Arts & Culture
On the cover art of her latest album, Lux, Spanish superstar Rosalía poses in a white nun’s habit, arms bundled to suggest straight-jacket confinement or maybe self-love. Before anyone heard a note of the new music, the internet was already bubbling over with commentary, par for the course when it comes to the complicated pop auteur. Fans and haters alike wondered what the Catholic imagery might mean. Habit aside, had Rosalía gone tradwife? Even Ikea joined in on the pre-release conversation, posting a version of the album cover with an overhead lamp. In Latin, Lux means light.
The album is a visionary landmark in pop music. Largely departing from previous forays into flamenco fusion and experimental reggaeton, Rosalía primarily draws from the classical tradition for the project, recording with the London Symphony Orchestra and pushing her voice into new operatic territory. Oh, and she sings in 13 different languages.
The most terrifying thing about power isn’t the force it applies; it’s the moral vacuum it creates in the soul of the person wielding it.
I think of the times I’ve made choices that were professionally powerful but ethically hollow—the quick decision that saved time but neglected a vulnerable party, the project that elevated my status but buried someone else’s contribution. We’ve all been Victor Frankenstein, playing God with a Promethean flame, only to be horrified when the fire scorches someone else.
In early 2024, filmmaker Sepideh Farsi felt compelled to document life in Gaza. Ultimately, she couldn’t gain access to the Strip, but she connected with a photographer who’d lived all 25 years of her life there: Fatma Hassona.
The documentary Put Your Soul On Your Hand and Walk is almost entirely composed of their monthslong correspondence. Farsi weaves Hassona’s portraits of an increasingly battered Gaza between a steady exchange of audio messages, spotty video calls, and text messages.
WHEN THE VATICAN introduced an anime-inspired mascot named Luce for the Year of Jubilee, online critics called it creepy, uninspiring, even “deeply evil.” The pushback against the cheerful, blue-haired pilgrim isn’t that surprising given the way anime is often stereotyped as an immature medium. Yet as animator-director Naoko Yamada demonstrates in her latest film, The Colors Within, anime can convey important existential truths.
Anime (Japanese animation) originated in the 1900s and spread across the globe with the advent of the internet and streaming services. Signature attributes of anime—including big-eyed characters with vibrant hairstyles—attract interest and, occasionally, scorn. Yet Japanese studios like Studio Ghibli have done well to engage with serious topics, from fascism to the devastations of war. Yamada’s work gives us another reason to take this medium seriously.
A FEW SUNDAYS ago, my partner Greg and I made a pot of chili for our community’s weekly dinner. The New York Times recipe said to add orange juice to the chili, letting it simmer and froth among the chopped onion, garlic, and butter. Then we mixed in the thick, tangy sauce from adobo chili peppers with black beans and sweet potatoes and corn, zipped with lime juice. It was rich, spicy, generous—brightened with the sun.
Lately I’ve had fun trying to write about food, playing with how I’d describe a certain taste, smell, or texture. I’ve been inspired by reading M.F.K. Fisher, who wrote essays about food starting in the late 1930s. She wrote gorgeous prose embedded with care for the human heart, for its loneliness and sadness and hope. In her 1937 essay “Borderland,” she writes about how each of us has our own private food pleasure—hers was warming sections of a tangerine on a radiator in the winter, which she describes while watching soldiers in Strasbourg march along the Rhine, the horrors of war closing in.
More Than Sobriety
The documentary A Bridge to Life profiles a residential program in rural Virginia for men overcoming addiction; founder and pastor William Washington believes environment is key to sobriety. By centering structure, job training, and hope, the program boasts a 5% recidivism rate. PBS
THESE BOOKS ALL circle the same question: What does our faith call us to do in the face of injustice? Women Talking, the 2018 novel by Miriam Toews that kicks off this list, captures the urgency of that inquiry.
“We are wasting time ... by passing this burden, this sack of stones, from one to the next, by pushing our pain away,” says Greta, a character eager to face a great evil happening in her Mennonite colony. “We mustn’t play Hot Potato with our pain. Let’s absorb it ourselves, each of us, she says. Let’s inhale it, let’s digest it, let’s process it into fuel.”
The last 25 years have dealt us plenty of pain—the so-called war on terror, racialized police violence, white Christian nationalism, greed-accelerated climate change. These books have helped us process that pain into fuel for change.
A LITTLE PRAYER is a family drama that embodies its title. Meek and heartfelt, the latest film from director Angus MacLachlan is full of quiet divinity.
Set in the suburbs of Winston-Salem, N.C., A Little Prayer focuses on Vietnam War veteran Bill (David Strathairn), who has lived in the same house for decades with his wife Venida (Celia Weston). Their son, David (Will Pullen), and daughter-in-law, Tammy (Jane Levy), live in an extension to their house, seemingly in harmony. But this peace is threatened once Bill begins to suspect that his son is cheating on Tammy.
Lights, camera, action, pope?
About three dozen Hollywood stars will meet Pope Leo this weekend, including actors Cate Blanchett, Chris Pine and Adam Scott, the Vatican said on Monday.
Hermann Göring, Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command, was known as “the best dinner party guest you’ll ever have.” That’s according to James Vanderbilt, the co-writer, co-producer, and director of Nuremberg, the new film dramatizing the origin story of the Nuremberg trials, when, for the first time in history, international law held individuals—not just nations—accountable for crimes against humanity. Göring, played by a precise, brilliant Russell Crowe, was the high command of the Nazi Luftwaffe. He was also, as Vanderbilt told me during a Zoom interview, “funny, charming, and magnetic—none of the things you would associate with a Nazi.”
The film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and arrives in theaters Nov. 7, opens with Göring surrendering himself to the Allied troops in 1945. He directs his driver to wave a white flag...ish (the lace material that he rips from the bottom of his wife’s slip). And just like that, we learn that one of the most powerful Nazi leaders is resourceful, is brazen, is husband.
Here’s a story that never grows tired of the telling: Bruce Springsteen, on the cusp of greatness following a string of instant classic albums that turned a scrawny New Jersey hippie into a bona fide rock star, pivoted to a spare, gothic folk album. Nebraska mystified and frustrated executives, who couldn’t understand why the Boss would zag into such commercially unviable territory with a fuzzy, warbly collection of bedroom demos about losers and outlaws on the fringes of society, but it made sense to Springsteen. To hear him tell the tale, it was the only thing his personal demons would allow him to release at the time, and he didn’t feel comfortable releasing Born in the U.S.A.— the album that would solidify his legacy—until he’d exorcised Nebraska.
Writer and director Scott Cooper brings this story to the screen in thew new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, working off Warren Zanes’ book about Nebraska. Jeremy Allen White is tasked with playing Springsteen, and he does a nice job of it. In a scene near the end, White’s Springsteen finally sits down with a therapist and tries to open up, but only sobs can come out. It’s powerful. White long ago mastered portraying this sort of incoherent anguish on The Bear, and he’s extremely effective as a man struggling with emotions he can’t articulate. It’s too bad the movie doesn’t deserve his performance. The script is riddled with musical biopic cliches and, more damning, a poor grasp of what depression is.
Although Justin Lin is best known now for his work on the Fast & Furious (he’s directed five of the franchise’s 10 entries), he got his breakthrough in independent filmmaking with his 2002 crime drama Better Luck Tomorrow, about Asian-American teenagers in Orange County, Calif. Outside of the Fast franchise, the films Lin has directed and produced often focus on Asian and Asian American identity, exploring topics including generational divides and the pressure to achieve.
Those themes are also present in Lin’s latest film, Last Days, which marks his return to independent filmmaking. Last Days, in theaters now, is a drama about the life of John Allen Chau, the young missionary who was determined to make contact with the Sentinelese, an indigenous tribe living on a government-protected island off the coast of India, and one of the last uncontacted indigenous communities. Chau was killed by the Sentinelese shortly after his first encounter with them, leaving behind a story that generated ongoing conversations and debates about the ethics of international missions work. Chau’s story was also the subject of the 2023 documentary The Mission.
In a climactic moment of the crime-comedy Roofman, Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum) enters a Presbyterian church. It’s a moment of respite, both for him and the audience. Until then, the Army veteran had been a man on the run: After robbing more than 40 McDonald’s to support his family, police unceremoniously arrested Jeffrey at his daughter’s birthday party. Though sentenced to 45 years in prison, he escapes and camps out in a hollow wall behind a bicycle display in a Toys R Us (Here is where I’ll mention that the film is based on a true story).
Pretty quickly, Jeffrey’s refuge becomes isolating. What good is a store full of toys if you have nobody to play with? While it would be risky to enter a public space, the desperation for connection drives Jeffrey to the pews.
The Spiritual Life podcast, hosted by Father James Martin, features thought-provoking and honest conversations on faith and meaning. Stephen Colbert, Whoopi Goldberg, Pete Buttigieg, and other guests infuse wisdom and playfulness into the role of spirituality in public and personal life. America Media
WHAT’S THE BEST use of our lives? Should we, as Jesus advises in Matthew 19, sell our possessions and “give the money to the poor” in hopes of a “treasure in heaven”? Or can we interpret this verse in a slightly less extreme way, instead holding up Jesus’ words as a sort of aspirational metaphor?
This question is at the core of The Greatest Possible Good by Ben Brooks.
We meet the Candlewicks, a wealthy but disaffected family of four living in the idyllic Cotswolds in England, surrounded by every luxurious distraction they could desire. Their lives change drastically when the father, Arthur Candlewick, falls into an abandoned mine shaft, sustaining a head injury. While stuck there for three days with his son’s stash of drugs and his daughter’s book on effective altruism, Arthur experiences what he calls his “road to Damascus moment.” The ordeal transforms Arthur, leading him to give away his entire fortune to charity.
This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.
I’m not on TikTok, so I’d never heard of 22-year-old content creator, Taylor Cassidy. Cassidy rose to prominence after she started creating engaging and easily digestible videos about Black history. During my interview with Cassidy, she told me her goal is to make sure her audience feels uplifted and excited about learning.
IN A PERENNIALLY timely 2014 article about the lessons she learned from her experience with trauma, Catherine Woodiwiss wrote, “Trauma is a disfiguring, lonely time even when surrounded in love; to suffer through trauma alone is unbearable.” We need people around us when we’re suffering, if only to know that they’re there to call on when we need something.
When my trauma and anxiety journey started in 2016, I quickly learned that putting up a front of “Everything’s fine!” only made things worse. It was humbling to admit I needed support. It was empowering to realize people wanted to help. I knew that someday, when I felt better (and I would feel better), I would return the favor.
The film Sorry, Baby, from writer-director Eva Victor, is the most accurate depiction I’ve seen of how trauma stays in your mind and body and what it takes to reach a place of stability. After Victor’s character, Agnes, experiences sexual assault, she relies on the help of close friends and a neighbor, and a stranger’s kindness, to help her through the three-year period that follows.
IN STREGA NONA, author and illustrator Tomie dePaola’s most widely known picture book, an Italian witch has a magic pot that produces pasta on command with a song. Strega Nona is a town healer, concocting love potions and curing warts and headaches. In her old age, she hires a man named Big Anthony to help keep her home and garden. She assigns him a list of chores and warns him to never touch the pasta pot.
When Strega Nona leaves for a trip, Big Anthony ignores her warning and tries the spell for himself, singing, “Bubble, bubble, pasta pot, / Boil me some pasta, nice and hot, / I’m hungry and it’s time to sup, / Boil enough pasta to fill me up.” Out comes the pasta! Big Anthony invites everyone to eat, but once the village has had their fill, a horrifying reality sets in: Big Anthony doesn’t know how to stop the pot, and pasta overtakes the village. Just as the townspeople are about to be buried in pasta, Strega Nona returns. She blows three kisses to the pot, stopping the pasta and saving the town. The charming book ends with an image of a very full Big Anthony after having eaten the mess he’s made.
You may be familiar with the tale of Strega Nona; it comes from a long history of folktales. In 19th century Germany, it was known as “Sweet Porridge” and recorded by the Brothers Grimm. The story goes that a poor, hungry girl receives a pot that makes endless porridge. When the girl is away, her mother tries to use the pot and porridge floods the town. Just as the final house is about to be overtaken, the girl returns to say the magic words. Anyone wishing to return to the town had to eat their way back. In the Chinese folktale “The Water Mother,” it wasn’t a pot, but a pail of water that overflowed and created a stream that drowned the pail’s owner. All these tales might call to mind “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” made famous for some in Disney’s Fantasia. In that folktale, an apprentice, tired of doing his mentor’s chores, enchants a broom to do the work for him. The situation quickly gets out of hand, and he is driven to chop up the broom with an axe, but each new splintering creates a new broom. This continues until the sorcerer intercedes, then lectures his apprentice that only a master should invoke a powerful spirit.
“You know what freedom is? No fear,” says Benicio Del Toro’s Sensei Sergio in One Battle After Another, inspiring Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson to face an authoritarian manhunt right on his family’s tail. While both Bob and Sergio are, in certain senses, doomsday preppers, they react quite differently to an impending threat. And how we react when we feel under threat makes a big difference, both to our own wellbeing and to the movements we care about.
In the film, Bob is an in-hiding former member of the far-left revolutionary group called the French 75. For the last 16 years, while raising his daughter Willa in the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross, he’s lived with an intense paranoia about her safety and the potential of his old life coming back to haunt them both.
You may have heard that, at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, Erika Kirk said that she forgave her husband’s assassin.
You may have also heard that only a few minutes later, President Donald Trump said that while Charlie Kirk “did not hate his opponents—he wanted the best for them,” he was different: “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them!” This moment got a lot of attention, understandably so, but another moment stuck out to me even more. And even though we’re almost a week and a half removed from the memorial service, I think it’s still worth exploring today.