Arts & Culture
Scope Pictures
Futuristic Dilemmas
In the film The Pod Generation, parents-to-be pay top dollar to gestate a fetus in an artificial womb outside the body, a commodification that more equally distributes the responsibility of pregnancy between males and females. But every technological advancement brings new moral quandaries. Scope Pictures
From Good Omens
IN THE THEOLOGY course on suffering that I teach at Lewis University, the Book of Job is required reading. Its plot can be hard to stomach: Satan believes that Job only loves God because the faithful servant has a blessed life. Looking to prove Job’s unconditional loyalty, God gives the accuser permission to take everything from Job except his life. The wager causes Job great suffering. When God finally arrives on the scene (Earth), we get some beautiful, albeit troubling, poetry. God says that God’s ways are beyond human understanding and especially human questioning. As one of my students put it last year, “God is kind of a jerk.”
Season 2 of Good Omens, streaming on Prime, leans into that confusing characterization of God. The fantasy comedy follows the unlikely friendship of Aziraphale (an angel) and Crowley (a demon). After thousands of years together on Earth, they find themselves more at home with humans than with angels or demons.
'Jurassic Park' / United Archives GmbH / Alamy
Thirty years after the release of the Steven Spielberg film that brought T. Rex to the silver screen and turned velociraptor into a global superstar, I sat in the theater watching Jurassic Park again. But this time, it wasn’t the giant dinosaurs that captivated me. It was a small, intimate conversation between Hammond and Sattler.
In rural Virginia, two men are seen through a bailer preparing freshly cut Christmas trees. In the U.S., nearly 30 million live trees will be purchased this year. / Photo by Gary Cameron / Reuters
WHEN I STARTED farming, 52 years ago, I knew it would take 15 to 20 years to plant Christmas trees without chemical fertilizer sprays and colors. Most commercial trees are sprayed with deep dark green. We get requests to mail the trees. We won’t do that because of the carbon footprint. If anything, we’re a little too idealistic. We started renting live trees in pots. They’re cedars. So, it doesn’t look like that perfect tree. Plastic trees are very questionable. A lot of people want a tree that looks like a plastic tree. They want a tree that has a certain look. We defy that.
Sufjan Stevens performing at the Sydney Opera House during the Vivid Festival. Joshua Windsor / Alamy
It’s clear why fans created the once popular but now defunct Facebook page,“Is This Sufjan Stevens Song Gay Or Just About God?” But Stevens’ music has never been either gay or about God. It’s indivisibly gay and about God.
Liliana Kennedy reads a book titled “Banned Books” during a Hamilton East Public Library board meeting on Thursday, Aug. 24, 2023, in Noblesville Ind. Michelle Pemberton/IndyStar / USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters.
Book-banning has always been about censoring the stories, histories, and information that push us to question the status quo.
With her book, and her appearance in the documentary series Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets, Jill peels back layers of life on reality TV.
'A Nightmare on Elm Street' / New Line Cinema
The word “monster” originates with the Latin words for “omen” or “warning.” The best monster stories teach us about ourselves — about the evil that lurks in our own spirits. That’s something horror stories and the Enneagram have in common.
In launching The Reconstruct, Sojourners’ newest newsletter, we hope to continue what we have been doing, but with more regularity: Offering thoughtful, constructive conversations with folks who are changing the world and reforming our faith.
Ashon T. Crawley. Original photo courtesy Trust for the National Mall. Candace Sanders/Sojourners
Ashon T. Crawley, author, artist, and professor of religious studies and African American and African studies at the University of Virginia, constructed a memorial for Black church choir directors who died during the U.S. HIV/AIDS crisis. The exhibit, “HOMEGOING,” told the story of the musicians who, as he puts it, “died within a kind of epistemological moment,” where to be a musician in the Black church was to be understood as gay, to be gay was to be understood as HIV-positive, and vice versa.
Illustration by Melanie Lambrick
THERE WAS NO WARNING.
I had just returned from a task that brings meaning and purpose to a retiree (triple-A batteries were on sale across town), but stepping over the threshold of my front door, I knew something was wrong.
In the middle distance, our dining room table — a place of memorable family gatherings and special dinners with friends — had been defiled with dozens of randomly shaped pieces of colored cardboard.
I gasped. This monstrous intrusion had presumably been placed there by the other member of my household, whose name I could not utter without a fierce complaint, the cry of a man wounded by a symbol of the last throes of human existence ... the jigsaw puzzle.
She: Oh, you’re home. I found that puzzle I’d misplaced.
Me: But I’m not ready for puzzles! It’s what you do when there’s little left to life, when you’re one step away from the grave!
She: Don’t be silly.
Me: I’m still a young man! In elephant years, I’m a teenager. I just got my driver’s license, for heaven’s sake!
Illustration by Nate Sweitzer
Dream fragment in which Thomas Merton stops his Jeep
at the border, where a customs official who looks like my sister
opens his suitcase and, finding a spare monastic robe,
From Viking
“NOT A SINGLE CELL of his body was the same as it had been in 1995. But he was still himself, just as I was still, despite everything, my teenage self. I had grown over her like rings around the core of a tree, but she was still there.” This reflection is from Bodie Kane, the narrator of Rebecca Makkai’s latest novel, I Have Some Questions for You. The quote captures the ethos of this story in which the main character recalls her past with both urgency and emotional clarity.
Bodie Kane is an LA-based podcaster who has come to teach a mini-mester at Granby, the New Hampshire boarding school she attended for high school. Her students become interested in the case of Thalia Keith — Bodie’s old roommate, who was murdered at Granby when they were both students.
“I think the wrong guy is in prison,” says Bodie’s student Britt — a conviction Bodie comes to share.
Westminster John Knox Press
HAVE YOU EVER heard a sermon on Dinah? Have you read many commentaries on Hegai? In The Hero and the Whore: Reclaiming Healing and Liberation Through Stories of Sexual Exploitation in the Bible, Camille Hernandez, a trauma-informed educator and minister, interprets the narrative of these lesser-known biblical characters. She also reinterprets the stories of well-known figures — such as Eve, Rahab, and Potiphar’s wife — through the lens of sexual exploitation. For too long, stories of women in the Bible have been interpreted in religious cultures rooted in racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. As a result, many Christians have stripped these characters of their agency and voice, demonized them, and sometimes ignored them altogether.
Hernandez provides language to reclaim our own narratives and process our own trauma. She encourages imagining a future where all people are safe and protected from sexual violence and other forms of oppression — both in the church and in society at large.
Artwork featuring Sinéad O'Conner at the Hard Rock Cafe in Dubin. Niall Carson / Alamy Stock Photo
AS AN INFANT, my son Malachi inserted an “el” sound into his cries. “Ah-La,” he wailed with outstretched arms. My husband Michael scooped up our boy and crooned Sinéad O’Connor’s lyrics, “All babies are born saying God’s name” (from “All Babies,” on the album Universal Mother, 1994).
As church-going Christians, we didn’t call God “Allah,” but we recognized it as the Islamic name for the Most Divine. We heard that name in our baby’s voice. But what strange lullaby was my husband singing to our child? “All babies are born out of great pain / Over and over, all born into great pain / All babies are crying / For no one remembers God’s name.”
I came of age to O’Connor’s 1990 album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, belting out every word to the hit “Nothing Compares 2 U.” I stayed up late one night during 9th grade to watch O’Connor on S aturday Night Live. I was confused when she sang a cover of Bob Marley’s “War,” itself a rendition of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie’s 1963 speech to the U.N., then tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II. I did not know then that she was protesting years of rampant child sexual abuse largely ignored by the church. She wanted us to listen to the cries of children.
From Netflix
A Sci-Fi Dark Comedy
They Cloned Tyrone is both hilarious and harrowing in its depiction of a drug dealer, sex worker, and pimp who suspect the U.S. government is experimenting on their community. The film shows how, too often, Black people must choose between assimilation or annihilation. Netflix
From Oppenheimer
IN CHRISTOPHER NOLAN'S film Oppenheimer, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) gives a speech to his assembled Manhattan Project team in Los Alamos, N.M., shortly after the U.S. drops an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, in early August of 1945. In a small auditorium in this town built for the sole purpose of developing the bomb, Oppenheimer looks over a crowd of ecstatic scientists and their families, who greet him with cheers. Some of them are waving American flags.
As Oppenheimer starts praising the team and what their great achievement means for the U.S., we’re given a window into his internal torment: The background starts to blur and vibrate. We hear a child’s scream. Oppenheimer sees a woman’s face start to flake away. Looking down, a charred human body clings to his leg. Oppenheimer sweats. He swallows. He continues speaking, but it’s clear he’s dissociated from the speech he’s written.
From Indiana University
ON APRIL 13, 2023, Ralph Yarl, a Black 16-year-old in Kansas City, Mo., went to pick up his younger siblings from a friend’s house. Mixing up the address, Yarl accidentally knocked on the door of an 84-year-old white man, Andrew D. Lester, who reacted by shooting Yarl in the head and then in the arm. Police took Lester into custody, only to release him without charges in less than two hours. As a result, protesters marched in Lester’s neighborhood, calling for his arrest. After days of protest, Lester was apprehended. In court, he pleaded not guilty, saying that he shot Yarl twice because he was “scared to death.” Yarl was in the hospital for three days before returning home to recover. In response to the shooting, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas, who is Black, lamented, “You’ve heard about driving while Black ... Can you not knock on the door while Black? It’s almost like you can’t exist.”
In The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song, J. Kameron Carter, a scholar of religion, English, gender, and African American studies, frames the current reality of modern Black suffering as “antiblackness,” or in his own words, “the settler colonial antiblackness of the religion of whiteness.” For Carter, antiblackness is the performance of a racial liturgy. This may sound strange to some readers — how can racism be religious, or liturgical? But what Carter is getting at is that there is a pattern — a ritual — to white violence against Black people. Lester’s shooting of Yarl was just one incident of this racial liturgy playing out. The murder of Jordan Neely by Daniel Penny in a New York subway car is another. They are all sacrifices on the altar of whiteness.
Rev. Sam Dessórdi Peres Leite is rector of St. James the Apostle Episcopal Church in Tempe, Ariz. He spoke to Sojourners associate news editor Mitchell Atencio.
IN MY CHILDHOOD we would go to the cemetery early in the morning on the Day of the Dead [Nov. 2]. We would clean the graves and paint them. We would eat by the graves and tell stories of the person buried there and laugh. It was a light experience and joyful in the sense of becoming one family again, so the deceased and living were together for at least one day.
When I was in Washington, D.C., I noticed the Days of the Dead becoming more popular for people who are not of Mexican, Central American, or Latin American descent. Churches started bringing in the elements [of the celebration], not knowing how to properly use them. So I offered workshops to help church leaders understand where the tradition came from. It’s important for people to learn the historical meaning, how Latinos identify with the festival, and ask, “How can we honor that tradition?”
Outtakes from the photoshoot for Rich Mullins’s debut, eponymous album. Original photos by Mark Tucker, courtesy David McCracken.
As I looked closer, I realized these weren’t just funny stories about the songwriter of “Awesome God.” Mullins wasn’t just witty among friends. He also used his humor as a tool to share his sharp criticisms, deep contemplations, and controversial ideas with largely evangelical audiences that were increasingly looking for Christian music to be a space that confirmed their assumptions.