observed. “So we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” What a funny and paradoxical and intensely true thing to say. This is indeed the drill. The world runs on pretense. We play along with norms, strengthening their power as we go, borrowing a sense of legitimacy—sometimes trading in acts of legitimation with others—in the hope of being seen by others as credible and worthy of a salaried position.

If we aren’t careful, we learn to stop asking whether the reigning legitimacies in which we live and move are, in fact, good or worthy or true. When they aren’t, our pretense is a form of earnest wickedness. I’ve gained power, a tiny world of fake legitimacy, while slowly and dutifully forfeiting my soul. I’ve become what I’ve played at and lost any righteous sense of self and others in exchange for status. Henry David Thoreau described the way his own conscience sometimes succumbed to such peer pressure thusly: “The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?”

We are, of course, responsible for our own words and actions, but we’re also responsible for the conflicts we avoid to more effectively get by, the lies we allow others to propagate unchallenged in our presence. Thoreau worried over all the ways he played along and didn’t raise a fuss in the face of the terrors his government enacted and the subtle fashion in which his own behavior, by proving polite and acceptable, abided injustice.

I'M TOO OLD, and so are my children, to set out cookies and milk for you. But I’m still hopeful enough to write you another letter.

Last year, with all the earnestness I could muster, I asked you for a white people intervention—many white progressive and evangelical Christians in the same room for a cleansing flood of white tears, some deep breathing and healing prayer, and time to plan to dismantle white supremacy from the inside.

But I have not received word that an intervention took place. I assume invitations to it went out or it got canceled, postponed, or taken over by the announcement of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement. (Was that supposed to be a Christmas-in-summer gift?)