Arts & Culture
Westminster John Knox
ONE OF MY EARLIEST memories of church is being in the children’s choir, pumping my fist in the air and yelling as we sang about David’s victory over Goliath. While my vocal pitch was suspect, I didn’t lack for enthusiasm. But the whole performance taught me something dangerous: Righteous violence is exciting. It’s a lesson I’ve spent a large part of my adult life trying to unlearn.
Eric A. Seibert is a key figure in working through the violent passages of the Hebrew Bible. In his newest book, Redeeming Violent Verses: A Guide for Using Troublesome Texts in Church and Ministry, Seibert argues that the church can’t run away from violent Bible verses. Moreover, he writes, we must incorporate them into our religious experiences. But, Seibert cautions, we must always do this in a way that rejects the glorification of violence that is often found within scripture. Seibert offers several ways for church leaders to accomplish this, including refocusing attention on the victims of violence, or retelling the story to imagine a nonviolent outcome. Individual chapters highlight some specific ideas for how this can be done in children’s education, liturgy, and preaching.
Milkweed
IN THE QUICKENING: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth, Elizabeth Rush explores both the quickening in her own body — the first feeling of the life moving in her belly — and the quickening pace of climate change.
In 2019, Rush embarked on a scientific sea-bound expedition to Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, a writer among dozens of scientists. Their journey, via an icebreaker ship, was the first of its kind, bringing together geologists, paleoclimatologists, oceanographers, and a dozen other flavors of scientists to better understand how climate change is affecting a glacier at the end of the world.
Thwaites Glacier is enormous, bigger than the state of Florida and up to 4,000 feet thick. Because of its sheer size and vulnerability to collapse under warming, Thwaites is often referred to as the “Doomsday Glacier.” This one glacier contributes to about 4 percent of global sea-level rise, and whenever it collapses, it will cause global sea levels to increase by more than two feet.
The cover of ‘Hell Is a World Without You.’ Background photo by S. H. Gue va Unsplash. Graphic by Mitchell Atencio/Sojourners
I don’t think I’ve ever read a book quite like Jason Kirk’s Hell Is a World Without You. This book, a bildungsroman about a teen’s evangelical house of cards and the mounting life experiences, new friends, and cold fingers of doubt that threaten to knock it over, is a call coming from firmly inside the house.
From XO, Kitty
IN THE GEN-Z romance XO, Kitty, Netflix platformed an uncommonly tender father-daughter exchange. “I have feelings for my friend Yuri, who’s a girl,” says Kitty, an American attending high school in Seoul, Korea. Speaking to her father across continents and generations, she’s visibly nervous to come out. He’s nervous too, but only because his daughter called him in the middle of the night. “Oh, thank God,” he exhales. Confused, she asks, “Thank God I’m bi? Or pan? Or fluid?” He smiles. “Whatever pan or fluid is, thank God you’re safe and healthy.”
I realize it’s doubtful the father is literally engaging the divine here — I don’t even know if he’s Christian — but I’ll take what I can get. Depictions of religious parents embracing their children’s queerness are rare. Christian coming-out stories are usually serious dramas, not binge-worthy rom-coms.
Broadleaf
Class Over Race
In Trash: A Poor White Journey, chaplain Cedar Monroe explores the complex dynamics of being poor and white in the U.S. Grounded in liberation theology, the author ultimately calls communities to embrace multiracial solidarity and reject “the empty promises of white supremacy.” Broadleaf
From Text With Jesus
THE AD FOR Text With Jesus promised “A Divine Connection in Your Pocket.” Developed by Catloaf Software, the app is an artificial intelligence chatbot that takes on the persona of the Alpha and Omega. In the paid version of Text With Jesus, you can also chat with Mary, the 12 apostles, Moses, and dozens of other biblical characters, including Satan (if you dare to enable him in the settings menu). Cue eye roll.
In November 2022, ChatGPT went public. With Generative AI now at our fingertips, offering conversational responses to users’ prompts, the AI revolution was officially in full swing. Tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI raced to provide the most accurate, engaging chatbot. But no one has taken the messianic furor around generative AI quite as literally as Catloaf.
A few years before launching Text With Jesus, Catloaf president and CEO Stéphane Peter had created Texts From Jesus, an app that sends users a daily Bible verse. In an email interview with Sojourners, Peter explained that the innovation of ChatGPT offered “a compelling new element of interactivity.” Instead of a static quote from the New Testament the new app lets users have conversations with an AI Jesus.
'Barbie,' Warner Bros.
The greatest single line in cinema of the past 12 months was delivered inside of a Barbie Dreamhouse.
From The Zone of Interest
JONATHAN GLAZER’S FILMS aren’t really stories; they’re experiences. His work is moody and image-driven. Plot matters less than concept, which often makes his work feel like it should be viewed in an art museum rather than in a theater. This is certainly true of his latest, The Zone of Interest, a loose adaptation of a novel by Martin Amis.
Glazer’s film follows a Nazi commandant and his family who live next door to Auschwitz. Theirs is a disturbingly wholesome life — a study in what philosopher Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil,” the bureaucratic just-following-orders mentality that allows evil to proliferate. As such, it’s also a timely film to consider in the context of rising authoritarianism around the world.
AFC running back Raheem Mostert (31) of the Miami Dolphins rushes the ball past NFC cornerback DaRon Bland (26) of the Dallas Cowboys during the 2024 Pro Bowl at Camping World Stadium on Feb 4, 2024 in Orlando, Fla. Nathan Ray Seebeck/USA TODAY Sports via Reuters
On Sunday, I tuned in to watch my first football game in over a year as part of my discipline toward Christian nonviolence. That may seem odd, especially since I’m the person who wrote about quitting the NFL as an act of nonviolence just last year. But this weekend I tuned in for the NFL’s Pro Bowl competition, including the flag football game, to signal my support for player safety and wellbeing.
Fans pack near the stage to cheer the band The Afters at the Creation Christian music festival near Mount Union, Penn., June 29, 2008. Mike Segar/Reuters
Payne details the creation, proliferation, and decline of CCM, tracing the industry’s relationship with conservative evangelical Christianity.
Pope Francis meets with director Martin Scorsese at the Vatican, Jan. 31, 2024. Vatican Media/Handout via REUTERS
Scorsese, talking about his upcoming film on the life of Jesus, told the Los Angeles Times: “I’m trying to find a new way to make it more accessible and take away the negative onus of what has been associated with organized religion.”
'Percy Jackson and the Olympians,' Disney+
As far as coming-of-age stories go, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, a new Disney+ streaming series, is certainly an earth-shattering one
'Dawn of the Nugget,' Netflix
More than 23 years after the box office hit Chicken Run came out, Aardman Animations has finally released a sequel: Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is a punny, thrilling, and slightly disturbing homage to the art of claymation, with abundant lessons about collective liberation, trauma, and parenting.
'The Color Purple,' Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
In her support of Icke and Rowling, Walker seems to have lost sight of her own claims about God and humanity that are revealed in The Color Purple and other works.
'The Book of Clarence,' Sony Pictures
Director Jeymes Samuel’s newest movie, The Book of Clarence, is not just a biblical epic but a Black biblical epic.
'The Iron Claw' / A24
The Von Erichs believed in the salvific power of both faith and wrestling.
Illustration by Melanie Lambrick
YOU THOUGHT YOU were going to be selected for the trial of some of the fascists who staged an insurrection at the nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. You went through jury selection and everything! But for some reason (maybe your use of the word “fascists”), they turned you down. What’s next?
Here’s what to expect when you’re expecting Jan. 6-jury-related grief:
1. Denial
C’mon. There’s no way. Why wouldn’t they want me? I am a morally upright and very impressive person who has all the right opinions and does all the right things. I am a good Christian who believes that God’s law is what matters most, and I will do the right and just thing even when it is against human law. I am the most law-abiding citizen of the United States re: God’s law. Which is totally relevant to what the judge is looking for. Totally.
Audible
PASTOR ALEXIS (narrated by Stephanie Hsu) is a recent divinity school graduate who has been hand-selected by Pastor William Hoyt (voiced by Bill Irwin) to succeed him at Trinity Grace Church in Ohio. Alexis has been working alongside Will, learning the rhythms and rigors of pastoring a small-town church. She’s young, radical, and fearless. These qualities — the very reasons Will chose her — are exactly what make a significant and influential portion of the congregation certain she’s the wrong choice. Then Will dies by suicide. Alexis is thrust into the role of lead pastor far sooner than she expected, and in apocalyptic conditions. All this is merely the first episode of Six Sermons, a 12-episode fiction podcast written by Asa Merritt (a journalist and author of the 2015 play True Believer about the Arab Spring).
Six Sermons is the story of how Alexis navigates this intense crisis: How will the cause of Will’s death impact the congregation? What should the memorial service entail? How is Alexis caring for her own mental health in the wake of her friend and mentor’s death?
Alexis, in particular, experiences God’s absence acutely. Six Sermons powerfully illustrates the humanity of pastors; both Will and Alexis are raw, vulnerable, and flawed. Early in their mentoring relationship, Will tells Alexis, “You don’t really know God until you meet him at night.” This is a story of meeting God at night.
Convergent Books
COLE ARTHUR RILEY never wanted to write a prayer book. But when she went looking for liturgical practices that centered Black emotion, Black literature, and Black bodies, she couldn’t find much. Now, for nearly four years, Riley has been curating the Instagram page @blackliturgies, which integrates the truths of dignity, lament, rage, justice, and rest into written prayers. Her new book, Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human, expands on that work. Typically, prayer books are not page-turners, but once I started reading this one, I couldn’t put it down.
By interpolating corporeal language into her prayers, Riley offers a refreshingly accessible entry into contemplative literature. She has a gentle way of encouraging readers to engage with her prayers. “Turn them over in your hand. Take a deep breath,” she writes. “There is no demand I will make of you, apart from staying near to yourself, your body, your own soul, and the stories that dwell there.”