Culture Watch
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THE DAY AFTER the presidential inauguration in January, Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, preaching at a prayer service for unity attended by President Donald J. Trump, warned members of the new administration that contempt is “a dangerous way to lead a country.” She pleaded for their mercy and compassion for the most vulnerable and outlined a vision for social healing founded on genuine “care for one another.” Budde’s words stand in stark contrast to the campaign of dehumanization and destruction we’ve witnessed since.
In the last few months, I’ve contemplated how, with incredible grace, Budde spoke truth to the power sitting before her in the pews. Her sermon left me feeling calm and convicted and brought to mind one of my favorite artists, the 19th-century impressionist Mary Cassatt. Like Budde’s sermon, Cassatt’s paintings are striking in their softness; they remind me of the kind of activist and person I want to be. I want to live with my heart softened and meet suffering with tenderness.
As Ruth E. Iskin explains in Mary Cassatt Between Paris and New York, Cassatt was “neither simply or completely a bourgeois, nor fully a precursor to the 1890s New Woman, but a mixture of both.” She was “anchored in a transatlantic network that included numerous conservative Americans” and an independent working woman who passionately supported women’s suffrage and full emancipation. In a male-dominated art scene, Cassatt made a name for herself with humanizing portraits of women of all ages, showing the relationship between caregivers and children and the dignity of motherhood. Her layered, emotionally vulnerable pieces highlighted the strength of women and the beauty and seriousness of care itself.
Her politics were characterized by a similar sensitivity. Iskin explains, “[Suffragists] claimed that the very role of mothers in the private sphere justified extending their activity into the public sphere of politics and government.” In other words, they made the case that the qualities of love, strength, and commitment exhibited by many women in their homes would also benefit civic spaces.
From You Are a Sacred Place ©️ 2025 by Madeleine Jubilee Saito. Reprinted with permission of Andrews McMeel.
I FIRST CAME across digital media artist Madeleine Jubilee Saito’s work on social media. While scrolling through a sea of Instagram stories about environmental disasters, civil unrest, and humanitarian strife, I reached a square that made me pause: a multicolor four-panel image from a digital watercolor comic. I took in the top two panels of a gray figure staring out into the sky and then the glimmering, fruited foliage framing the bottom two panels. It felt like a vision from a better, more just future. The text on each panel, though brief, was powerful. I took in each word like a sacred telegram: THE GREAT WOUND / IS HEALED / ALL THINGS / MADE NEW.”
When I was younger, I found comfort in dynamic plotlines nestled in the predictable geometry of print and online comic series. Through Saito’s work, that comfort returned to me, in the form of four panels grappling with climate grief and environmental repair.
When I spoke with Saito about her work, she said that her affinity for comics started in high school. “As a young person, I had a very hard time accessing my own feelings or seeing that my interiority or my life were particularly valuable,” she said. “Comics were a way I could crystallize that value and the meaning of my own interiority for others — make it visible.” Now, Saito’s work conveys the value of the natural world. In her ecological storytelling, we see portraits of people amid towering trees and shimmering waterways. Her human subjects submerge themselves in the elements; her natural subjects invite readers to take a closer look at this numinous world.
Her upbringing in northern Illinois exposed Saito to the tensions between humans and earth. She grew up in a house deep in the woods — “a strip of forest in the middle of this desolate monocrop landscape,” she said, explaining how she saw beauty amid exploitation. “The animals — raccoons and possums — were pests to be managed. Every year the trees and bushes and plants from the forest would encroach further toward the house and every year they would need to be cut back.”
This awareness of the adversarial relationship with the natural world has guided her work and now culminates in her debut book, You Are a Sacred Place: Visual Poems for Living in Climate Crisis (Andrews McMeel, 2025). The first section explores the doom happening parallel to climate collapse. In one story, we see someone curled up in bed, sinking into and verbalizing their sadness post-job layoff. Wildfire smoke chokes the Seattle air around them. In this panel, I see myself, two years ago, numb from financial despair while wildfire smoke cast a noxious orange hue over Philadelphia.
Christopher Penler / Alamy
DURING MOST RECENT winters, my sister has heard me declare, excitedly, “Baseball is almost back!”
This may be surprising. Perhaps that’s because I am a Black man in my early 30s. (There aren’t that many of us longing for baseball anymore.) But it also may be surprising because my favorite team is the New York Mets. And if you know anything about the Mets, you know that to be a Mets fan is to be a friend to frustration, not to excitement.
I guess I was saved from some frustration because school and the lack of the necessary cable TV bundles made it hard for me to follow the team as closely as I would’ve liked during the 2010s and much of the early 2020s. Most of those years ended with the team losing more games than they won. And yet last year, with the blessing of a full-time job, I was glad to purchase a streaming service that allowed me to regularly watch my favorite team again.
Being a baseball fan — if you let it — can train your spiritual muscles in a way that few other activities can. Do you care about daily rituals like prayer? Baseball, unlike most professional sports, is typically played six or seven days a week. Are you working toward a cause, like human rights, that is mostly out of your control? Baseball reminds us that no one player, no matter how good they are, can single-handedly make their team win a championship (shoutout to Mike Trout).
VisualStories / iStock
I LOVE TO walk. I came by this love naturally. My mother, now well into her 80s, is a dedicated walker, spending at least 30 minutes each evening walking on her treadmill. In earlier years, especially when the winds of the Kansas plains died down late in the day, she would walk the half-mile dirt road to our mailbox and back.
I’ve added three Labrador retrievers to my walking ritual — Hershey, Pippi, and Rue — who delight in a daily routine of getting outside, noses to the ground, tails in the air, ears perked and attuned. Responding to the rattle of their leash, each one’s anticipation is uniquely their own — a hop, a tail whipping against my leg, a wet nose urgently working to get the collar in place.
In recent years, after experiencing the awe of walking in the Pacific Northwest, where lush forests and rippling rivers drew my husband and me to their sacred cathedrals, we have started structuring vacations around where we want to hike. Step after step, we take in nature’s altars, praying with our feet, ingesting nature’s elements in holy, full-bodied communion.
In her book Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age, Katherine May articulates what I feel when I’m walking. Enchantment, she writes, evokes a deep knowing that “something is there, something vast and wise and beautiful that pervades all of life. Something that is present, attentive, behind the everyday. A frequency of consciousness at the low end of the dial, amid the static. A stratum of experience waiting to be uncovered.” This is precisely why I have taken my worship on the road.
The Bible is replete with people who go walking and end up finding themselves in the process. Patriarch Abram, for example, was called to leave his home in Ur and walk to a new place in a more fertile valley where he made his new home with Sarai. Or consider the ancient Israelites who escaped the oppressive Egyptian pharaoh — and walked in the desert for a generation. Also don’t forget one of the Bible’s most familiar walks: the one taken by Ruth and her mother-in-law, Naomi. While the narrator shares few details of their journey, their trek from the hinterlands back to Naomi’s hometown must have been an adventure of dangerous proportions.
Walking requires a willingness to leave one place and go to another. And somewhere along the road, in the liminality of “not-there-yet,” transformation becomes possible.
Bettman / Getty Images
IN “KITCHENETTE BUILDING,” Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, considers the challenge of dreaming in grim places. The setting of this 1945 poem, published as part of Brooks’ first collection, A Street in Bronzeville, is the titular kitchenette building, a housing unit of many cramped, run-down apartments, often rented by Black residents in that era in cities like Chicago. Tenants are “grayed in, and gray,” worn out by systemic injustice and the demands of daily life, such as paying rent and putting food on the table. Still, the speaker — who speaks on the behalf of a collective “we” — wonders if a dream could rise “through onion fumes” and “sing an aria” in the building.
The dream in “kitchenette building” is delicate and “fluttering,” something that requires time and contemplation — luxuries that systemic oppression makes nearly impossible. Brooks’ biographer, Angela Jackson, in A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life & Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks, describes this poignantly: “Life is grim in these kitchenette buildings ... entrapment as in a prison. People here are not people; they are things, dehumanized by the nature of a system they did not volunteer for.” Later, she asserts that kitchenette residents “cannot even consider” a dream greater than a cold bath “[before] a realistic necessity comes up ... They take what they can get.”
Brooks makes it clear, though: Imagination is a vital precursor to liberation. “Kitchenette building” plants seeds in questions: What would happen if dreams of freedom and freshness had space to grow? What would liberation look like for Black communities and the U.S. as a whole?
From Will & Harper
THE DAY AFTER I told my mother I was transitioning, I sat across from a childhood friend, who I’ll call Sarah, in Los Reyes, my favorite Mexican restaurant in my hometown. It was 2009, and I had come home from college specifically to give my mom the news. I hadn’t seen Sarah in six years but I remembered she had a strong faith that she shared openly and invitationally. As soon as I sat down, she asked how I was doing. Something in me broke open, yearning to be seen. I was a mess — sadness and anger dipping in and out of despair. I said something like, “My mom’s just never understood me, and now she’s not going to try to understand.” Sarah got quiet and nodded before replying, “So? I don’t understand either, but I’m here because I love you.”
Whatever I said in response doesn’t matter as much as the truth I learned: Friends and family can love and support one another without understanding them.
In last year’s documentary Will & Harper, Harper Steele, a trans comedy writer living in New York, has one such friend in the comedian Will Ferrell. At the beginning of the documentary, we learn that Steele announced the news of her transition via an email to her loved ones, Ferrell included. Upon hearing the news, Ferrell, who’s been friends with Steele since the two met on Saturday Night Live 30 years ago, is shocked but wants to be supportive — he’s just not sure how.
“So many of us don’t know what the rules of engagement are,” Ferrell says. “And in terms of our friendship and our relationship, it’s uncharted waters.” So he invites Steele to go on a road trip with him.
Ferrell describes Steele as a rough-and-tough, beer-drinking Midwesterner who loves finding seedy roadside bars and truck stops on cross-country drives. But both he and Steele are worried those dive bars will not be safe now that Steele is living as a woman. So the motivation for the trip is twofold: They can learn how to navigate the new circumstances of their friendship, and Steele can learn to navigate the places she’s always loved — this time as the person she’s always known herself to be.
Katharine Bushnell / A Woman of the Century (1893)
AMERICAN EVANGELICALS LIKE to assume that reading the Bible is easy, that a plain reading exists. If only people were to hold our favorite English translation in their hands, Godself would arrest the reader, Truth making itself obvious on the tissue-paper pages. And voila! We would discover a clear path to world peace (or at least denominational peace).
Unfortunately, Bible reading is not so simple. Sometimes, we as readers have gotten the meaning of the text wrong. Sometimes commentators have allowed bias to shape interpretation. And sometimes, the problems start nearer to the root, in the translation itself. For example, the question of women’s roles in the Bible represents a tower of errors built up over time.
Katharine Bushnell, an American medical missionary to China who was fluent in the biblical languages, was one of the first female translators to take on these errors directly. In her 1921 commentary, God’s Word to Women, she painstakingly retranslated and corrected 100 Bible passages that referred to women and women’s prescribed roles within the home and church.
And she starts at the very beginning. While many male translators had written that in Genesis 2:21 Eve was formed by God from Adam’s “rib,” those translators render that same Hebrew word as “side” the other 42 times it recurs in the Old Testament. Bushnell explains that the Hebrew language contains a different word that explicitly means “rib,” a word that the Genesis author does not utilize in the account of Eve’s creation. Yet even today, a corrected translation appears only as a footnote in my NIV Bible. So, why has the mistranslation of Eve as created from the “rib” of Adam — rather than his “side” — persisted?
From Inside Out 2
THE BIBLE REPEATEDLY points us toward understanding God as a parent. Jesus recommends we call God “Dad,” or “Abba” in Aramaic (Matthew 6:9), and compares himself to a mother “hen [who] gathers her chicks under her wings” (Luke 13:34). And in the Hebrew scriptures, God often appears as a parent. Consider this description of God’s relationship to us from Hosea 11:3-4 and see if you don’t get a little misty-eyed: “Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk; I took them up in my arms, but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them.”
As a parent, I get glimpses of that love: The joy I felt watching my daughter score her first goal in soccer. The worry I felt when I saw her fight through a string of stomach bugs. But most surprisingly, I’ve caught glimpses of God’s parental love when watching kids’ movies with my child, particularly films from 2024.
One moment in particular, a scene from Despicable Me 4, of all things, really hammered home the link between parenting and God. Throughout the film, the main character, Gru, struggles to connect with his son, Gru Jr. When Gru Jr. finds another father figure, someone who will bring harm to Gru, Gru still offers his child one last gift by saying, “It’s okay, Junior. Dada loves you.” There was something about that scene showcasing the fierce love of a parent for their children, even when that love hurts, that made me understand that movies, especially kids’ movies, can be a fantastic way to gain some understanding of what God’s love might look like.
Extemely American: Onward Christian Soldiers by Heath Druzin and James Dawson
A NETWORK OF outspoken Christian nationalists is growing in popularity. They are not yet mainstream, but their drive for power is irrefutable. In Onward Christian Soldiers, the second season of the NPR podcast Extremely American, hosts Heath Druzin and James Dawson trace the rise of this Christian nationalist movement as manifested in the ministry of Doug Wilson, the reactionary, fundamentalist pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho.
Wilson and his followers are forthright about their goal. “Our mission at Christ Church is summed up by the phrase, ‘all of Christ for all of life,’” according to the mission page on the church’s website. “Under the grace of God, this means that our desire is to make Moscow a Christian town.”
Across eight episodes, listeners of Extremely American witness Wilson’s emergence: The son of a Christian bookstore owner, Wilson takes on the mantle of preacher, excels in his philosophy classes, becomes an intuitive builder of institutions, and uses these skills to advance a crude political vision of Christian domination.
Dorcas Cheng-Tozun and Trish O'Kane
DORCAS CHENG-TOZUN, author of Social Justice for the Sensitive Soul (Broadleaf), wanted to be an “unceasing voice” for social justice. “And while I was busy saving the world,” she writes, “I would also be the kind of person who’d happily sacrifice anything for a good cause.” But 10 months after Cheng-Tozun moved from the U.S. to China to set up an operations office for her spouse’s solar business, thrilled at the possibility of providing affordable electricity to billions of people, she experienced the “worst and longest panic attack” of her life. For more than a year, she could do “little more than sleep and cry and journal.” A crucial, difficult question arose: “Why can’t I handle what everyone else seems to be managing perfectly well?”
For Trish O’Kane, author of Birding to Change the World (Ecco), the breaking point was Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed her New Orleans home and neighborhood. “After a disaster,” O’Kane reflects, “you just can’t do as much. Nor should you. You need time to think, to ponder ... I needed a great slowing down.” She took up knitting, spent long hours outdoors on the ground “watching the clouds change shape and bumblebees loading their back legs with pollen and the yard birds going about their business.
Like Cheng-Tozun’s year of sleeping, crying, and journaling, these months surfaced life-changing questions for O’Kane. “I could feel my question changing,” O’Kane writes, “from What should I do? to How should I be?”
In their respective books, Cheng-Tozun and O’Kane write from the other side of activist burnout — something Cheng-Tozun experienced after working for multiple social justice organizations, and O’Kane after working in human rights journalism in conflict areas, both for many years. Both writers ponder how to change, heal, and move forward. Birdwatching was the gateway for O’Kane, while Cheng-Tozun found herself reflecting on sensitivity, introversion, and the many ways people are wired with different gifts to offer. They have different backgrounds and stories — Cheng-Tozun is now a writer and consultant who most recently worked for a Christian nonprofit that equips BIPOC contemplative activists; O’Kane is an environmental educator who created the “Birding to Change the World” program at University of Wisconsin-Madison — but both authors offer a similar invitation to those who yearn to make a difference: Learn to embody gentler, more sustainable ways of doing so.
Leonard Knight created Salvation Mountain from 1984 to 2010 using adobe, straw, and paint to convey the message that “God loves everyone.” Knight died in 2014. / Paul Harris / Getty Images
WE STOOD AT the base of a sticky, bright mountain, a 50-foot-high altar of hay and clay and thousands of gallons of paint proclaiming “GOD IS LOVE” in chunky letters. We shaded our faces from the hazy-sizzling sky to see the white cross at the very top, blue stripes streaming down the sides, a parade of happy flowers at the base. “Say Jesus I’m a sinner please come upon my body and into my heart” is written into a giant cherry-red heart.
My friends and I were 19 years old and seeing Salvation Mountain, the folk-art stronghold, for the first time. We learned about Salvation Mountain the way most people do these days: through friends on Instagram. We drove three hours east from San Diego to Niland, a tiny census designated place in Southern California’s Imperial Valley, a desert landscape of sagebrush, sand, and brassy wind. Salvation Mountain’s artist, Leonard Knight, began building the mountain in 1984 and maintained it every day until his health began to fail in 2011. He died in 2014.
The prayer in the big red heart was what Knight prayed on the day he experienced a born-again moment and heard God call him to build a mountain proclaiming universal love to the world. When we visited, he’d been dead for a few years, and the mountain was getting cracked and worn, the paint tearing up in chunks. Knight built other structures next to the mountain, including a shaded “forest” of what he called “car tire trees”: stacks of tires for trunks and crisscrossed poles for branches, mixed with adobe and straw and painted bright colors. We quietly moved among them. “God is love” appeared again and again on the crevices and lumps, like a psalm. I felt it in my chest, that ache it takes to devote all of one’s creativity and being to God.
Pilgrims gather for Christmas services at the rock-hewn Church of St. George (Biete Ghiorgis), the best known of the 11 monolithic churches in Lalibela, Ethiopia. / MWayOut / iStock
COMPLETELY BY COINCIDENCE, travel writer and translator Shahnaz Habib once joined thousands of pilgrims in Lalibela, Ethiopia. Habib’s trip happened to overlap with Ethiopian Christmas, which brings Ethiopian Orthodox Christians from across the country and world to the town, famous for its medieval rock-hewn churches.
Detailing her experience in her book Airplane Mode, a personal history of travel with a sharp eye for the colonial legacies in tourism, Habib calls Lalibela’s churches “marvels of subterranean engineering.” Carved from red volcanic rock, they sit embedded in the ground, connected by tunnels. The complex of structures was built in the 12th century as an homage to Jerusalem, complete with replicas of Christ’s Nativity crib and tomb.
Habib observed as her fellow travelers lined up around the churches to kiss crosses offered by priests: “A kiss at the top of the cross, a kiss at the bottom, a touch of the cross to the forehead. Hundreds of kisses every hour.” She noted the procedural quality of the ritual.
“To lose oneself in a crowd. To walk the beaten path. To wait and be bored,” she writes. “Perhaps what separates the tourist and the pilgrim is not the reasons for their travel but the satisfaction that the pilgrim finds in what frustrates the tourist.”
Liev Schreiber in "Doubt" / Joan Marcus
IN THE LAST nine months, John Patrick Shanley has had three plays on and off Broadway: revivals of “Doubt” and “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” and the debut of “Brooklyn Laundry.” While the timing is completely coincidental, the three plays cover much of his career: “Danny” premiered more than 40 years ago, and “Doubt” recently turned 20.
Despite the decades between them, these plays share a surprisingly consistent take on faith. Though raised Catholic, today Shanley demurs from identifying with any one religion. In a recent interview he told me, “It’s like when you’re among theists, you get handed a piano with 88 keys and told you can only use 13. I think that human spiritual experience is first of all mysterious and second of all, extremely rich and varied. Any reduction is just that, a subtraction from the breathtaking panoply available to us through the history of the spirit.”
In “Danny,” “Doubt,” and “Brooklyn,” God is not a comfort. Instead, Shanley’s characters are confronted with the radical, unavoidable uncertainty of reality — and challenged to go forward anyway. For Shanley, the whole idea of faith demands stripping away anything sentimental or reassuring. It isn’t faith if it isn’t well and truly a leap.
Marge Erin Johnson preaching at Wake Forest Divinity School in North Carolina, March 2023
PREACHER ACTIVIST AND drag queen Marge Erin Johnson walked up to the wooden lectern at Fort Washington Collegiate Church in Manhattan wearing a sequin rainbow dress and high hot pink wig. “I want to give an extravagant welcome to the LGBTQIA+ community,” she said, “especially those of us that have been burned by the demonic homophobic and transphobic flames of the church. You are welcome here. And lastly, a special welcome to those who are here today — whether you are queer or straight — but for some reason, you feel more seen and comfortable and heard because there is a drag queen at the pulpit.”
Marge Erin Johnson is the drag persona of James Admans (they/them), a nonbinary minister, currently ordained, pending call, in the United Church of Christ. A graduate of Union Theological Seminary, Admans served as assistant minister at Fort Washington Collegiate Church where they coordinated an LGBTQ+ ministry called Beyond Labels, and edited the 2022 anthology Beyond Worship: Meditations on Queer Worship, Liturgy, and Theology. They are most well-known, however, for hosting drag church services where LGBTQ+ individuals can feel affirmed and welcomed back into spaces that may have caused immense trauma.
Marge told Sojourners that drag church “might be exactly what we need to remind us of the beauty and diversity and God’s infinite love for all.” But her ministry comes at a time when drag culture itself is under fire from U.S. conservatives. According to the ACLU, there are 319 anti-LGBTQ+ bills under deliberation or passed into law in the United States. These include legislation that would censor books with queer characters or ban trans youth from sports, and several anti-drag bills that could make performing drag to younger audiences illegal. These bills, often used to create moral panic by associating trans people and drag queens with sexual endangerment of children, are in large part created and supported by Christians.
From 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture
WHEN THE FULL Revised Standard Version of the Bible was released in 1952, the translation used “young woman” instead of “virgin” in Isaiah 7:14, which so enraged conservatives like Rev. M. Luther Hux that he publicly burned that page of the Bible. This would not be nearly the most impactful RSV translation, however, as the new film 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture seeks to explain.
1946 (named for the year the RSV New Testament was released) aims to measure the drastic effects of the RSV being the first Bible translation to use the word “homosexual.”
The film follows the research by Kathy Baldock and Ed Oxford on the RSV translation, with supplementary scholarship from other academics who help explain the RSV’s rendering of the Greek words malakoi and arsenokoitai as “homosexual.” It also traces the cultural ripples of this translation, which the film asserts helped anti-LGBTQ+ Christians demonize and ostracize queer people. Finally, it shows the relationship between the film’s director Sharon “Rocky” Roggio, a lesbian, and her father Sal Roggio, a conservative pastor.
Translating portions of the Bible can be tricky business. As scholars note, arsenokoitai is a word with few other uses across the ancient world and may have been invented by the apostle Paul. Literally, it is a combination word that means “man who beds with males,” connotating a sexual usage. Malakoi means “soft,” and is understood as referring to “effeminate” men.
In the American Standard Version, a common translation that preceded the RSV, the translation used for arsenokoitai is “abusers of themselves with men.” The RSV later changed its translation to “sexual perverts,” though at the time, this was code for LGBTQ+ people. After the RSV, the New International Version used “men who have sex with men,” while the New Revised Standard Version used “sodomites.” The NRSV’s Updated Edition, released in 2021, uses “men who engage in illicit sex,” while noting that the meaning of the Greek is uncertain.
From Text With Jesus
THE AD FOR Text With Jesus promised “A Divine Connection in Your Pocket.” Developed by Catloaf Software, the app is an artificial intelligence chatbot that takes on the persona of the Alpha and Omega. In the paid version of Text With Jesus, you can also chat with Mary, the 12 apostles, Moses, and dozens of other biblical characters, including Satan (if you dare to enable him in the settings menu). Cue eye roll.
In November 2022, ChatGPT went public. With Generative AI now at our fingertips, offering conversational responses to users’ prompts, the AI revolution was officially in full swing. Tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI raced to provide the most accurate, engaging chatbot. But no one has taken the messianic furor around generative AI quite as literally as Catloaf.
A few years before launching Text With Jesus, Catloaf president and CEO Stéphane Peter had created Texts From Jesus, an app that sends users a daily Bible verse. In an email interview with Sojourners, Peter explained that the innovation of ChatGPT offered “a compelling new element of interactivity.” Instead of a static quote from the New Testament the new app lets users have conversations with an AI Jesus.
From The Devil's Advocate
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.
CSA-Archive / Shutterstock
WHEN I WAS a student at Earlham College in Indiana, I co-hosted an alcohol-free dance party. Fry House, which was owned by the university, held a reputation for wild parties before we established it as Interfaith House in 1997. We — a group of religiously observant and spiritually curious undergrads — wanted to bring a new spirit into our house. I had been to enough drunken high school parties that I chose not to drink in college, other housemates had parents with alcoholism, and some abstained for religious reasons. We posted flyers, twisting a beer slogan into our hook: “Why ask why? Try Fry Dry!”
When the big night came, we pushed the furniture aside, laid out snacks, turned up the music, and swallowed our pride when only one person showed up.
This memory returned when I noticed with some surprise how Dry January, which has an app called “Try Dry,” has become a global movement. In 2013, the nonprofit Alcohol Concern (now “Alcohol Change UK”) invited people to abstain from alcohol in January; 4,000 people signed up. In 2022, 130,000 people signed up, with many more participating around the world. As alcohol-related deaths, especially among women, rose in that same period, Dry January began to take hold.
Master1305 / Shutterstock
The school district is back to bipartisan leadership, but exclusionary policies and white supremacy have not lost their stranglehold.
Glacial tarn and melting ice, Grinnel Glacia, northern Montana / Getty Images
I KNOW WHAT it’s like to be baptized in the meltwater of a dying glacier. It feels like a plunge into all the emotions of living in our climate-changed world: joy, dread, awe, fear, love.
In August, a few of my college friends and I took a trip, something of a pilgrimage, to Glacier National Park in Montana. We wanted to visit the glaciers that are projected to die off in the coming decades. The Kootenai people call this place Ya·qawiswitxuki,“the place where there is a lot of ice.” It is a place burdened with names that it will hold on to even after the glaciers and ice disappear.
The geology of the park is like a cake cut open to show layers of sandstone, shale, and limestone — a portal into deep time. About 100 million years ago, in an event called the Sevier Orogeny, the mountains in Glacier formed as the forces of colliding tectonic plates thrust two billion years’ worth of sedimentary rock upward. Across 100,000-year cycles, glaciers formed and retreated, slowly whittling away at the rock and carving out dramatic valleys, moraines, arêtes and horns, cirques and tarns. During a simple four-hour hike, we walked through billions of years of sedimentation.
Walking through such a place makes this moment in history seem both insignificant and deeply important. Thousands of feet of layered sediment formed organically, with nearly no human influence, but the small sliver at the top will be markedly human. This Anthropocene layer in the geologic cake holds markers of nuclear bombs, cow manure, and a lot of plastic. It holds the most dramatic increase in carbon concentration and the accompanying increase in temperature. It holds the extinction of hundreds of creatures, which may soon include the western glacier stonefly and meltwater lednian stonefly, who require ice-cold clear streams to survive.
This layer is also the moment, a blink of an eye in geologic time, when the mighty glaciers disappear. It is estimated that by 2100, two-thirds of the world’s glaciers will be killed. The reality is more devastating in the eponymous national park, where all the glaciers are expected to be gone by the end of this century. I can’t predict all the impacts the park will feel over the next 75 years, but I imagine that the numerous hikers currently making pilgrimages to the glaciers will instead walk in funeral processions to plaques, like the one marking the death of the Okjökull Glacier in Iceland.