Arts & Culture
From Show Me A Hero
WHEN I THINK about the 2015 HBO miniseries Show Me a Hero, the person who first comes to mind is Nick Wasicsko. This is understandable: According to its HBO blurb, the politician is the show’s main protagonist. But this scripted drama is about the real-life 1980s and ’90s struggle for public housing in Yonkers, N.Y., when low-income people of color worked for integration and the city government resisted—even as daily contempt-of-court fines threatened to bankrupt it. So, it feels weird to focus on the white Mayor Wasicsko, although he (eventually) fights for the public housing too.
This discomfort may be the point. “The thing I don’t buy anymore,” said the show’s co-writer, David Simon (The Wire, Treme), “is if we elect the right guy, the great men of history, that’ll save us. ... Our problems are systemic, and we’re going to have to solve them as people.”
We Are / Getty Images
I WROTE MY first “Eyes and Ears” column in January 1987 when I was a Sojourners staff editor. Over the ensuing years, I’ve changed from Protestant to Catholic, from full-time journalist to full-time teacher, and from city mouse to country mouse. I’ve been married to Polly Duncan Collum and helped raise four children. Through all that, I’ve kept this column going, but now I’m pulling the plug to make way for whatever’s next.
In my first column, I set out a twofold purpose for this space. I intended to track the merger of politics and popular culture that began in earnest with the 1980 election of a movie star president. I noted then that our public life was largely being reduced to an “ephemeral community of shared media experience,” by which, at the time, I meant mostly Hollywood movies and various televised spectacles.
By the time we elected a reality TV star as president, the convergence of politics and popular culture was already long complete, except that, in a world of microtargeted messaging, there is no longer even much “shared media experience” from which to forge a community.
My second rationale for starting the column, however, has held up a little better. I noted way back then that, in both politics and popular culture and in the intellectual netherworld of think tanks and commentary journalism, the very definitions of terms such as “America,” “democracy,” and “Christianity” were up for grabs. In 1987, I called this a “war of ideas” and it continues with a vengeance, though often degenerating into an emotional war of identities.
However, “stuff happens.” And in these 35 years, two big things have happened that exploded many of my expectations and drastically altered the cultural landscape.
Using theologically diverse Christian figures ranging from Billy Graham to Mister Rogers, Mayfield offers examples of what insecure attachment to God can look or feel like, including feelings of doubt, shame, or distancing. Leaning heavily on attachment theory — a theory that examines relationships and the nature of the bonds between people, especially between caregivers and children, romantic partners, and close platonic relationships — Mayfield provides a relatable guide to assist folks with identifying the deeper questions and beliefs behind some of our spiritual frameworks.
Photo by Biegun Wschodni on Unsplash
This spring, I’m thinking about the season as a blooming period for the complexities of truth. That’s not to say that truth itself is complicated, but that the application, acknowledgment, or apprehension of truth can be a sticky mess. Truth will set you free, but then we get to wrestle with freedom and the responsibility that comes with it: Realizing that racism is ingrained in the church is important, for instance, but acting to rid the church of that sin is paramount.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
Lent is the angstiest season of the liturgical calendar: Jesus in the desert with the devil; us sitting with our sin and mortality. So below you’ll find six songs to accompany you this brooding, contemplative season. Soon, Easter will roll around and bring with it upbeat resurrection bops, but for now, the tunes are appropriately emo — at least lyrically.
A dental x-ray. Photo: Opreanu Roberto Sorin / Alamy
Several days ago, I spent more than I would have liked on a dental procedure that involved removing decay from one of my molars, doing a lot of horrible-sounding drilling and scraping, then saving the delicate bits that remained by capping it with a fake tooth. My dentist insisted this was called a “crown,” but I know a euphemism when I see one.
Allison Bailey via Reuters Connect
Last year, Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg, a social practice artist, created In America: Remember — a vast field of flags on the national mall, one for each American who died from COVID-19. Visitors, both in-person and digitally, had the opportunity to dedicate a flag by writing a message on the while poly film. When the installation began in mid-September of 2021, there were 666,624 deaths. When the installation closed in early October, there were 701,133 deaths. As of this week, nearly 1 million people have died of COVID-19 in the United States, 6 million globally. As we try to grapple with the weight of these fatalities, we’re revisiting an interview from late October 2021 between Firstenberg and Sojourners associate culture editor Jenna Barnett, in which they discuss what it looks like to honor grief and memorialize an ongoing pandemic.
Brad Stine performs. By Hope4ASU via Flickr.
When I was a kid, Christian comic Brad Stine yelled at me about wearing a helmet while riding my bike. He also yelled about seatbelt and car-seat laws, smoking laws, and gay marriage through his stand-up routine that I sat in the front row for.
Zoë Kravitz as Catwoman and Robert Pattinson as Batman in The Batman (2022).
This is a tale of two orphans, Bruce and Jephthah. A tale of two cities, Gotham and Gilead. A story of curses and vengeance and redemption.
Graves in a natural burial ground. Graham Hardy / Alamy
My father saw Lent as a chance to build a more sustainable life, much like training for a championship game. As a mother and teacher of environmental education in the mountains of North Carolina, I couldn’t have imagined how the Lenten practice of my childhood would help me face both life and death amid a global climate crisis decades later.
Illustration by Melanie Lambrick
ALLOW ME TO introduce myself: I’m IKEA, an expert in DIY construction and deconstruction, here to explain a recent religious phenomenon. According to a 2021 Relevant magazine article, Christianity is in “the age of deconstruction.” “Through deconstruction,” explains writer Kurtis Vanderpool, “we are able to find the good and the helpful parts of our faith upbringing, while reshaping or throwing out the unhelpful.” But there is a problem! While the exvangelicals on Twitter are obsessed with deconstruction, “most people you will find in church are uncomfortable with deconstruction,” says Vanderpool.
You may be thinking, “Is an enormous warehouse full of good-enough furniture really equipped to explain a sensitive theological process? No offense, IKEA, but did you even go to seminary?” No, I didn’t. But nondenominational churches often pay me thousands of dollars to host massive lock-ins and I overhear A LOT of really bad theology as youth pastors, groggy chaperones, and sugar-faced youth groups play hide-and-seek in my showrooms. (I’m pretty sure I didn’t dream this.)
Illustration by Aldo Jarillo
My stanzas do not resemble marimbas
after all. These lines are the warmed
rank of organ pipes, droning & melting
their millennia into my shoulders.
Yes, yes, my God is heavyset & broad
& not a week of childhood passes
without Bach or Luther or a collect
that echoes the grungy psalmist
Forever in Thy Path: The God of Black Liberation, by Harry H. Singleton III / Orbis Books
Used with permission from Orbis Books (orbisbooks.com)
TO ITS CREDIT, the Black church seeks to instill a sense of “somebodyness” through positive reinforcement in conversion. But it seeks to do so without deeply immersing the convert in the true history of his/her culture. Consequently, the Black church falls prey to the universalism of the white church by naïvely thinking that one can be a true child of God while possessed of a deformed racial self-image. In so doing, the static conservatism of the Black church is at odds with freedom movements and prophetic leaders who are able to judge rightly that the freedom of Blacks cannot come through a rejection of one’s history, whether intentional or not.
Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong / Penguin Press
IN OCEAN VUONG'S latest collection Time Is a Mother, the T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet reaches for depths of what was lost.
We encounter Vuong submerged in profound and compounding grief after the death of his mother. The book’s epigraph from César Vallejo reads, “Forgive me, Lord: I’ve died so little,” touching on the guilt that can accompany those left behind after a death. These poems hold the tension between looking back and moving forward, with the awareness of someone acquainted with feelings “that made death so large it was indistinguishable / from air,” as Vuong writes in “Not Even.” Those grieving search for comfort, while also examining life before loss—sometimes recognizing that grief was always present.
Time Is a Mother is full of questions that reckon with these past experiences. One of the first poems asks, “How else do we return to ourselves but to fold / The page so it points to the good part.” Other verses ask, “What if it wasn’t the crash that made us, but the debris?” and “How come the past tense is always longer?”
Get Untamed: The Journal by Glennon Doyle
WHEN I PICKED up Get Untamed—a journal based on Glennon Doyle’s best-selling memoir Untamed—at a secondhand bookstore, I was, as the kids say, down bad. Real bad. A year of overscheduling, overcommitting, and underhydrating had turned me into the caretaker of a creative and existential abyss. In that bookstore, I was reaching for more than a how-to book. I was reaching for a lifeline. And I found one—just not in the way I expected.
Doyle emerged onto the nonfiction scene with Carry On, Warrior in 2013, followed by Love Warrior in 2016. The latter book was raw and vulnerable, detailing the dissolution and resurrection of Doyle’s first marriage. Acclaimed by Oprah, Brené Brown, and Elizabeth Gilbert, Love Warrior celebrated love’s ability to overcome all obstacles—from addiction to internalized misogyny—in a marriage. Then Doyle met retired professional soccer player Abby Wambach. Doyle and her husband divorced. Now Doyle and Wambach are, by all accounts, happily married. The events leading to this form the basis for Untamed.
From The Worst Person in the World
IN A 2001 lecture titled “Devotional Cinema,” filmmaker and film editor Nathaniel Dorsky broadly described devotional practice as “the interruption that allows us to experience what is hidden and to accept with our hearts our given situation.” Dorsky connected this definition to the experience of watching a movie, claiming, “It is alive as a devotional form,” allowing viewers to uncover truths about themselves and the world by watching someone else’s story. A movie doesn’t have to be experimental art, a heavy drama, or a religious epic to be a devotional experience. Often, the most profound stories are about the subtle changes of the soul over time and the experiences and relationships that define a person. We relate to them because, like a devotional practice, they help us reflect on our own lives and consider how we live in relation to others.
Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World is one such film, following its protagonist, Julie (Renate Reinsve), from her late 20s to her early 30s. Trier places Julie as the main character of her own story, narrated to us as she lives it, changing careers, falling in love, breaking up, experiencing loss, and becoming wiser and more comfortable with herself as a result.
From The Green Knight
WHEN I FIRST read Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “truth” early last year, I did a double take to make sure it wasn’t written in 2021. The 1987 poem personifies its titular subject as a living being that can knock its “firm knuckles / Hard on the door,” whose arrival brings an equal mix of anticipation and apprehension. Brooks describes multiple responses one can have to the arrival of truth. For those who have made peace with lies, the truth can be threatening: “Shall we not dread him, / Shall we not fear him / After so lengthy a / Session with shade?” Even for those who have longed for truth’s arrival, blissful or willful ignorance seems to be a better alternative than the terror of having to engage truth head on: “Shall we not shudder?— / Shall we not flee / Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter / Of the familiar / Propitious haze?” Regardless, Brooks makes one thing clear: The question is not a matter of if truth will come, but when. The most important question of our lives then becomes, how are we to greet it?
In the poem, Brooks doesn’t name the truth that haunts her—although since she first published it in 1949, as the stage for the civil rights movement was being set, one possibility might be the systemic mistreatment of Black people and white people’s willful obliviousness to it. I found the poem to be a peculiar comfort in this time as we try to adjust to an ever-shifting landscape of new realities and reckon with truths about ourselves we might otherwise prefer remain hidden.
Similarly, several films offer insight into how people receive truth’s advent.
Photo by Norbert Buduczki on Unsplash
Horror has always leaned on religion to provide the backbone for its explorations of evil, even before the first time Dracula cowered in fear at the sight of a cross. But religion doesn’t just inspire the horror genre, it utilizes it, too. The Bible is full of horror.
From Women of the Movement
Moved by Love
The limited ABC series Women of the Movement follows Mamie Till-Mobley as she grieves the murder of her son Emmett Till and fights for justice. Directed by four Black women, the show tells the true story of the woman who helped fuel the civil rights movement. Two Drifters
Catholic priest Manuel Salazar (left) blesses dogs with holy water in Iztapalapa, Mexico. / Henry Romero / Reuters
“We want to recognize how you have blessed Bandit and how Bandit has blessed you.”