Arts & Culture

ANDREW LELAND HAS been going blind since high school. In college, he was formally diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye condition. Leland, who is a writer, editor, and educator, named his memoir The Country of the Blind, after the 1904 H.G. Wells short story in which an explorer falls down a mountain and finds himself in a village where everyone is blind. But unlike the explorer, Leland does not experience a rapid descent into blindness. Instead, for decades he has traversed the blurry middle ground of “becoming blind.” He writes, “It’s so much easier to conceive of it as a binary — you’re either blind or you’re not; you see or you don’t.” The Country of the Blind breaks down the binaries of our understanding of blindness and sightedness, and takes us on a personal and historical journey through the culture of blindness.

Blindness has always been a part of my story. My father, who has both retinitis pigmentosa and Coats disease, started to lose his eyesight in his teens and lost almost all of it by the time he was 27. But his world was not lost when blindness set in. Rather, like Leland and others with blindness, his world was still there; he just needed to learn new ways to traverse it. Growing up, I observed my father navigate the world with intention. He chopped firewood to keep us warm in the winter. He identified different denominations of currency by distinctively folding the bills. He carried a special tool to guide his pen when he signed documents.

Futuristic Dilemmas

In the film The Pod Generation, parents-to-be pay top dollar to gestate a fetus in an artificial womb outside the body, a commodification that more equally distributes the responsibility of pregnancy between males and females. But every technological advancement brings new moral quandaries. Scope Pictures

Thirty years after the release of the Steven Spielberg film that brought T. Rex to the silver screen and turned velociraptor into a global superstar, I sat in the theater watching Jurassic Park again. But this time, it wasn’t the giant dinosaurs that captivated me. It was a small, intimate conversation between Hammond and Sattler.

It’s clear why fans created the once popular but now defunct Facebook page,“Is This Sufjan Stevens Song Gay Or Just About God?” But Stevens’ music has never been either gay or about God. It’s indivisibly gay and about God.

With her book, and her appearance in the documentary series Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets, Jill peels back layers of life on reality TV.

In launching The Reconstruct, Sojourners’ newest newsletter, we hope to continue what we have been doing, but with more regularity: Offering thoughtful, constructive conversations with folks who are changing the world and reforming our faith.

THERE WAS NO WARNING.

I had just returned from a task that brings meaning and purpose to a retiree (triple-A batteries were on sale across town), but stepping over the threshold of my front door, I knew something was wrong.

In the middle distance, our dining room table — a place of memorable family gatherings and special dinners with friends — had been defiled with dozens of randomly shaped pieces of colored cardboard.

I gasped. This monstrous intrusion had presumably been placed there by the other member of my household, whose name I could not utter without a fierce complaint, the cry of a man wounded by a symbol of the last throes of human existence ... the jigsaw puzzle.

She: Oh, you’re home. I found that puzzle I’d misplaced.

Me: But I’m not ready for puzzles! It’s what you do when there’s little left to life, when you’re one step away from the grave!

She: Don’t be silly.

Me: I’m still a young man! In elephant years, I’m a teenager. I just got my driver’s license, for heaven’s sake!

“NOT A SINGLE CELL of his body was the same as it had been in 1995. But he was still himself, just as I was still, despite everything, my teenage self. I had grown over her like rings around the core of a tree, but she was still there.” This reflection is from Bodie Kane, the narrator of Rebecca Makkai’s latest novel, I Have Some Questions for You. The quote captures the ethos of this story in which the main character recalls her past with both urgency and emotional clarity.

Bodie Kane is an LA-based podcaster who has come to teach a mini-mester at Granby, the New Hampshire boarding school she attended for high school. Her students become interested in the case of Thalia Keith — Bodie’s old roommate, who was murdered at Granby when they were both students.

“I think the wrong guy is in prison,” says Bodie’s student Britt — a conviction Bodie comes to share.

AS AN INFANT, my son Malachi inserted an “el” sound into his cries. “Ah-La,” he wailed with outstretched arms. My husband Michael scooped up our boy and crooned Sinéad O’Connor’s lyrics, “All babies are born saying God’s name” (from “All Babies,” on the album Universal Mother, 1994).

As church-going Christians, we didn’t call God “Allah,” but we recognized it as the Islamic name for the Most Divine. We heard that name in our baby’s voice. But what strange lullaby was my husband singing to our child? “All babies are born out of great pain / Over and over, all born into great pain / All babies are crying / For no one remembers God’s name.”

I came of age to O’Connor’s 1990 album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, belting out every word to the hit “Nothing Compares 2 U.” I stayed up late one night during 9th grade to watch O’Connor on S aturday Night Live. I was confused when she sang a cover of Bob Marley’s “War,” itself a rendition of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie’s 1963 speech to the U.N., then tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II. I did not know then that she was protesting years of rampant child sexual abuse largely ignored by the church. She wanted us to listen to the cries of children.