Roundup: Carrying a boulder, toppling statues, art and prayer retreat, and more

NEW SONG: “Trust in You” by Antoine Bradford IV: Alternative soul artist Antoine Bradford released the original song “Trust in You” on April 21, and then came this acoustic version, which simultaneously moves me and stills me! Another single, “How Many Times,” came out yesterday, and a full-length album is on its way, on the Humble Beast label.

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PODCAST EPISODES

“Andre Henry on Systemic Racism,” Conversing (Fuller Studio), May 7, 2020: Writer, musical artist, speaker, and activist Andre Henry sits down with Mark Labberton, president of Fuller Theological Seminary (where Henry earned a master’s in 2016), to share his personal journey of learning about systemic racism and some of the ways he’s exposing and pushing against it. He talks about growing up the son of Jamaican immigrants in Stone Mountain, Georgia, and the early influence of reggae music; his moving to New York City during the age of stop-and-frisk to take a job as a worship leader; and his time at Fuller in California, where, in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death, he shifted from the perspective of “Black people are treated differently in the US” to “The US is a fundamentally racist society.”

Along the way, he discusses “whiteness” as an invention made to subjugate other people, not letting the news cycle dictate when you talk about racism, his study of social movement theory and the post-Shoah theologians, his realization that black people are not powerless, his writing the songs “It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way” and “How Long,” the failure of many (white) church ministers to minister to black congregants, the resistance he met while interviewing for pastoral positions, the religious doubts that surfaced after repeatedly hearing from Christian friends that “Racism isn’t a priority for God” and that social activism distracts from the gospel, and more.

I particularly appreciated hearing Henry describe, starting at 28:36, an art piece he performed over the course of six months in 2016, in which he pulled around a hundred-pound boulder in a wagon everywhere he went—work, classes, dinners, church, grocery store, etc. The boulder was painted white and had words like “Mass incarceration,” “police brutality,” and “white fragility” written on it. Labberton, who was one of the many witnesses of this performance, interprets its intent as “I’m trying to externalize a burden that is the burden that I walk with every day, and I want you to see it for what it actually is, and the weightiness of it.” “Stunning,” “profound,” “a significant liturgical act,” and “a Jeremiah kind of an enactment” are some of the ways Labberton describes Henry’s boulder-carrying, the latter referring to the biblical prophet’s outrageous symbolic acts, such as the retrieval of soiled, tattered underwear, the breaking of a clay jug, and the wearing of an oxen yoke. (As a side note, one of my all-time favorite articles from the esteemed Image journal is “The Avant-Garde and Sacred Discontent: Contemporary Performance Artists Meet Ancient Jewish Prophets” by Wayne Roosa.)

To learn more about Andre Henry, visit his website, http://andrehenry.co/, where you can find his Hope and Hard Pills podcast, blog, and music and sign up for his newsletter. See also his self-introduction on Twitter and the short video Fuller Studio made with him in 2016, “Culture Care and Music.”

“Why Christians Have a Reputation for Smashing Statues,” Quick to Listen, interview with Matthew Milliner, July 8, 2020: Following the killing of George Floyd in May, protesters have torn down or vandalized dozens of statues connected to the Confederacy and to other controversial historical figures like Christopher Columbus. Matthew Milliner, associate professor of art history at Wheaton College, joins Christianity Today’s global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen “to discuss how much earlier Christian battles over statues echo today’s fights, what Christians have learned that might help us better understand the call to remove statues today, and whether we should even be creating memorials and monuments in the first place.”

Milliner references the Emancipation Memorial and Mary McLeod Bethune statue in DC’s Lincoln Park; the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama [previously]; Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial; the St. Augustine Foot Soldiers Monument; and UNC–Chapel Hill’s Silent Sam monument to the Confederacy and lesser-known Unsung Founders Memorial. After the interview he created a chart titled “What to Do with Monuments,” providing five options and citing historical analogues as well as contemporary examples in the US and internationally.

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OBITUARY: “Ennio Morricone, Oscar-Winning Composer of Film Scores, Dies at 91”: Regarded as one of the most influential film composers of all time, Ennio Morricone wrote over four hundred scores for cinema and television, as well as over a hundred classical works. I know him best for the soundtrack of The Mission, especially the “Gabriel’s Oboe” theme, which is played in the movie by the Spanish Jesuit priest Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) as an outreaching gesture of friendship to the Paraguayan Guarani.

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ONLINE RETREAT: “The Art of Prayer” with Monsignor Timothy Verdon: On August 7 Paraclete Press is hosting an online retreat with Monsignor Timothy Verdon, a Roman Catholic priest and art historian based in Florence, Italy. As in his book Art and Prayer: The Beauty of Turning to God, Msgr. Verdon will reflect on the ways in which visual art has historically supported, and can still support, prayer, guiding participants in meditating on images from the lives of Christ, Mary, and the saints. View the schedule and reserve your ticket here.

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CHORAL ANTHEM: “Lead Me, Lord” | Text: Psalm 5:8, Psalm 4:9 | Music by Samuel Sebastian Wesley, 1905 | Performed by the Chapel Choir of Girton College, Cambridge, June 2020 [HT: Malcolm Guite]

Lead me, Lord,
Lead me in thy righteousness;
Make thy way plain before my face.
For it is thou, Lord,
Thou, Lord, only,
That makest me dwell in safety.