Review

Abby Olcese 2-15-2024

A scene from 'God & Country,' Oscilloscope Laboratories

The new documentary God & Country, inspired by Katherine Stewart’s book The Power Worshippers, fortunately escapes most of the major pitfalls of political documentaries as it addresses the rise of Christian nationalism.

Zachary Lee 11-02-2023

'Killers of the Flower Moon' / Apple Studios

The real mystery of Killers of the Flower Moon is not who murdered so many Osage people, it’s how these murders can go on for so long — how the loss of life can be dismissed with such apathy.

The book 'Pregnant While Black' features a black pregnant woman dressed in a red dress while holding her stomach. The cover's backdrop has waves of cyan, yellow, orange, and red. The book hovers at an angle, casting a shadow against a pink-red backdrop.

Pregnant While Black: Advancing Justice for Maternal Health in America, by Monique Rainford / Broadleaf Books

WHEN TORI BOWIE'S autopsy report was released in June, the cause of death stunned many track fans. The 32-year-old sprinter had won several medals at the 2016 Olympics. On May 2, Bowie was found dead in her apartment; the one-time “World’s Fastest Woman” had been eight months pregnant and was in labor when she died.

Bowie’s tragic death caused renewed attention to an ongoing health crisis affecting Black women in the United States. Despite being relatively young and in presumably good health, Bowie’s autopsy indicated she suffered from eclampsia and respiratory distress, pregnancy complications experienced by Black women in the U.S. at much higher rates than other demographics.

In Pregnant While Black: Advancing Justice for Maternal Health in America, Dr. Monique Rainford addresses this troubling truth: Black mothers in the U.S. are dying. They face more risks in pregnancy than white and non-white Hispanic women living in the United States.

JR. Forasteros 8-02-2023
Philomena (played by Dame Judi Dench) and Sixsmith (played by Steve Coogan) sit next to each other in a waiting room. Philomena is wearing a black jacket with a flower-patterned scarf. Sixsmith is wearing a dark brown jacket and blue jeans.

From Philomena

THE BEST CHRISTIAN MOVIE you’ve never seen (even though it was Oscar-nominated for best picture!) turns 10 this year. That movie is Philomena, adapted from The Lost Child of Philomena Lee: A Mother, Her Son and A Fifty-Year Search, by British journalist Martin Sixsmith. The film stars Dame Judi Dench as the titular mother and Steve Coogan as Sixsmith. While the book primarily focuses on Philomena’s son Michael Hess, the film more closely traces the mother’s story. As a pregnant teenager, Philomena was abandoned to a convent of nuns who forced young women to work without pay and sold their children to wealthy Americans looking to adopt.

On her son’s 50th birthday, Philomena weeps, clutching the only pictures she has of him. Despite her efforts, she has never been able to learn his fate. When Sixsmith, a disgraced journalist, learns of Philomena’s plight, he agrees to help her. What began as a distraction from his own troubles soon shifts to captivation. Despite Philomena’s assurances that the sisters of the convent have done their best to care for the women and children in their charge, Sixsmith uncovers a devilish conspiracy of silence.

Joe George 6-02-2023

Ted Lasso / Apple TV+

Ted Lasso season three has been unbelievable, and not just because season two ended with the destruction of the series’ defining image: a yellow paper sign with the word “BELIEVE” scribbled across it.

JR. Forasteros 5-23-2023

‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’ / Marvel

What does it take to survive the wrath of gods? This has been a perennial question for Star Lord, Rocket, Gamora, Drax, Groot, Mantis, Nebula, and the others who have found themselves drawn into the orbit of the Guardians of the Galaxy.

Zachary Lee 4-26-2023
The cover for the podcast 'Sounds Like A Cult' is cast against a gray-green backdrop. The cover is an illustration of an open human mouth superimposed over a multi-colored background. The podcast's name is in cursive, positioned between the teeth.

Sounds Like A Cult, hosted by Amanda Montell and Isa Medina-Maté / All Things Comedy

WHAT DO CELEBRITY megachurches, a cappella groups, nonprofits, and Trader Joe’s have in common? According to author Amanda Montell and comedian Isabela (Isa) Medina-Maté, they’re all cults. In their hilariously informative podcast, Sounds Like A Cult, launched in 2021, these are just a few of the groups they eye with suspicion. Across episodes, the duo focuses on a group, institution, or brand with a fanatical following and ask, “This group sounds like a cult, but is it really?”

Whether they are calling out the hypocrisy of Starbucks’ refusal to let their workers unionize or critiquing the ways Taylor Swift weaponizes her loyal fan base to dismantle outlets that might portray her negatively, no brand, organization, or person is safe. They often have guests who have escaped (or sometimes still are in) said “cults,” and at the end of each episode, Medina-Maté and Montell share whether that week’s subject fits under one of three categories: a “Live Your Life” cult, a “Watch Your Back” cult, or a “Get the [Expletive] Out” cult. Listening to them is akin to eavesdropping on a conversation between friends, and the tone can switch from serious to breezy in the same breath. “All billionaires are cult leaders, period,” Montell says in an episode about Starbucks. In an episode about church camps, she notes that camps are great at “weaponizing endorphins and calling it the Holy Spirit.” The hosts are alternately analytical, easygoing, and earnest, but they never belittle their subjects for the sake of laughs.

Aarik Danielsen 3-20-2023
The cover for the music album ‘And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow’ by Weyes Blood. The artist, Natalie Mering, has long hair and looks to the side. She wears a low-cut dress with her upper chest exposed. A warm light glows from within where her heart is.

And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, by Weyes Blood

A STORM BLOWS through Weyes Blood’s fifth album, And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow. A cold front of disillusionment meets the swirling tones of songwriter Natalie Mering. The effect is gorgeous and staggering.

Sounding both in and out of their time, these songs fuse darkly majestic orchestral arrangements with pop elements such as drum machines, synthesizers, and the occasional guitar. If history took a later start, this could be our classical music. Weyes Blood (pronounced “Wise Blood,” a nod to Flannery O’Connor’s novel set in the “Christ-haunted” South) has said that she craves sanctuary acoustics.

Billowing and hymn-like, “God Turn Me Into a Flower” is the album’s truest prayer. “It’s good to be soft when they push you down,” Mering sings. She sings to stand firm, but never aspires to twist into bramble: “... it’s such a curse to be so hard / You shatter easily and can’t pick up all those shards.”

Laurel A. Dykstra 3-20-2023
The book ‘Daring Adventures: Helping Gender-Diverse Kids and Their Families Thrive’ has a cover with swirling paint strokes of blue and pink. The book is hovering at an angle, cast against a light purple backdrop.

Daring Adventures: Helping Gender-Diverse Kids and Their Families Thrive, by Rachel A. Cornwell

“GIRLS JUST SIT AROUND and talk about being friends, but the boys go on daring adventures!” Arkansas first-grader Evan’s less-than-feminist argument for joining the Boy Scouts became the title of his mother’s book. Rachel A. Cornwell wrote Daring Adventures: Helping Gender-Diverse Kids and Their Families Thrive for kids exploring gender identity in unsupportive communities and for families seeking to support them. A United Methodist pastor, Cornwell emphasizes that full acceptance of transgender and gender-diverse people is entirely compatible with a life of faith.

At a time when Christians are championing anti-trans legislation, it is critical that cisgender, heterosexual Christian leaders publicly affirm trans and gender-diverse people. With the high rate of suicide among trans youth who experience rejection from family or community, books like Cornwell’s save lives.

For Daring Adventures, Cornwell draws from her own family’s experience with Evan’s gender transition and shares insights from interviews with nearly 20 other families of transgender and gender-diverse children. I was particularly touched by the high schoolers who started an online group for younger kids: They talked about favorite animals, transgender celebrities, and drew pictures of their future selves.

Laura Traverse 2-24-2023
The poetry book 'Divination with a Human Heart Attached' rests over an orange background. The cover depicts a human eye peering through the middle of a torn page, which is cut in the shape of a bird.

Divination with a Human Heart Attached, by Emily Stoddard

IN EARLY CHRISTIAN gnostic texts, you can read the story of St. Peter’s daughter, who would come to be known as Petronilla. Legend has it that Petronilla was so beautiful that her father prayed she be paralyzed on one side (so that she would not “be beguiled”). In Emily Stoddard’s debut collection of poetry, Divination with a Human Heart Attached, Petronilla is a fruitful companion and the voice of several poems. They appear alongside poems voiced by a contemporary speaker who we assume to be Stoddard herself. In this way, Petronilla serves as a sort of spiritual ancestor for Stoddard. Both look for and lose faith. Both find signs of divine presence everywhere.

While Petronilla’s God speaks in things like “fish and flower,” Stoddard’s confessional work finds God in interior, negative space — not in religious institutions: “I cut away from my body ... slice myself awake to numb arms ... too big to fit inside the church.” She tentatively hopes that “if it’s true, if god is there at all, she kicks us from the inside.” Faith finds form here in ovaries, dreams, the “dark joy” of Stoddard’s dying grandmother finding beauty in “the sunset on the highway.” Unlike Petronilla, whose father fears her seduction by men, the poet-speaker is seduced by poetry — the power of naming things “without the restraint of a scientist.” Names for plants, names for God: “we are not done yet / inventing names / for what will save us.”

Abby Olcese 2-24-2023
A photo of actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi as fictional journalist Arezoo Ramimi in the film 'Holy Spider.' She is cast against a red flag in the background and staring just off camera at something.

From Holy Spider

THE OPENING SCENE of Holy Spider is brutal. We see a woman — a sex worker — leave her child at home to go to work. Walking through Iran’s holy city of Mashhad, she stops at a public restroom to adjust her headscarf and apply bold lipstick. She goes on her first call of the night and does some opium. As she prepares to go home, a man approaches on a motorcycle. He offers her money. She joins him. Shortly after arriving at their destination, he strangles her.

Writer-director Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider is a fictionalized account of Saeed Hanaei, known as the Spider Killer, who targeted female sex workers in Mashhad from 2000 to 2001. The film, which premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, examines the killer’s life and the process of capturing him, led by (fictionalized) female journalist Arezoo Rahimi (Zar Amir Ebrahimi).

2-16-2023
The cover for Sojourners' April 2023 issue, featuring a story about international adoption. There's a photo collage with one showing a toddler on a beach, and two photos with mothers holding babies. There's a map illustration and another of a baby bottle.

Wrestling with the complicated legacy of Christians and international adoption.

Abby Olcese 1-24-2023
A human-like figure with angel wings rears it's head toward the sky.

A scene from 'The Devil Conspiracy.'

Here’s the setup: A shadowy biotech conglomerate and a cabal of satanists (gasp!) are planning to release Lucifer from hell by… wait for it… stealing the linen cloth used to cover Christ’s body during his entombment, using it to clone Christ’s DNA, and then implanting it into a surrogate mother, allowing Lucifer to possess the fetus. The Devil Conspiracy is like a mix of Rosemary’s Baby, Demon Seed, and the surrogacy mix-up romcom The Switch.

Betsy Shirley 12-07-2022
Book covers are arranged in a tiled pattern against a mustard background.

“Find those who tell you, Do not be afraid, yet stay close enough to tremble with you,” writes Cole Arthur Riley in This Here Flesh, “This is a love.” Here are 12 books from 2022 — nonfiction, memoirs, novels, and short stories — that we think are worth keeping close.

Cassidy Klein 11-22-2022

Day is who Mayfield looks to when her soul is parched and she longs to be renewed with God’s love “in order to keep going.” I found Unruly Saint spiritually nourishing in this way: It wrestles with the questions of how we keep going, how we keep having hope in our exhausting world, how we keep our inner light burning. “She wanted to keep a flame lit for people wondering how to break the cycles of war and oppression built into our histories and hearts,” Mayfield writes.

11-16-2022
The cover for the January 2023 issue of Sojourners features a white Bible with gold leaf pages. A gold-plated pistol sits under the book board with some bullets around it.

A fringe Christian ideology helped stoke an out-of-control gun culture. People of faith are working to take back the conversation.

Joe George 10-03-2022

Photo by Steve Swisher / Focus Features

Honk for Jesus follows Lee-Curtis and his wife First Lady Trinitie Childs (Regina Hall) as they prepare a grand reopening for their Atlanta-area megachurch.

Zachary Lee 7-07-2022

Austin Butler as Elvis Presley in 'Elvis.' Warner Bros. Pictures

Above all else, Luhrmann displays Elvis as a man-turned-god who was exhausted trying to make peace with his paradoxes.

Cassidy Klein 6-22-2022

'Building a Bridge'

The filmmakers tell the stories of LGBTQ Catholics and their families with gentleness and respect. “Nothing converts like stories,” Martin says in the film.

Olivia Bardo 6-07-2022

Photo by Autumn de Wilde

It feels as if there’s an incantation around Dance Fever. Florence Welch leads us through the complexities of finding beauty and purpose amid suffering and evil. The 14 tracks take us on a mythic journey that lingers on the pain.