Arts & Culture
Photo by Kimiya Oveisi via Unsplash.
Whenever I am writing, editing, or reading, it feels wrong to be without a cup of coffee (black, no sugar). I know I am not the only editor who feels this way. [Editor’s note: Can confirm] Also, I feel confident in speaking for the editorial team when I say the 10 stories we have picked for you this week are best enjoyed with a piping-hot cup of joe.
Questions to help you use your privilege for the flourishing of all.
Christianity leaves a lot to interpretation — both biblically and apparently, culinarily.
Jennifer Hudson as Aretha Franklin in “Respect.” Quantrell D. Colbert / Metro Goldwyn Mayer
Respect is a must-see work, moving in its revelation of a superstar whose glow many of us have seen, the shadows surrounding them more hidden from view. Ms. Franklin was not just an incredible singer but also a civil rights activist like her father.
Photo by lucas Favre on Unsplash
The absurd hope found in Zillow-ing during the pandemic.
Becki Falwell and her husband Jerry Falwell Jr. in 2018.
While the show's gossipy tone offers an entertaining portrait of the affection Falwell and his wife had for, shall we say, the things of this world, listeners may find themselves wanting more. I know I did.
By Madrolly via shutterstock.
Change happens constantly, mostly without a second thought: The moon changes its phase ever gradually. We change from sleeping to waking. I changed this introduction after receiving edits from my colleagues.
But when change — good or bad — does catch our individual or collective attention, it often presents challenges.
Photo via Facebook, Lucy Dacus
Home Video is not a Christian album, but I didn’t really want it to be. There are songs for VBS, but these are songs about VBS. We need both.
Billionaire businessman Jeff Bezos and pioneering female aviator Wally Funk emerge from their capsule after their flight aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket on the world's first unpiloted suborbital flight near Van Horn, Texas, July 20, 2021 in a still image from video. Blue Origin/Handout via REUTERS.
There’s more than one way to tell a story. As journalists, we know this well. As readers, you know this well. The news this week gave us ample opportunities to remember that stories can be told with different — sometimes even contradictory — purposes.
Julie Rodgers in "Pray Away" / Netflix
The spiritual and psychological harm of conversion therapy is indeed intense. Rodgers gives an insider’s account in her new memoir Outlove and Pray Away, which premieres on August 3. Her survival story will appeal to readers and viewers whether they are LGBTQ and Christian, one or the other, or none of the above.
Illustration by Ric Carrasquillo
I’ve told you there are wolves out here.
Don’t you believe me?
You could fall in a hole
too deep to climb out of.
You could slip on wet rocks
and fall into the river and drown.
Good thing I noticed
your pink nose was missing.
Good thing I turn around
to check on what’s behind me.
Remember that leading the flock
I look forward to find tender grass.
Until This Shakes Apart by Five Iron Frenzy
UPBEATS AND BEATDOWNS, the first album by the Denver-based band Five Iron Frenzy, opens with a song about the evil of manifest destiny and the genocide of Native people. In the second song, the protagonist gives all his money to a homeless man. The fourth track is about refusing to pledge allegiance to the American flag. This was in 1996. On an album sold primarily in Christian bookstores, by a band that played evangelical church basements.
Five Iron Frenzy is still making music and, earlier this year, put out the most caustically political album of their career, Until This Shakes Apart. Released days after the Capitol insurrection, the album pulls no punches in its criticism of evangelicals’ embrace of Trumpian politics. And the band has never sounded better.
After their sloppy, fun ska-punk days in the ’90s and their hit-and-miss, genre-hopping experiments in the early 2000s, the band broke up, reformed in 2011, and released the mature and muscular Engine of a Million Plots in 2013. Rejoined with songwriter Scott Kerr (who had left the band in 1998), the band found new purpose and energy as its songs became more introspective. The result was a record more in the vein of Jimmy Eat World than third-wave ska, ending with a song about uncertainty and hope rather than their previous, hymn-like closers. The band remains loud and dark, but Until This Shakes Apart is more explicitly influenced by older forms of ska, like reggae and two-tone. And where Engine of a Million Plots was introspective, this album points the finger outward. No one is safe from singer Reese Roper’s critique on this record, each song unleashing righteous anger at a different target: heartless immigration policy, gentrification of the band’s hometown, the Confederate flag, oil profiteering, and so much more.
On Pilgrimage: The Sixties, by Dorothy Day
LOVE IS LACED liberally through this compendium, skillfully edited by Robert Ellsberg, of Dorothy Day’s monthly columns from The Catholic Worker, the newspaper of the movement Day co-founded. Love for God, especially as it lives in the poor whose burdens of poverty she tried to share, shines through Day’s accounts of her travels and her life at the Catholic Worker houses of hospitality in New York and the community’s farms. Seeing examples of living love seems even more important today as our country faces the same problems as in the ’60s: racism, poverty in a land of plenty, and endless wars that consume needed resources.
Day writes of these issues, but love as lived through acts of mercy is what unites the essays. She describes Catholic Worker houses of hospitality across the country where, daily, the hungry are fed, the naked are clothed, the dead are mourned and buried, and the sick and the imprisoned are visited. In these essays, these acts are presented in opposition to works of war and racism. She documents that the latter are fueled by an out-of-control U.S. military whose expenditures rob the poor.
Coming in for special notice are prisoners of conscience, Day’s colleagues who are imprisoned for resisting the draft that fueled the Vietnam War, including, in 1968, burning draft files in Catonsville, Md., and Milwaukee, in nonviolent destruction of what Jesuit priest Dan Berrigan called “improper property.” These nonviolent trespasses against the law by the anti-war and civil rights movements were in obedience to God’s laws. After several good recent biographies of Day, reading again the words that first introduced me to the Catholic Worker movement brought back memories of those days when Day helped so many commit to nonviolence as a way to make a world where, as her mentor Peter Maurin would say, “it’s easier for people to be good.”
Georgia O'Keeffe's "Sky Above Clouds IV" (1965)
NEARLY EVERYONE I know is moving. Homes that were once beloved, or at least tolerable, now represent forced encampment. Like rats departing a sinking ship, many of us are running from the wreckage of 2020 with little more than the clothes on our backs and enough money for a security deposit. Change is in the air. Yet, as the adage goes, “The more things change …” Cells renew, but bones remain.
The image on a postcard on my desk, taken by the infamous Carl Van Vechten, is Georgia O’Keeffe next to one of her iconic cow skulls. Her eyes are closed as she cradles the skull in her hand and leans her head against it. The gesture, almost reverent in its grace, seems to acknowledge the animal who once was. The picture is a study in contrast, much like O’Keeffe’s life. According to the postcard, the photo was captured at O’Keeffe’s New York penthouse in 1936. By this point, she’d already made her first pilgrimages to the American Southwest, a region that would provide her with artistic inspiration until her death in 1986. It was also a refuge from the stress of her marriage to the influential photographer and philanderer Alfred Stieglitz. Maybe it’s fitting then that one of the few O’Keeffe pieces I’ve seen in person is related to her attempts to find sanctuary.
Tree Rings
The three short films in The Trees Remember series span 60 years and feature Black women in the outdoors, reframing narrow historical narratives of who has access to nature. Directed by Angela Tucker, they portray memory, relationships, and belonging in the outdoors. TuckerGurl Inc.
Unique Pathways
On the Spectrum: Autism, Faith, and the Gifts of Neurodiversity chronicles author Daniel Bowman Jr.’s life as an autistic Christian, starting from his unexpected diagnosis at 35. Illuminating the ways that neurodiversity enriches us all, this book debunks misconceptions and offers hope. Brazos Press.
From We Are Lady Parts
NO MATTER YOUR racial, ethnic, spiritual, or geographic background, or where you fall on the gender spectrum, a vital part of adulthood is determining your identity—particularly in relationship to the community you grew up in. At some point, we all diverge from others’ opinions of us. Hopefully, we also find people who help us in our quest to define ourselves.
The Peacock series We Are Lady Parts, about an all-female, Muslim punk band, shows a group of characters who support each other on their individual journeys of identity, with their religion and larger community playing central roles. The series, created and written by Nida Manzoor, presents a diverse look at modern-day Muslim womanhood. Its themes also carry over into the broader experience of maturing alongside your faith, and what happens when your expression of belief conflicts with cultural expectations.
Lady Parts is fronted by the fierce feminist Saira (Sarah Kameela Impey). Earthy mom Bisma (Faith Omole) plays bass, and aggressive Ayesha (Juliette Motamed) is on drums. Momtaz (Lucie Shorthouse), often shown vaping through her niqab, is their manager. Saira decides the band needs a lead guitarist, eventually selecting Amina (Anjana Vasan), a painfully shy, tightly wound Ph.D. student.
Image from Aliens
WHEN AUTHOR AND film critic Sarah Welch-Larson was growing up, she wasn’t a horror movie fan. That started to change when, as a teenager, she had a fateful encounter with the James Cameron film Aliens on cable TV.
The movie’s hero, Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, “looked a lot like my mom and had a lot of the attitudes my mom has about some things,” Welch-Larson, who writes about faith and popular culture for the online publications Think Christian and Bright Wall/Dark Room, told Sojourners. “I was captivated by that character.” Two weeks later, Welch-Larson watched the first 1979 Alien movie, directed by Ridley Scott. It frightened her and she couldn’t get it out of her head.
Eventually Welch-Larson’s interest grew into a fascination with the series as a whole. Her new book, Becoming Alien: The Beginning and End of Evil in Science Fiction’s Most Idiosyncratic Film Franchise, looks at recurring themes of evil, greed, and destruction in the Alien films through the lens of theologian Catherine Keller’s 2002 book, The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming, in which Keller examines the first two verses of Genesis.
“She writes a lot about God setting everything into relationship with each other. God’s saying there’s a relationship you have with the rest of the world and with other created beings around you,” Welch-Larson explains. “Once you start to deny those relationships, you’re saying they’re not as important as what God has created you to be, and Keller says that’s the source of evil.”
Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash
Theology isn’t the only place we overlook the feminine.
I think we usually ask these questions in a penitential key: “Where was God during this tragedy?” Being a human is difficult — so difficult that it is not only hard to imagine someone created us, but also that there exists anything outside of the mess we’ve created. We often collapse in on each other — whether by accident or on purpose.