Arts & Culture

“What happens when strangers meet?” is the driving question of the Silkroad Ensemble, an instrumental group conceived in 1998 by cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Musicians from around the world connect and communicate through music in response to this question. Lines between East and West, classical and folk blur as musicians work together to give old sounds new life. When musician and historian Rhiannon Giddens became artistic director of Silkroad in 2020, she focused the musical conversation on railroads. What emerged, and is still emerging, is American Railroad: A Musical Journey of Reclamation — a multiyear collaborative project including performances, residencies, an album, and a podcast exploring the untold stories of the people who helped lay the tracks connecting the United States. 

I WANT TO believe there’s a live band at a church somewhere in the U.S. playing Joy Oladokun’s latest album, Observations From a Crowded Room. After all, Oladokun is no stranger to sanctuaries: By the time she was 16, Oladokun was leading the worship music at the charismatic nondenominational church her family attended. But around the age of 24, she quit, explaining in an interview with NPR, “I just felt like so much of my attention was going towards taking care of people and singing the right songs and not saying the wrong thing on Sunday.”

I think, for a long time, I’ve been looking for a church willing to risk singing the wrong thing on Sunday—to risk singing something like these lyrics from Oladokun’s “Dust/Divinity”: “I’m a skeptic who still prays / ... ’Cause though it hurts me to believe / It kills me not to / And I am trying to find my way through the middle / And I am desperate to receive every good thing / From now until eternity / From dust until divinity.”

Trauma changes your memories. When I think of traumatic experiences in my life — what happened, how I felt before that moment, how I felt afterward, the changes I’ve noticed in myself since — they often play in short bursts. Those bursts are rarely sequential, and the length of time they last depends on how long I allow myself to linger on a memory.

Filmmaker RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is a record of trauma. It tells the story of two Black boys’ experience at an abusive reform academy in Jim Crow-era Florida. The fictional Nickel Academy is inspired by an actual place, Florida’s Dozier School for Boys, where students received brutal treatment at the hands of staff. A 2012 investigation by the University of South Florida uncovered dozens of human burial sites on the property.

Ross does something unique with this story about trauma, memory, and how they relate to each other: He makes it feel authentic.

IN HIS FIRST performance on season 19 of America’s Got Talent, Richard Goodall was shaking. The 55-year-old middle school janitor from Terre Haute, Ind., pushed his glasses up from his perspiring face. “Whew,” he said.

“Are you a bit nervous?” Simon Cowell, one of the judges, asked.

“This has been a long time coming,” Goodall replied. He patted his chest and took a deep breath.

My husband, Michael, sitting beside me on the couch, was nearly in tears, and Goodall hadn’t even started to sing.

If you’ve encountered Mason Mennenga online, it’s likely due to one of his viral tweets.

Gems like “bible college girls are like ‘marriage is so hard’ yeah, you married a 19-year old evangelical man” and “christians will name their kids after old testament prophets and then are shocked that their kids eventually speak out against injustices.” Occasionally, he dunks on a conservative personality, or he becomes the punching bag for conservative voices frustrated by his progressive theology.

But Mennenga is more than a social media account. He hosts two podcasts, writes about theology and culture, and works as director of admissions at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities.

The Piano Lesson is a film about what we pass on from one generation to the next: family heirlooms, deeply embedded wounds, and — as is the case for the Charles family — deeply embedded spirituality. 

A musical about Tammy Faye Messner, more widely known by her former name, Tammy Faye Bakker, seems odd at first. But the Broadway stage feels like the right place for the rise and fall of televangelism to play out. Televangelism, after all, is meant to be a spectacle. And its shadow of corruption, sex, and money only add to the theatrics of it all.

Heretic is a litany of theological inquiries wrapped in the skin of a horror movie. Like Legion, the frights of directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ film are many, but its biggest scare isn’t demonic or paranormal or gory: It’s the unique terror of being caught in a theological conversation with a self-righteous man.

MAYBE YOU FIRST saw it while sitting in the waiting room of the doctor’s office — a Fox News banner update across the bottom of the screen. Or perhaps you saw the hashtag on X or Threads. Maybe you’re following the story as internet sleuths exchange theories on Reddit. Here’s what you know: There’s an SUV making its way from California to Washington, D.C., driven by a man and a woman in their 20s. They’re transporting some sort of nuclear device, and they plan to blow up the president. And, for some reason, law enforcement isn’t taking this very seriously.

It’s the story of the moment. Even though nobody has any real facts. Everyone just knows we’re collectively watching a disaster unfold.

Such is the setup for Jason Pargin’s I’m Starting to Worry About this Black Box of Doom, a parable of the dangers of the information age. Pargin’s witty, incisive novel illustrates how social media has eroded our ability to trust each other.