Arts & Culture
Annie Dillard, one of the greatest American writers, considered her own first book on writing a failure. At least, she called it “dull” and told an interviewer that she “never should have published it.”
The walls are covered in shiplap paneling. Over by the spare toilet paper, an essential oil diffuser hums quietly as it emits Young Living’s “Purification” into the air. Two wide-eyed Precious Moments figurines watch you from the windowsill. A framed Bible verse declares, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord,” but you already knew you were in the bathroom of a white Christian woman; the signs and wonders were all around you. In Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made, Kristin Kobes Du Mez dissects those signs—and their political implications.
Du Mez, a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University, landed on The New York Times’ bestseller list for Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, her scorching dissection of white evangelical masculinity. With Live Laugh Love, Du Mez turns her eye to white Christian femininity. Because, “demographically speaking, women are the center of American Christianity,” writes Du Mez, “we should look beyond denominational seminaries and theological treatises and read Christian romance novels instead.”
Janet Kellogg Ray is on a mission as an evolution evangelist. Her two prior books, Baby Dinosaurs on the Ark? and The God of Monkey Science, show how she can run with any biblical narrative (Noah’s flood) or historical event (the COVID-19 pandemic), and use these as launch points for crash courses on fossilization, germ theory, and scientific methodology. In her new book, Fish with Feet, she not only places humans center stage in the story of evolution, but also sets out to explore how this impacts a core Christian doctrine enshrining the status and purpose of humans: the image of God.
For many Christians, evolution threatens the concept of the imago Dei because it suggests we weren’t perfectly designed and set apart from animals by God. This is partly why apologetic enterprises like Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research exist to preserve our divine origins. Otherwise, these groups say we may as well toss out the Bible and act like animals. Fish with Feet challenges creationists directly but is primarily intended for those who grew up under their influence: Christians (deconstructed, deconverted, and otherwise) who grew up with little to no education related to evolution or an old Earth. This certainly works for folks like me, since I was homeschooled on creationism and intelligent design by Abeka Academy.
A humble ploughman walks across the countryside with a radical preacher and a former nun, with thousands of livid farmers and laborers following behind them. Together, the three travelers ponder the reason for the recent pandemic that swept across the land and killed half of the people they’ve ever known.
“The sickness was [God’s] punishment for the crimes of the rich,” remarks the preacher, John Ball, rather matter-of-factly.
“So why do we suffer also?” asks the ploughman.
Wendell Berry, farmer, author, and activist died earlier this week. He was 92 years old.
Berry’s death was first reported by The New York Times and confirmed by a statement sent to Sojourners by The Berry Center where his daughter, Mary Berry, serves as executive director.
“The Berry Center and Berry family are heartbroken to announce the death of Wendell Erdman Berry, writer and farmer of Port Royal, Henry County, Kentucky. He passed suddenly and peacefully at home yesterday afternoon, August 31st,” the statement read. “His work continues, here and in every place where people aim to live according to nature’s measure, on and with and of their beloved home place.”
Try as my mother did to instill the chronology of the liturgical calendar in me, I’ve instead opted to track the passage of time by the movie release calendar. Right now, we’re in anything but Ordinary Time.
What thrills me about the fall and winter movie season is that, for the most part, the movies released in this window are the ones that will be in the conversation for the rest of the year (and even into the new year), whether it’s because they’re nominated for awards or just remain people’s personal favorites. It was around this time last year when I saw visions like Frankenstein, No Other Choice, Train Dreams, and Wake Up Dead Man. That’s not to say the movies of the summer and early months aren’t without substance or provocation (I still find myself thinking about scenes from 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Leviticus, Disclosure Day, and, of course, The Odyssey). Maybe it’s something about the liturgical motions of the season itself, the way we move from bright days to crisp nights to winter chills, that makes the films that come out during this time weightier and cozier, a cinematic hearth that burns on the fuel of new releases.
At 28, I resigned from my dream job, packed up my life and made the 24-hour drive from Gilbert, Ariz., to Nashville, Tenn. I had wanted to work for a big Catholic ministry since high school when I went to a youth conference and saw speakers giving passionate sermons about how God changed their lives and could change mine too.
Everybody Wants a Revolution
How can faith inform, for instance, our relationship to fossil fuels, to anarchism, and to wealth acquisition?
BUTT-HEAD. That was my costume the last time I went trick or treating. It was 1995, and one of my friends, sporting a homemade blue Metallica shirt, went as Beavis. For hours that night, I walked the streets of an Annapolis, Md., suburb saying, “Uh, huh, huh, like, trick or treat and stuff” to bemused neighbors as we wound our way through a sea of Woodys, Buzz Lightyears, and Carmen Sandiegos.
AS SOMEONE WHO has experienced life-altering, faith-shaking physical pain, when I see a book with a subtitle like The Body, Pain, and Faith, I find myself automatically asking: Can I trust this author? Do they speak of pain from personal experience or as a mere intellectual exercise? Five-time novelist Darcey Steinke answers this question right away. In the foreword to her new nonfiction book This Is the Door, Steinke details her experience of several months of back pain so intense that it caused her to “walk a tight-rope between raging against [her] pain and trying to search for any scraps of meaning that might be left in its wreckage.” Those of us who have endured pain like this can likely relate. As the book continues, Steinke explores her own pain, the pains of her family members, the pains of various historical artists and thinkers, and the pains of people she interviewed who suffer in different ways. Is there meaning to be found?
“TO THE SO-CALLED whores and their daughters! May we inherit the earth and enjoy an endless fount of wine to forget our troubles,” says First Lady Scharisse Freeman as she concludes a subversive monologue reimagining Proverbs 31, the biblical passage often invoked as a model of ideal Christian womanhood. With this opening scene, Deesha Philyaw sets the tone for her riveting, satirical novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman. The story then goes back in time to show the events that led to the rousing speech. We follow Freeman, the wife of a megachurch pastor who is 15 years her senior, as she prepares for the First Lady USA pageant and deals with the fallout from a scandal that threatens her marriage, her family, and their megachurch.
WITHIN A YEAR, two blockbuster films have featured fugitives who seek refuge in a surprising place: a convent of religious women. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, the daughter of a revolutionary hides out with the fictional Sisters of the Brave Beaver. In Stephen Speilberg’s sci-fi thriller Disclosure Day, a government whistleblower carrying stolen information about alien life takes shelter at the monastery of St. Clare of the Dawn.
IN A VERSE that has spurred debate and inflicted pain, Leviticus 20:13 reads: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their bloodguilt is upon them.” The scripture also provides the inspiration for Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus, a new film in which repressed queer desire becomes, quite literally, monstrous.
THIS YEAR’S TRIBECA Film Festival featured an intriguing pair of documentaries about gay life in small towns, one released 20 years ago and one brand-new. Together the two of them offer unexpected vistas of hope and community.
The 2006 documentary Small Town Gay Bar (available for free on YouTube) follows the story of several gay bars in and around Shannon, Miss., near Elvis Presley’s hometown. It’s immediately clear that, for queer residents in this town of less than 1,500, the gay bars provide a shelter and a lifeline in an otherwise bleak and often scary existence. “You walk in and you walk into family,” says one patron. “If there wasn’t a gay bar there wouldn’t be any kind of community,” says another.
One day, after washing the feet and hands of men and women with leprosy, Angela of Foligno, the 13th-century saint and mystic, ate a leperous sore. “We drank the very water with which we had washed him,” she writes. “And the drink was so sweet that, all the way home, we tasted its sweetness and it was as if we had received Holy Communion. As a small scale of the leper’s sores was stuck in my throat, I tried to swallow it. My conscience would not let me spit it out, just as if I had received Holy Communion.”
On the one hand, it’s a radical testament: that all bodies are holy, and those most marginalized and considered “unclean” are Christ’s truest flesh. But on the other hand—what was the man with leprosy thinking in that moment as he watched Angela do this? What was his story, his life, his human experience that Angela saw as a gateway to God?
There's an early moment in the new Little House on the Prairie series that I keep thinking about.
Midway through Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) needs to track down the escaped villain Scorpion, so he tells his NYPD contact, Detective Jean DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas), that he’s going to hack every security camera in New York City to find his face.
Last week, we were proud to publish Georgia Coley’s review of Christopher Nolan’s newest epic: The Odyssey. In it, Georgia notes that the film’s frequent use of “Zeus’ Law” has a lot in common with the biblical Golden Rule.
Safe Havens
For undocumented migrants facing deportation, church can be more than a place of worship—it can become a home.
If I were to look around at the most powerful people and movements in American society right now, the clearest trait I could ascribe to them would be “shamelessness,” particularly in the face of cruelty. Poisonous and vitriolic words fly freely in ways that would have made leaders and diplomats of a previous generation blush.