SPOTIFY PLAYLIST: August 2024 (Art & Theology): An assortment of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, old and new.
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OBITUARIES:
>> Jürgen Moltmann (1926–2024): Jürgen Moltmann, one of the leading Christian theologians of the twentieth century, died June 3 at age ninety-eight. His conversion to Christianity began while he was a German soldier in a POW camp in Belgium during World War II, and he afterward spent most of his career as a theology professor at the University of Tübingen, confronting the theological implications of Auschwitz, among other topics. The pastors of the first church I joined as an adult were deeply influenced by Moltmann (and his protégé Miroslav Volf), so I have been shaped by his theology, especially in the areas of theodicy (which he binds inextricably to Christology) and eschatology.
Moltmann challenged the classical doctrine of divine impassibility, which says God does not feel pain or have emotions, in his seminal book The Crucified God (1974), articulating how God the Father, not just God the Son, is a being who feels and is moved and who also suffered on Good Friday; understanding this, he says, is key to understanding how God relates to the suffering of the world. In Theology of Hope (1964), Moltmann tackled eschatology, which he defines not as the theology of last things but as the theology of hope; not of the end of time but of the fullness of time toward which God is moving all creation, even now. The gospel, he says, must be taken as good news not just of a past event (the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ) but also of a promised future, with vast implications for the present.
>> Bernice Johnson Reagon (1942–2024):Bernice Johnson Reagon [previously], a civil rights activist who cofounded The Freedom Singers and later started the African American vocal ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, died July 16 at age eighty-one. I’m so inspired by her Christian witness through nonviolent resistance and music—her songs are on regular rotation in my house.
Beauty isn’t necessarily pretty, pleasant, soothing, Vander Lugt says. Beauty is whatever makes our being gasp a little—whether in delight, or in terrified awe. Beauty demands attention. It also dislodges us from the center of the story, Vander Lugt continues—it unselfs us, in a way, curving us outward. It can be present in what’s torn. (“God goes belonging to every riven thing,” as the poet Christian Wiman puts it.)
I was struck by a remark that Howell, the host, who is a pastor, made near the beginning of the conversation: he said preachers should be less like an instructor imparting moral lessons and more like a docent at an art museum who points out the beauty of the paintings, drawing people’s eyes to its various aspects. What a compelling way to frame the ministry of preaching!
>> Malcolm Guite on Poetry and the Imagination, The Habit: Conversations with Writers about Writing (Rabbit Room), May 7, 2020: In the eleventh poem of his “Station Island” cycle, Seamus Heaney writes about “the need and chance // To salvage everything, to re-envisage / The zenith and glimpsed jewels of any gift / Mistakenly abased.” In this podcast episode, poet-priest Malcolm Guite [previously] talks with host Jonathan Rogers about the “salvaging of the mistakenly abased gift of imagination.” Imagination, Guite says, is as much a truth-bearing faculty as reason; in order to know things well, wemust engage the imagination. It’s not about a private, subjective world or inward fantasies devised to compensate for the cruelty of the world; it’s about truly seeing.
One of the gifts mistakenly abased by our culture for about the last two or three hundred years is the gift of the imagination. We’ve sidelined it so it’s only about the subjective, [whereas] out there is the objective world of dry, rational facts. And we’ve abased that gift of intuitively knowing the truth and value of things and expressing that in warm and poetic imagery, rather than simply reducing everything to a set of tiny particles or mathematical formulae.
—Malcolm Guite
The Romantic poets, for example, Guite says, “aimed at awakening the mind’s attention, removing the film of familiarity and restoring to us that vision of the freshness and depth of nature for which we have eyes that see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. So they weren’t trying to make stuff up. They were trying to take away this film which [Samuel Taylor Coleridge] says our selfishness and solicitousness have cast over the world, and unveil a deeper but equally real truth about nature which is more than just the surfaces we see.”
Also in this conversation, Guite reveals the poet who made him want to be a poet, the poem that prompted his reconversion to Christianity, what we lost when poetry changed from oral to written, and why he writes poetry in meter.
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SHORT FILM SERIES: SparkShorts, produced by Pixar, streaming on Disney+: Did you know Pixar Animation Studios launched an experimental shorts initiative in 2017, giving employees the opportunity, through funding and resourcing, to flex their creative muscles with a great measure of freedom? “The SparkShorts program is designed to discover new storytellers, explore new storytelling techniques, and experiment with new production workflows,” says Pixar President Jim Morris. “These films are unlike anything we’ve ever done at Pixar, providing an opportunity to unlock the potential of individual artists and their inventive filmmaking approaches on a smaller scale than our normal fare.”
Eleven SparkShorts have been released since 2019, all streaming on Disney+. Here are my favorites:
>>Self, dir. Searit Kahsay Huluf: Released February 2, 2024, this stop-motion–CGI hybrid is about a woman who self-sabotages to belong. Writer-director Searit Kahsay Huluf says it was inspired by her family story: her mother immigrated to the US from Ethiopia to escape a civil war and had to learn how to assimilate without losing herself, and as a second-generation African immigrant growing up in Los Angeles, she herself wrestled with identity issues. The way in which Huluf tells the story is beautiful, clever, and kind of dark! Notice the differentiation of textures and sound between the wood of the main character (portrayed by a puppet) and the metal of the “Goldies.”
>> Float, dir. Bobby Rubio: A father discovers his infant son has a unique characteristic that differentiates him from others and then tries to hide him to avoid judgment—but when doing so visibly deflates his son’s spirit, he vulnerably releases him out into the world to be who he is. Writer-director Bobby Rubio created Float for his son, Alex, who is on the autism spectrum. As a dad, Rubio initially struggled with the diagnosis, and this is his story of learning to embrace the beauty of it. It’s one of the few portrayals of a Filipino American family on film, and a warmhearted celebration of neurodivergence—or any other type of divergence.
>> Nona, dir. Louis Gonzales: Nona is looking forward to a day to herself to just chill in front of the TV, watching her favorite show, E.W.W. Smashdown Wrestling. But when her five-year-old granddaughter is unexpectedly dropped off, she has to adapt her plans—begrudgingly at first. Writer-director Louis Gonzales says Nona is based on his own grandma, with whom he shared a love of wrestling. I appreciate how the film addresses dealing with disruptions to a cherished routine; it’s honest about the frustration (even if the disrupter is someone you love dearly!) while also showing how a gracious, go-with-the-flow attitude can unlock surprising new joys. What a fitting watch for the current season of Ordinary Time!
Hansa (Hans Versteeg) (Dutch, 1941–), Between Hope and Despair, 2015. Oil on canvas, 125 × 150 cm.
Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold, Death’s great black wing scrapes the air, Misery gnaws to the bone. Why then do we not despair?
By day, from the surrounding woods, cherries blow summer into town; at night the deep transparent skies glitter with new galaxies.
And the miraculous comes so close to the ruined, dirty houses— something not known to anyone at all, but wild in our breast for centuries.
This poem was originally published in Russian (title: “Все разграблено”) in Anno Domini MCMMXI by Anna Akhmatova (Petrograd: Petropolis, 1922). The above translation by Stanley Kunitz, with Max Hayward, appears in Poems of Akhmatova (Boston: Mariner Books, 1997).
Akhmatova wrote “Everything Is Plundered” in June 1921, during a time of great social and political upheaval caused by the Russian Revolution (1917), which established Communism in the country, and the resultant Russian Civil War (1917–1922). Just two months later, her first husband, the father of her nine-year-old son, would be arrested and executed as a counterrevolutionary. Despite the death and destruction she was witnessing, she did not want to abandon hope. She grasps for a miracle, which is elusive but, she senses, near—will it land?
Like the poet, I too marvel at how such ugliness and beauty can coexist in the world. For Akhmatova, it’s in large part gifts from nature, such as the scent of cherry blossoms or the sparkle of a starry night sky, that prevent her from despairing, that rekindle in her that faith-flame. When humans make a terrible and violent mess of things, there’s still the persistence of seasons and the steadiness of sky. I consider such things graces from God, reminders of God’s deep-down, benevolent, outreaching presence.
Anna Akhmatova, the pen name of Anna Andreevna Gorenko (1889–1966), is one of the most significant Russian poets of the twentieth century. She was active as a writer during both the prerevolutionary and Soviet eras, though in the latter, her work was condemned and censored by Stalinist authorities, who viewed it as too pessimistic and rooted in bourgeois culture. Though many of her friends emigrated out of the country to escape oppression, she chose not to, believing that her poetry would die if she left her homeland; she wanted to stay and bear witness to the events around her, and to hold out hope for a better tomorrow. One of Akhmatova’s most famous poem cycles, Requiem, she wrote while her only child, Lev Gumilev, was detained in Kresty prison in 1938 along with hundreds of other victims of the Great Terror; he would spend the next two decades in forced-labor camps. It wasn’t until the late 1980s, after her death, that Akhmatova achieved full recognition for her literary accomplishments in her native Russia, when all her previously unpublishable works finally became accessible to the public.
VIRTUAL ARTIST’S TALK: “The Stations of the Resurrection according to John” with Laura James, July 30, 2024, 7:00–8:15 p.m. ET: Next Tuesday, Bronx-based artist Laura James will discuss her latest painting series, The Stations of the Resurrection according to John, in a live online conversation with patron Rita L. Houlihan. Register at the link above.
The series began in 2021 with four paintings—Called by Name, Jesus Commissions Mary Magdalene, Mary Magdalene Proclaims Resurrection, and Pentecost: Jesus Sends Them Out, collectively the Mary Magdalene and the Risen Jesus series (which you can purchase as a set of cards)—and then expanded to include the full resurrection narrative from John 20. View details of all ten paintings for the first time, and hear from the artist about the artistic choices she made.
The daughter of immigrants from Antigua in the Caribbean, Laura James is especially celebrated for her vibrant paintings that depict biblical figures, including Jesus, as dark-skinned, influenced in part by the long tradition of Ethiopian Christian art. Rita Houlihan, who commissioned the Stations of the Resurrection series from James, is a founding member of FutureChurch’s Catholic Women Preach and Reclaim Magdalene projects and a longtime advocate for the restoration of historical memory regarding early Christian women leaders, especially Mary Magdalene.
VIRTUAL BOOK LAUNCH: Refractions, 15th anniversary edition, by Makoto Fujimura, August 6, 2024, 3:00 p.m. ET: Artist, speaker, writer, and IAMCultureCare founder Makoto Fujimura is one of the most prominent voices in the “art and faith” conversation in the US. On Tuesday, August 6, he’s hosting a Zoom event to celebrate the release of the fifteenth anniversary edition of his essay collection Refractions: A Journey of Faith, Art, and Culture, which is updated and expanded. He will read new selections from the book and host a time of Q&A and sharing. Register for the event at the above link, and you will receive a 30% discount on copies of the book preordered before the end of July.
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ART TRAIL: Vessel, miscellaneous locations along the Welsh-English border, August 8*–October 31, 2024: An exciting new art trail has been curated by Jacquiline Creswell [previously] for the group Art and Christianity. From the press release: “Vessel is a curated art trail in remote rural churches near the Black Mountains between Usk and Hay-on-Wye [in the border country between South Wales and England]. Seven artworks by seven [contemporary] artists will be shown in seven churches, six of which are maintained by the Friends of Friendless Churches who keep them open all year round. The theme of ‘vessel’ references bodies, boats, secretions and receptacles; each of the artworks will be sited in a particular relationship to the church and its material culture.”
*Lou Baker’s installation at Dore Abbey opens August 21.
Lucy Glendinning (British, 1964–), White Hart (detail), 2018. Wax, Jesmonite, timber, duck feathers, 175 × 73 × 58 cm. Photo courtesy of Art and Christianity. [artist’s website]
Here is the list of venues, artists, and artworks:
St Michael and All Angels’, Gwernesney, Monmouthshire, Wales: Grace Vessel by Jane Sheppard
St Cadoc, Llangattock Vibon Avel, Monmouthshire, Wales: Wiela by Barbara Beyer
St Mary the Virgin, Llanfair Kilgeddin, Monmouthshire, Wales: Centre by Steinunn Thórainsdóttir
St Jerome, Llangwm Uchaf, Monmouthshire, Wales: White Hart by Lucy Glendinning
St David, Llangeview, Monmouthshire, Wales: Compendium by Andrew Bick
Dore Abbey, Herefordshire, England: Life/Blood by Lou Baker
Castle Chapel, Urishay, Herefordshire, England: Simmer Down I by Robert George
Art + Christianity is offering a weekend retreat September 13–15, based in Abergavenny, that will include a guided minibus tour (led by the curator) to all seven sites, a lecture by Fr. Jarel Robinson-Brown titled “Living Stones: Buildings, Bodies and Spirit,” a presentation and panel discussion on curating and organizing art in rural churches and chapels, and a performance by Holly Slingsby, Felled, Yet Unfurling, that draws on the iconography of the Tree of Jesse. (St Mary’s Priory in Abergavenny houses an extraordinary fifteenth-century oak carving of the Old Testament figure of Jesse that once formed the base of an elaborate sculpture depicting Jesus’s ancestry; to contextualize this artwork, in 2016 a Jesse Tree Window designed by Helen Whittaker was installed in the church’s Lewis Chapel.) Ticket pricing starts at £35 and does not include accommodations.
“As religious affiliation declines, can art provide fresh ways of exploring the questions posed by theology?” Borysewicz asks. “Might art—its creation as well as reception—lead to the discovery of new spiritual information? What do faith traditions lose when they overemphasize the written word and neglect the role of images?
“Historically, faith traditions have focused on both the written word and images as sources of knowledge and meaning. Some would claim that words have taken undue precedence as theologies have developed, while images seem to have been left behind. Has this shift in focus left us wanting?”
Alfonse Borysewicz (American, 1957–), Pomegranate, 2010–11. Oil and wax on linen, 70 × 50 in. The artist said, “When I see a pomegranate at the market, I see it as a visible sign of the resurrection of Christ; or a hive, the community of Christ.”
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SONGS:
>> “Kasih Tuhan” (God’s Love) by Abraham Boas Yarona, performed by Prison Akustik: This video shows, from what I can gather, a group of inmates from Lapas Abepura (Abepura Prison) in Papua, Indonesia, playing and singing an Indonesian Christian song together. It’s one of many lagu rohani (spiritual songs) uploaded to the Prison Akustik YouTube channel (the group is also active on Instagram and TikTok).
>> “Del amor divino, ¿quién me apartará?” (Who Can Separate Me from the Love of God?) by Enrique Turrall and José Daniel Verstraeten, performed by Coro del Seminario Internacional Teológico Bautista: Based on Romans 8:31–39, the lyrics of “Del amor divino” are by Enrique Turrall (1867–1953) of Spain, and the music is by José Daniel Verstraeten (b. 1935). The song was performed in 2018 by a vocal and instrumental ensemble from Seminario Internacional Teológico Bautista (International Baptist Theological Seminary) in Buenos Aires [previously], under the direction of Constanza Bongarrá.The instrumentalists are Jimena Garabaya (guitar), Marcelo Villanueva (charango), and Samy Mielgo (bombo). [HT: Daily Prayer Project]
>> “Caritas abundat in omnia” (Love Aboundeth in All Things) with “O virtus Sapientie” (O Virtue of Wisdom) by Hildegard of Bingen, sung by St. Stanislav Girls’ Choir of the Diocesan Classical Gymnasium, feat. Julija Skobe: Combining two Latin antiphons by the medieval German polymath Hildegard of Bingen [previously], who wrote both the words and music, this song is performed a cappella inside St. Joseph’s Church in Ljubljana, Slovenia, by a student choir with some forty singers between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, directed by Helena Fojkar Zupančič. Mesmerizing! Turn on closed captioning for English subtitles, or see here and here.
Henry Ossawa Tanner (American, 1859–1937), The Thankful Poor, 1894. Oil on canvas, 35 1/2 × 44 1/4 in. (90.2 × 112.4 cm). Collection of the Art Bridges Foundation, Bentonville, Arkansas.
Momma used to say That when Jesus turned the Loaves and fish Into a picnic For those hungry folks In the wilderness The God blessed victuals Tasted like mouth watering Mississippi catfish Deep fried in the best store bought meal Served with a healthy side helping Of iron skillet cornbread— Bread so fine that No one asked for butter or honey And nary a crumb hit the ground. She grew up an orphan In the Great Depression, Where low cotton prices And bad weather Killed farms and families— Times, she remembered, so hard That sometimes even dinner Was a miracle And prayers offered At the evening meal Wafted in the air Thick as coal oil smoke In the fragrance of gratefulness.
This poem by Tom Darin Liskey was originally published June 16, 2019, on Kelly Belmonte’s All Nine blog. Used with permission of the author.
Tom Darin Liskey is a photographer and a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. A graduate of the University of Southern Mississippi, he spent nearly a decade working as a photojournalist in Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil. He is the author of the short story collection This Side of the River (2022) and, with Kelly Belmonte, the poetry-photography collaboration Transit (2022), as well as a contributor to The Cultivating Project. He lives with his family in South Carolina.
Van Engen answers questions from poet Shane McCrae and from the audience, addressing how to read a volume of poetry, how poetry produces an experience, the role of understanding and not understanding when it comes to poems, why Christians in particular should read poetry, hymns as poetry, how Adam’s naming creation in Genesis 2 relates to the task of the poet, his favorite poets, and the qualities of a good poem.
Two especially great questions from attendees were:
How do you imagine poetry nourishing discipleship and/or corporate worship, if used by a church leader?
What, if anything, would you like to see more of from Christian poets writing today?
Regarding the first, he says,
I often think that ministers in particular—and especially the heavier the preaching tradition, the more true this is—need creative literature—poetry, novels, and other things—to enliven what it is they’re doing from the pulpit. Not just to understand human life in all of its flourishing and misery, but to connect to people in different kinds of ways than pure principle and message can do.
He mentions the recurring summer seminar for pastors co-led by Dr. Cornelius “Neal” Plantinga, “Imaginative Reading for Creative Preaching,” to help participants explore the possibilities and homiletical impact of engaging in an ongoing program of reading novels, poetry, short fiction, children’s lit, and nonfiction outside the category of Christianity—not just to mine for sermon illustrations but also to develop a “middle wisdom” (“insights into life that are more profound than commonplaces, but less so than great proverbs”) and to deepen their perception of people.
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PODCAST EPISODE: “Opening Your Bible? Turn on Your Imagination” with Russ Ramsey and Sandra McCracken, The Gospel Coalition Podcast, May 8, 2020: This is a recording of a breakout session—“Reading Scripture with an Engaged Imagination”—from the Gospel Coalition’s 2019 National Conference in Indianapolis. Pastor Russ Ramsey (author of Rembrandt Is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art through the Eyes of Faith) and singer-songwriter Sandra McCracken (“We Will Feast in the House of Zion,” “Thy Mercy, My God”) discuss the role the imagination plays in reading scripture and understanding and conveying its truth.
Scripture calls for reading with a fully engaged imagination, Ramsey says, because that’s how literature works and that’s how people work. “How are you supposed to understand Scripture if you’re not trying to empathize or get into a situation and walk around inside of it?” he asks. They discuss wonder, mystery, and paradox—the unresolved dissonance and complexity present in many Bible stories—and the need to take a Bible story on its own terms instead of always trying to extract a moral or “life application” from it.
Though they don’t use the term, they’re basically advocating for Ignatian contemplation, a.k.a. the Ignatian method of Bible reading and prayer, in which you put yourself into the story and try to experience it with all your senses. Ramsey demonstrates with the story of Mary and the nard. “In those hours as Jesus is being arrested and tried and flogged and crucified, he smells opulent. And I think we’re supposed to get that, you know. We’re supposed to . . . especially a first-century reader is going to say, ‘He left a lingering scent as he went down the Via Dolorosa, and it was the scent of royalty. And it was the scent of extravagance.’”
Some of the names that come up along the way are Robert Alter, Ellen Davis, Eugene Peterson, and Frederick Buechner.
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IMMERSIVE ART EXPERIENCE:Rembrandt’s Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee at Frameless in London: I’ve been seeing these kinds of exhibitions advertised more and more—ones that use animation and projection-mapping technology and dozens of loudspeakers strategically placed around the room to create a wall-to-wall, multisensory experience built around one or more masterpiece paintings. Some people say it’s gimmicky or overstimulating, but though I’ve never been to one, I generally think they look like fun! They’re not meant to be a substitute for seeing the actual artwork in person.
In the case of Rembrandt van Rijn’s Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, though, that’s not possible, as the painting was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 and has not been recovered. In collaboration with their long-term partner Cinesite, Frameless recently developed an immersive art experience based on the painting—the Dutch master’s only seascape—in which visitors can get a sense of the terror and exasperation Jesus’s disciples must have felt that night they were caught at sea in a torrential wind- and rainstorm while Jesus lay calmly asleep in the boat’s stern (see Matt. 8:23–27; Mark 4:36–41; Luke 8:22–25). Here’s a making-of featurette for that experience, which garnered a nomination for a prestigious Visual Effects Society award earlier this year:
Frameless is permanently housed in the Marble Arch Place in London’s West End cultural district. Christ in the Storm is one of forty-two works of art they riff on across four galleries.
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POEMS:
Here are two poems published this month that each explores a different episode from the story of Jacob’s family in the book of Genesis—one of his wife Rachel stealing her father’s household gods as they flee to Canaan, and one of Jacob’s sons avenging the rape of their sister, Dinah. Both are examples of how poems can stimulate renewed engagement with scripture, as these were stories I had forgotten some of the details of, and the poems did not make sense until I revisited the relevant Bible passages. Poems can help us walk around inside the biblical narratives, both familiar and unfamiliar ones, and see things from the perspectives of different characters, especially ones who are not given a voice in scripture, such as a Shechemite woman taken captive by Jacob’s sons.
>>“Rachel, Cunning”by Patricia L. Hamilton, Reformed Journal: Read the poem first, then Genesis 29–31, then my commentary.
Voiced by Jacob’s second wife, Rachel, in this poem Rachel vents her jealousy over Jacob having first married her sister, Leah, who bore him six sons to her one at this point. This marriage was due to the trickery of her father, Laban, who also tried to cheat Jacob out of fair shepherding wages—so Rachel resents her father. As she prepares to secretly leave Paddan-aram for Canaan with Jacob, Leah, and their children, she steals her father’s teraphim (small images or cult objects used as domestic deities or oracles by ancient Semitic peoples).
In the biblical narrative, Rachel’s motive for stealing the idols is not given. Was she seeking to prevent Laban from consulting them to find out which way she and her family went? Was possession of the gods in some way connected to property inheritance, as some scholars have attested? Was she stealing a blessing from her ancestors? Did she take them for their monetary value? Or leaving her homeland, did she simply wish to take with her a little piece of home, for nostalgia’s sake?
I think the most likely reason is she still believed in these gods’ power—her allegiance to the God of Jacob had not yet been firmly established—and so she stole them for protection. That’s what Hamilton imagines in her poem: that Rachel sees them as “talismans against the spite of brothers,” averting the evil Jacob’s older twin brother, Esau, wished him for his having stolen their father’s blessing that belonged to him. (According to Genesis 27:41–45, before Jacob left for Paddan-aram, Esau had vowed to kill him.)
Marc Chagall (Belarusian French, 1887–1985), Rachel dérobe les idoles de son père (Rachel Hides Her Father’s Household Gods), from The Bible series, 1960. Original color lithograph on Arches wove paper, image size 14 × 10 1/2 in. (35.6 × 26.7 cm).
Caught between two tricksters—her husband and her father—Rachel herself becomes a trickster. When Laban catches up with their traveling party and searches among their possessions for the stolen gods, Rachel, who’s sitting on them, lies and says she cannot get up because she’s menstruating (Gen. 31:34–35). She deceives her deceitful father to keep her deceitful husband and her son Joseph safe from Esau’s rage, as she believes the gods will act in the interests of whoever possesses them. The poem explores the ever-thickening web of deceptions woven in Jacob’s and Rachel’s families and also reminds us that Rachel, remembered now as a great Jewish matriarch, was not raised in the then-still-developing Israelite religion, nor was her turn to Yahweh necessarily immediate upon her marriage to Jacob. I hear in the poem a lament for fraternal and sororal rivalries, and a subtle sad awareness of the vulnerabilities and pressures of women in patriarchal cultures, who are bought and sold in marriage, valued primarily for their childbearing capacities, and typically forced to rely on men for survival, often suffering the consequences of men’s mistakes. (In the poem at least, Rachel’s feeling of insecurity comes from Esau’s threat of vengeance.)
Based on a lithograph by Marc Chagall, this ekphrastic poem is one of twenty-four from the unpublished chapbook Voiced by Patricia Hamilton, all inspired by biblical artworks by Chagall. Hamilton is currently looking for a publisher to take on the collection.
>>“For the Circumcision of a Small City” by Emma De Lisle, Image: The deception continues in Genesis 34; like father, like sons. This poem is based on the episode of the massacre of the men at Shechem by Jacob’s sons Simeon and Levi to avenge the rape of their sister, Dinah. Shechem, meaning “shoulder,” was the name of both the city in Canaan where the rape took place and the Hivite prince’s son who committed the rape. Jacob and his family were sojourning there, having even bought land. After sexually assaulting Dinah, Shechem wanted to make her his wife. Dinah’s brothers were disgusted by this request, but they pretended they would entertain bride-price discussions on the condition that all the males in the city be circumcised. Shechem’s father agreed, and his position as ruler meant the people obeyed. A few days after the mass circumcision, while the men were still sore, Simeon and Levi attacked with swords, killing all the males in the city. Their brothers then joined them in capturing the men’s wives and children and plundering their wealth.
Emma De Lisle’s poem is written from the perspective of a woman of Shechem, taken captive in the slaughter. The women of the city scorned the lengths Shechem was willing to go to for the homely Dinah, barely old enough to have her period. “Jacob’s silence for you” alludes to Genesis 34:5, which says that when he found out about his daughter’s rape, “Jacob held his peace” until his sons returned from the fields. If he felt grief or outrage, it’s not apparent in the scripture text. His initial response was to say and do nothing, and then to defer to his sons, who exact an outsize punishment for the crime that Jacob admits after the fact disappointed him because when word spreads, it will negatively impact the hospitality of other Canaanite cities toward them.
Stanzas 4 and 5 refer to two of Jacob’s previous deceptions: donning goatskins on his hands and neck to impersonate his hairy brother, Esau, before their blind father, so as to steal the blessing of the firstborn (Gen. 27), and altering the breeding pattern of Laban’s flocks to increase the number of spotted sheep and goats (how this is accomplished is vague and has posed difficulties for interpreters) and so enrich himself, as the spotted animals were his agreed-upon wage (Gen. 30:25–43). The implication of this mention is, I think, that men will take what they feel is owed to them, whether by guile or force.
Sometimes women participate in this violence. The poetic speaker wonders whether Dinah will force her or the other captive women to bear children for her (future husband’s) family line, just as her mother, Leah, had used her slave, Zilpah, when her own womb had closed.
“The city bled one way // or another, before your brothers took interest,” the speaker says. Sexual violence was not new to them. The last sentence suggests that Dinah was not the only female victim of the lustful Shechem’s assault—the women of the city paid a price too, seeing their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons murdered in retaliation and themselves taken prisoner.
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ORATORIO: The Book of Romans by Emily Hiemstra (2019): Consisting of musical settings of select passages from the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans, this piece for SATB soloists, choir, and string orchestra was commissioned by Grace Centre for the Arts, a ministry of Grace Toronto Church, where it premiered October 22, 2019. (Hooray for churches that commission new art!) Read a statement from the composer on the Deus Ex Musica blog. The performers are Meghan Jamieson (soprano), Rebecca Cuddy (alto), Asitha Tennekoon (tenor), Graham Robinson (baritone), Lyssa Pelton (violin), Amy Spurr (violin), Emily Hiemstra (viola), and Lydia Munchinsky (cello).
Here is the video time stamp for each of the eight movements:
0:18: i. Who Has Known the Mind of the Lord? (Rom. 11:33–36)
3:56: ii. His Eternal Power and Divine Nature (Rom. 1:20)
Chagall’s Peace Window is one of the most significant works in the United Nations’ art collection. On my quick visit to New York City last month, where the UN is headquartered, I was hoping to see it, but I emailed ahead of time and found out it’s not currently available for viewing due to construction behind it. (You can “see” it but not really, because it’s not lit, and there’s a tall plastic barrier in front.) I was disappointed, but I decided to visit the UN anyway, to see what other art I might find.
The United Nations was founded in 1945 for the purpose of preventing a third world war. Comprising 193 member states, the organization is committed to maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations, and promoting social progress, better living standards, and human rights. Their motto is “Peace, dignity, and equality on a healthy planet.”
After presenting my ID, getting my photo taken, being stickered, and going through security, I was inside the campus and directed to the General Assembly Building. Outside the entrance to this building is the famous Non-Violence bronze, aka TheKnotted Gun, by Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd of Sweden. The artist made the sculpture in 1980 after his friend John Lennon was murdered. He wanted to honor the singer-songwriter’s vision of a peaceful world.
Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd (Swedish, 1934–2016), Non-Violence, 1984. Bronze, 79 × 44 × 50 in. United Nations Headquarters (outside the General Assembly building), New York. Gift from Luxembourg. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
The original cast was first placed at the Strawberry Fields memorial in New York City’s Central Park, across the street from the Dakota apartment building where Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, lived, and where he was shot. But Reuterswärd worried it would be stolen there. In 1988, the Government of Luxembourg bought the sculpture and donated it to the United Nations, who installed it inside the gate of their New York headquarters.
Non-Violence is an oversize replica of a Colt Python .357 Magnum revolver with the barrel tied in a knot and the muzzle pointing upward, rendering the weapon useless. In his statement from 1988, Reuterswärd said, “Humor is the finest instrument we have to bring people together. While making my peace-symbol, I thought of the importance of introducing a touch of humor, just to make my ‘weapon’ symbolically ridiculous and completely out of order.”
Reuterswärd ultimately made over thirty additional casts of Non-Violence, which are publicly installed in cities such as Beijing, Beirut, Cape Town, Lausanne, and Mexico City.
After spending some time with this iconic work, I entered the General Assembly lobby. What first caught my eye, on the right wall, was a monumental Mola Tapestry from Panama, made by unidentified Kuna women. (To learn about the art form, see my previous blog post from Lent 2022.)
Mola Tapestry by the Kuna people, 1993. Reverse appliqué tapestry, 190 × 284 in. General Assembly Building, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from Panama. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
Molas are made using a reverse appliqué technique, in which several layers of multicolored cloth are sewn together and then parts of each layer are cut out to form the design. These textile panels are traditionally made on a smaller scale and sewn onto women’s blouses, but as outside interest in them grew, local artisans started making some to be displayed as wall hangings.
This one shows a colorful array of indigenous flora and fauna, including a toucan, owl, hummingbird, monkey, turtle, frog, squirrel, rabbit, deer, and wildcat.
On the opposite wall is a nearly thirty-foot-long painting titled La Fraternidad (Brotherhood) by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo [previously], which shows a group of people gathered around a fire with interlaced arms. The fire may represent enlightenment, knowledge and power, or the Divine Presence.
Rufino Tamayo (Mexican, 1899–1991), La Fraternidad (Brotherhood), 1968. Oil on canvas, 160 × 358 in. General Assembly Building, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from Mexico, 1971. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
At the left is an ancient Aztec or Mayan pyramid, whereas the structure at the right is modern. Tamayo said this shows the span of time, from the ancient era into the present and future.
From 2009 to 2014 the painting was on display at the Mexican state legislature, after which it was restored and returned to the UN.
Situated in front is a replica of an ancient Greek sculpture depicting Poseidon of Artemision, god of the sea, in an active stance. His right hand would have originally wielded a trident, representing his power. At first I thought it an odd choice for the UN to display an apparently militant figure, as Poseidon used his trident as a weapon to fight Trojans, Titans, and others, and indeed here he seems poised to deliver a death blow. But after some rudimentary research, I found that Poseidon also created life-giving springs with the strike of his trident (think Moses striking the rock with his staff), and used it to calm turbulent waters. These ameliorating acts align with the UN’s mission and make the Poseidon sculpture a fitting addition to their collection.
Also in the lobby is a wool tapestry from Latvia. Titled Hope, it’s by the well-known Latvian textile artist Edīte Pauls-Vīgnere.
Edīte Pauls-Vīgnere (Latvian, 1939–), Hope, 1994. Tapestry, 126 × 114 in. General Assembly Building, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from Latvia. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
The female figure in the foreground is, I’m assuming, a personification of hope, dressed in a white gown and golden headband and holding the sun. She stands in front of the Freedom Monument in Riga, which shows Lady Liberty holding three gilded stars, symbolizing the three constitutional districts of Latvia.
Deeper inside the lobby was a temporary exhibition, Interwoven: Refugee Murals Across Borders, organized jointly by UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency) and Artolution. It opened on June 20, World Refugee Day, and will continue through July 19. The exhibition presents paintings by refugees and host communities in refugee camps, conflict zones, and crisis-affected communities across the world. These were created through a collaborative process in which the work circulated to different locations, with artists contributing additions at each stop. The end results show interwoven narratives of the diverse peoples forced to flee their homes. Themes include joy, lament, labor, empowerment, identity, and home.
Made by about a dozen refugee girls and women from four countries, Fabric of Women’s Resilience began in Uganda with a small group of South Sudanese, who prepared the traditional bark cloth from the bark of a mutuba tree. This substrate then traveled to Bangladesh, where Rohingya women painted a pregnant woman lying on a bed while a female doctor presses a stethoscope to her belly, and on the left, a mother bathing her child. The artists said they wanted to encourage mothers to seek access to prenatal healthcare and to practice good hygiene with their babies.
Fabric of Women’s Resilience, a collaborative painting by approx. twelve Rohingya, Syrian, Afghan, and South Sudanese refugee women, 2018. Acrylic on bark cloth, 24 × 60 in. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
In Greece, the bark cloth traveled to Samos refugee camp, where one young Afghan woman, with the help of others, painted one of her traumatic childhood experiences: being married off at age twelve to an older man. This scene at the top is a bit crumpled in the frame, so it’s difficult to see, but the child bride is crying, and the man has a white beard.
The painting also went to Azraq refugee camp in Jordan, where Syrian women added a woman carrying a baby on her back while reading a book to show that women can be mothers and pursue an education. (This scene was at the extreme right but must have come off; view the full original painting on the exhibition webpage, fourth image down.) It ended its journey with a return to Uganda, where the South Sudanese women filled in the remaining spaces with plants, fish, and fruits.
Other artworks include The Creature of Home and Play in the Midst of Chaos, painted on food distribution bags and as a collaboration between South Sudanese and Rohingya refugees, both children and adults.
The Creature of Home, which traveled to BidiBidi Refugee Settlement in Uganda and Balukhali Refugee Camp in Bangladesh, depicts chickens, a soccer field, memories of home, and tools needed to take care of the land.
The Creature of Home, a collaborative painting by South Sudanese refugees at BidiBidi Refugee Settlement, Uganda, and Rohingya refugees at Balukhali Refugee Camp, Bangladesh. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
Play in the Midst of Chaos, which traveled to BidiBidi Refugee Settlement in Uganda and Bhasan Char Island in Bangladesh, captures a sense of joy with its vivid colors and depiction of sports. It also highlights the importance of planting trees and taking climate action.
Play in the Midst of Chaos, a collaborative painting by South Sudanese refugees at BidiBidi Refugee Settlement, Uganda, and Rohingya refugees at Bhasan Char Island, Bangladesh. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
Seeing the Interwoven exhibition sent me down an internet rabbit trail of learning more about the co-organizer, Artolution, and the work they’re doing, which then impelled me to learn more about the refugee communities in which they’re active. Follow them on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. I also commend to you the Founder Spirit podcast interview with Artolution cofounder and public artist, educator, and humanitarian Max Frieder.
All the above artworks can be seen for free without an appointment. (However, note that the temporary exhibitions change throughout the year.) But to access the sculptures in the garden, which is kept locked, your only option is to pay $26 for the guided, forty-five-minute Garden Tour.
I had seen photos of the biblically inspired Let Us Beat Swords into Ploughshares and wanted to see it in person, so I paid up. It’s vaguely visible from the vantage of the free-access plaza outside the main entrance of the General Assembly Building.
But let’s move in closer.
Yevgeny Vuchetich (Russian, 1908–1974), Let Us Beat Swords into Ploughshares, 1959. Cast bronze and granite pedestal, figure 111 × 76 × 35 in., pedestal 44 × 75 × 34 in. North Lawn, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from the USSR. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
Gifted to the United Nations by the USSR in 1959, the bronze sculpture is by the Soviet artist Yevgeny (sometimes spelled “Evgeniy”) Vuchetich, who was of Russian, French, and Serbian heritage and lived most of his life in Russia. It shows a muscular man (modeled by Olympic wrestler Boris Gurevich) hammering a sword into a plow blade, used to cut furrows for planting crops. Representing the transformation of tools of death into tools of life, the imagery is taken from Isaiah 2:4 in the Hebrew Bible, in which the prophet proclaims that “in days to come,” people of all nations “shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more.” The vision is that in the kingdom of God, instead of the land being littered with human blood and corpses, it will be cultivated and bring forth good food.
This scripture text is the basis of the African American spiritual “Down by the Riverside” [previously], whose refrain declares, “I ain’t gonna study war no more!” One of the commonly used verses is “I’m gonna beat my sword into a plow.” Here’s Michael Wright’s version:
And, from 1959, the Golden Gate Quartet’s, arranged by Orlandus Wilson:
Reflecting the song lyrics, Vuchetich’s sculpture is itself planted “down by the riverside”—the East River.
Vuchetich was one of the major figures of Soviet government–backed monumental sculpture, making his name from depictions of military heroes. So I find it a little odd that he was commissioned to make this peace sculpture that subverts the very militarism his other sculptures celebrate. One of his most famous pieces is The Motherland Calls; located at the top of Mamayev Kurgan hill overlooking the city formerly known as Stalingrad, it shows a female personification of Russia lifting high a sword in one hand and calling the Soviet people to battle with the other.
Look, many artists will take what work they can get, regardless of whether a commission matches their own ideology. I don’t claim to know what Vuchetich’s personal views were about war, violence, and empire.
Regardless of its disjunction with the artist’s larger oeuvre—and the uncomfortable fact that the donor’s successor state and caretaker of the sculpture, the Russian Federation, is persisting in an illegal and immoral war against its neighbor Ukraine—I really appreciate the theological imagination that Let Us Beat Swords into Ploughshares embodies, entreating us to apply our strength to constructive, not destructive, acts.
Nearby in the garden, not pictured in this article, is a literalization of the “swords into plowshares” principle. A recent gift from the Government of Colombia, Kusikawsay (Quechua for “peaceful and happy life”) is made of steel armaments melted and cast into the shape of a canoe, sailing upward. A donor representative said the sculpture for them symbolizes the end of an over-fifty-year armed conflict in their country. The idea is that the grotesque paraphernalia of war is metamorphosed into a benign watercraft that, in how it’s positioned, symbolizes humanity’s traveling into a lofty future.
Another boat on the UNHQ’s North Lawn is Arrival by the Irish sculptor John Behan, which shows Irish immigrants disembarking into a new world. The sculpture was intended as a thank-you to the many nations that have received the Irish over the years, including Great Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, New Zealand, and Brazil.
John Behan (Irish, 1938–), Arrival, 2000. Bronze, stainless steel on granite pavers, 26 × 23 ft. North Lawn, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from Ireland. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
This piece wasn’t covered by the Garden Tour, nor was the colossal Mother and Child by the Italian artist Giacomo Manzù, which I spotted across the lawn and hurriedly snapped a distant photo of while scurrying to keep up with the group.
Giacomo Manzù (Italian, 1908–1991), Mother and Child, 1989. Bronze, 254 × 66 × 52 in. North Lawn, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from Italy. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
One of the pieces our guide did stop for and spend a good amount of time on was a fragment of the Berlin Wall gifted by Germany in 2002, after the wall came down in 1989. The ninety-six-mile-long barrier was erected in 1961 to divide the country into East (Communist) and West (Federal Republic), but a peaceful revolution in East Germany resulted in its fall and the country’s reunification as a federal republic, marking the end of the Cold War in Europe.
Kani Alavi (Iranian German, 1955–), Trophy of Civil Rights (Berlin Wall Fragment), ca. 1998. Precast reinforced concrete wall sections with paint, overall 84 × 114 in. North Lawn, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from Germany. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
The front of this three-slab wall fragment (that is, the side visible from the paved path) bears a mural by Kani Alavi, an Iranian artist who moved to West Berlin in 1980, living in an apartment overlooking the formidable “Checkpoint Charlie.” Throughout the 1980s, artists painted images on the west side of the wall as a form of political commentary and resistance. The east side, however, was unpainted during the Cold War because it was so heavily guarded; attempted art interventionists probably would have been shot.
After the border opened on November 9, 1989, and demolition of the wall began, Alavi was a key organizer of what’s known as the East Side Gallery, inviting artists from Germany and around the world to paint murals on the east side of the wall, across a segment that would be deliberately left standing as a memorial. “Alavi helped transform the most visible symbol of the Iron Curtain into an enduring monument to the power of freedom,” Ryan Prior wrote for CNN. This open-air gallery is one of Berlin’s most visited attractions, featuring the work of at least 118 artists from twenty-one countries.
Alavi painted Trophy of Civil Rights (I’m not sure whether that inscription was his or just a remnant from another artist, but it’s become the mural’s de facto title) on a section of remaining wall sometime around 1998. “It is a representation of two people hugging over the wall, a dramatic situation of people trying to get close to each other,” he told NPR through a translator. “It shows how the people were separated. It shows how a culture was divided by a wall. That’s what happened, and that’s what I showed.”
The other side of the wall is painted with miscellaneous graffiti by anonymous artists.
The largest sculpture on the North Lawn, standing at thirty-one feet tall and weighing forty tons, is Good Defeats Evil by the Georgian Russian sculptor Zurab Tsereteli. It depicts the Early Christian martyr-saint George, who was tortured and executed in 303 under the Diocletian persecution. Legends about him started developing in the sixth century and by the thirteenth century were widely circulated and embellished to include a tale of him slaying a dragon to save a Libyan princess whom the terrorized villagers had planned to sacrifice to it for appeasement.
Zurab Tsereteli (Georgian Russian, 1934–), Good Defeats Evil, 1990. Cast bronze figure with dragon formed from sections of two destroyed nuclear missiles, 31 × 18 × 10 ft. North Lawn, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from the USSR. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
(Side note: Saint George is not to be confused with Saint Michael the Archangel from the book of Revelation, who in Christian iconography is usually shown on foot [but occasionally on horseback], also slaying a dragon. The easiest way to tell the two saints apart is that Michael has wings, whereas George does not.)
The most intriguing aspect of this sculpture is that the two-headed dragon is made up of sections of two destroyed nuclear missiles, making the piece a symbol of disarmament. According to the UN website, here
the dragon is not the mythological beast of early Christian tradition, but rather represents the vanquishing of nuclear war through the historic treaty between the Soviet Union and the United States [the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Short-Range Nuclear Missiles, signed in 1987]. Created as a monument to peace, the sculpture is composed of parts of actual United States and Soviet missiles. Accordingly, the dragon is shown lying amid actual fragments of these weapons, the broken pieces of Soviet SS-20 and U.S. Pershing missiles.
The dragon’s two heads thus represent the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals during the Cold War: those of the Soviet Union and the United States.
The last sculpture I’ll mention is Consciousnessby the Mongolian artist Ochirbold Ayurzana. It consists of a rounded, high-luster steel alloy floor plate on which stands a human figure, made of twisted metal strings, examining the footprints they’ve left on the planet. What mark will we make, for good or ill? The sculpture is dedicated to the historic adoption of two global developmental milestone documents: the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.
Ochirbold Ayurzana (Mongolian, 1976–), Consciousness, 2017. Steel, metal on pedestal, 110 × 196 × 125 in. North Lawn, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from Mongolia. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
This is just a selection of the many artworks on view at the United Nations Headquarters in Manhattan. To view a full catalog, click here.
Garden Tours are offered every Wednesday at 2 p.m. from May through August, and Art Tours are offered every other Thursday at 1:15 p.m. year-round—or either one upon request. I’m grateful for their having accommodated me and my husband while we were in town!
I really wish the UN would allow visitors to move through the garden at their own speed, though, as the tour was so fast-paced that I hardly had time to take in a sculpture before we were made to move on to the next one. Approximately one to three minutes was apportioned for each work, which is hardly enough time to sit with the weight and history of some of these pieces. And I didn’t have time to change camera lenses for different types of shots. Because you have to be accompanied by a staff person, you are not allowed to linger behind when the group advances. Some leeway was given to me, but overall I felt rushed. Perhaps the pacing was anomalous because it was such a hot day—in the nineties—and the few shaded areas were prioritized.
Despite the swiftness, I really enjoyed the tour and experiencing and learning about the variety of sculptures and other art pieces from a variety of UN member countries, which celebrate peace, joy, and global unity and project a hopeful future.
O Lord, in whose countenance is the morning of all things made new, shine upon us that we may illumine with peace the world-home thou hast given us. Remove from us pride of might and arrogance of possession. Stretch our thoughts, O Divine Mind, that we may see the whole earth as our country, and the inhabitants thereof as our neighbors. Fill our hearts with love that changes discord to trust.
Temper to our good the weariness and the broken hopes we cannot escape. Pour into us the strength of all valiant spirits. Put into our hands constructive tasks of peace. Let not our striving end with condemnation of folly and stupidity in high places.
Quicken in us the will to resist the hysteria that they who take the sword raise to turn us aside from thy commandments. Give us power to the depth, breadth, and height of our souls to prevent the destructions we have lived to weep. Out of the embers of fires that have scorched and blackened thy kingdom on earth, help us create a new order in which we will no more become savages through fear. Unite us, millions strong, against the darkness of hate, as unnumbered sunbeams streaming one way sweeten the sod unto green ecstasy and fruitfulness.
—Helen Keller, “Prayer for Peace,” delivered April 5, 1936, at the “East of Suez” bazaar at the New History Society’s Caravan Hall, New York City [HT]
There are many great movies that spotlight the positive role of family, friendship, and community, showing how humans are built for interdependence. For this article of recommendations, I’ve chosen a narrower subset of that theme: movies about a character or characters who don’t have community at the beginning, or who aren’t receptive to it, but who find it throughout the course of the story. That may sound cliché, but I promise, all five selections are nonsappy and bring something new to the table.
What movie(s) would you add to the list? Also, what other thematic film lists would you like to see on this website?
Will (Hugh Grant) sits through an uncomfortable Christmas dinner at Fiona’s house (the main course: nutloaf), having been invited by her son, Marcus, in this scene from About a Boy.
1. About a Boy (2002), dir. Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz. In general, my favorite type of movie is one that makes me both laugh and cry. About a Boy hits that spot. Based on a novel of the same name by Nick Hornby, it stars Hugh Grant as Will, a thirty-something single man who lives a carefree life in a swanky apartment—with no responsibilities, no commitments—subsisting off the royalties of a hit song his late father wrote many years ago. He prides himself in this unattached, “island living.”
Sleazeball that he is, he joins a Single Parents Alone Together group for access to vulnerable single women, despite his not having kids. It’s through that group that he meets a nerdy twelve-year-old named Marcus (Nicholas Hoult), whose mom, Fiona (Toni Collette), has depression. Marcus strategizes to make Will a part of their life so that they have a bigger support network as his mom navigates her mental illness. (“Two people isn’t enough; you need a backup,” he reasons.) Will is resistant at first. He doesn’t want the complexity or inconvenience that come with relationships. But Marcus’s persistence wears him down, and as he warms up to Marcus’s friendship and later Fiona’s, he learns to care for people and things other than just himself. His autonomy breaks down the more he allows his behaviors and decisions to be influenced by those around him whom he’s grown fond of and invested in, and he eventually realizes that, as the poet John Donne famously wrote, “no man is an island.”
(Not currently streaming for free through any subscription services but can be rented digitally. If you’re a local friend, you can borrow my Blu-ray copy—or come over and watch it with me!)
2. Lars and the Real Girl (2007), dir. Craig Gillespie. Twenty-seven-year-old Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling) lives in a small Wisconsin town in his brother Gus (Paul Schneider) and sister-in-law Karen’s (Emily Mortimer) garage. Conversation and physical contact make him anxious, so he generally keeps to himself. But then one day a sex doll named Bianca arrives at his house, and he develops a chaste relationship with her. He gives her a backstory—she’s a half-Brazilian, half-Danish missionary with nurse’s training who was orphaned as a baby—and starts introducing her around town as his girlfriend.
Bianca, at right, waits for her doctor’s appointment in Lars and the Real Girl. (“She loves kids,” Lars says.)
The beauty of this film is in how Lars’s family, his church (one of the rare positive portrayals of Christianity in contemporary cinema), his coworkers, and local retailers all compassionately care for Lars as he experiences this delusion, not judging or teasing—although there is some initial resistance—but instead welcoming Bianca into the community, as his psychiatrist advised. Bianca attends worship, gets her hair done at the salon, volunteers at the hospital, leads story time at the elementary school, even gets elected to the school board! Karen bathes and dresses her; a work colleague dances with her at a party; her new friends drive her to a girls’ night out. As the people in Lars’s life embrace Bianca, Lars becomes more open to human interaction, more sociable, until he no longer needs the delusion. Waiting in the wings is Margo (Kelli Garner), the “real girl” of the title, who works in Lars’s office and sings in the church choir—and who has a crush on him. The love and support of his community as he works through psychological issues is what enables him to eventually pursue healthy relationships with real-life people.
Streaming on Tubi (no account necessary).
3. Shoplifters (2018), dir. Kore-eda Hirokazu. My favorite film by one of my favorite writer-directors, Shoplifters is a preeminent onscreen example of “found family.” It follows a band of outsiders living together in a small house on the outskirts of Tokyo. Each of them has suffered some form of abuse or neglect, having been cast off by their biological families or spouses. None of them are blood-related, and yet they’ve formed bonds of love and loyalty. They support each other emotionally and financially: Hatsue (Kirin Kiki), aka “Grandma,” contributes funds allegedly from her deceased husband’s pension; Nobuyo (Sakura Andô) works for an industrial laundry service, while her husband, Osamu (Lily Franky), works as a day laborer; Aki (Mayu Matsuoka) works at a sex parlor; and the boy Shoto (Jyo Kairi) engages in petty theft.
Nobuyo, Aki, Lin, Shota, and Osamu take a day off from their workaday lives to spend time together at the beach in the found-family film Shoplifters—Kore-eda’s best, in my opinion.
The conflict is introduced when the family finds a little girl named Yuri/Juri (Miyu Sasaki), dirty and hungry, left alone on a front porch, and they decide to take her. They rename her Lin, and she becomes part of their family. But now they are guilty of kidnapping. The film explores themes of belonging and of being unwanted versus wanted—that is, chosen. It also asks, What is a mother or a father? What is a sibling? Kore-eda deftly folds together the delicate layers of the various relationships, most movingly (to me) Grandma and Aki’s, and Shoto’s with his new younger sister, Lin.
Sakura Andô is outstanding as Noboyu—the best performance of any of the films on this list, and of 2018. She delivers a zinger during the interrogation scene, and the nuances of her voice and body language throughout bear so much of the film’s complexity and meaning.
Streaming on Hulu.
4. A Man Called Ove (2015), dir. Hannes Holm. Based on the best-selling Swedish novel En man som heter Ove by Fredrik Backman, this movie centers on Ove (pronounced “oo-vah”) (Rolf Lassgård), a grumpy old widower and retiree obsessed with enforcing block association rules no one cares about and still mourning the death of his wife. When a lively young couple and their two kids move in next door, the commotion interrupts Ove’s suicide attempt. He is called on to help out with increasing frequency—lend his ladder, watch the girls, teach the wife, Parvaneh (Bahar Pars), to drive—which outwardly annoys him but, he subconsciously realizes, gives him purpose and opportunities for meaningful human connection. He gradually learns also to receive acts of care and outreach, like a chicken and rice dinner, and to interact with others in modes other than just criticism and judgment.
In A Man Called Ove, the titular character becomes disgruntled when a boisterous family moves in next door, but they ultimately draw him out of his suicidal ideation and help him let go of his bitterness over the hand he’s been dealt in life.
Through flashbacks, we learn about Ove’s childhood and his romance and married life with Sonja (Ida Engvoll) and begin to better understand the bitterness he holds. It’s beautiful to see that bitterness fade, even if it doesn’t entirely go away, as he begins to let his guard down and open himself to small joys.
The film was remade in English in 2022 as A Man Called Otto, set in Pittsburgh and starring Tom Hanks, but the original Swedish adaptation is the better of the two.
Streaming on Amazon.
5. The Station Agent (2003), dir. Tom McCarthy. When his only friend dies, Fin (Peter Dinklage), a train enthusiast, inherits an abandoned train depot in rural New Jersey, which he moves into, intent on living in solitude. But situated just outside his new digs is a chatty hot dog vendor, Joe (Bobby Cannavale)—in town indefinitely from Manhattan to care for his sick father—whose stand is frequented by Olivia (Patricia Clarkson), a discombobulated woman who, we later find out, is grieving the death of her son and the fraying of her marriage. Fin gradually surrenders to the uninvited companionship. He also befriends a local elementary school girl who plays alone and likes trains, and a librarian with an abusive boyfriend.
In The Station Agent, Fin’s deliberate life of solitude is interrupted by Olivia and Joe, who adopt his hobby of train watching not so much for their interest in trains as for their desire for companionship.
Fin had chosen a solitary life to protect himself from the taunts he receives because of his dwarfism. But he finds that vulnerability—putting yourself out there—is ultimately the better way to live, even though it means greater unpredictability and susceptibility to hurt. He forges a community from an unlikely bunch, people with whom he learns to enjoy comfortable silences and talk both small and large. The movie is punctuated by long walks along railroad rights-of-way and ends with a meal around a table.
SPOTIFY PLAYLIST: July 2024 (Art & Theology): This month’s “mixtape” includes a worship song by Daniel P. Cariño from Baguio, the Philippines; a 1954 recording from the streets of New Orleans of the itinerant preacher, singer, and guitarist Elder David Ross; a piano-violin arrangement of “Amazing Grace” by Carlos Simon; a nineteenth-century American folk hymn; an excerpt from Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah; a Jesus bhajan in Hindi from Toronto; a one-word song by choral-pop composer Michael Engelhardt; a brand-new Porter’s Gate single; and more.
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NEW BOOKS:
>> Diary of an Old Soul: Annotated Edition by George MacDonald, with introduction and notes by Timothy Larsen: At last, a keepsake edition of George MacDonald’s devotional poetry collection Diary of an Old Soul! Last week InterVarsity Press released a cloth-bound hardcover with ribbon bookmark, an introduction and sparing notes by the modern British religious history scholar Timothy Larsen, and, as MacDonald stipulated in the book’s first printing in 1880, a blank page facing each page of verse for readers to continue the conversation. C. S. Lewis gave a copy of Diary of an Old Soul to his future wife, Joy Davidman, as a Christmas gift in 1952, and it would make a wonderful Christmas gift still. For each day of the year MacDonald offers a seven-line poem that voices his spiritual longings, struggles, or joys; the Victorian tastemaker John Ruskin extolled the collection as proof that worthy religious poetry could still be written in the modern age. I highlighted my favorite selections from the book in a blog post last year, but on reading this new edition, new lines are standing out to me.
>> Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church by Abram Van Engen: Several Christians have told me they want to read more poetry and learn to better appreciate it but don’t know where to start. I usually recommend starting with an anthology, to get a taste of a wide range of styles and eras, and see if there are particular kinds they gravitate to. But now I’m thrilled I can recommend Abram Van Engen’s Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church, with a foreword by Shane McCrae. (Full disclosure: I was the copyeditor!) Endorsed by such luminaries as Christian Wiman and James K. A. Smith, the book is an excellent introduction to how and why to read poetry. Van Engen discusses sixty-two distinct poems, almost all of them reproduced in full, ranging from John Donne, Ben Jonson, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper to Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wilbur, and Li-Young Lee and including, too, church hymns and biblical psalms, two forms of poetry with which Christian readers are likely already familiar. In part 1 he demonstrates six ways to read poetry: personally, for pleasure, inquisitively, like it’s a friend, considering form, and through erasure. In part 2 he answers the question “Why read poetry?”: to name creation, to tell the truth, to rejoice with those who rejoice, and to weep with those who weep. Van Engen insists that poetry is for everyone, and Word Made Fresh substantiates the claim.
PRINT INTERVIEW: “Through the Rent, Eternity Enters: A Conversation with Marilyn Nelson and Christian Wiman,” moderated by Abram Van Engen, Hedgehog Review: In December 2023, The Carver Project at Washington University in St. Louis brought together award-winning poets Marilyn Nelson and Christian Wiman for a discussion of poetry, faith, love, perception, ambition, humility, prayer, and grace, moderated by Abram Van Engen. Poets, I’ve noticed from attending conferences and reading or listening to interviews with them, tend to have an immense storehouse of wise quotes from other poets and thinkers at the ready, as this interview corroborates. There’s so much here to chew on!
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ESSAY: “Christianity and Poetry” by Dana Gioia, First Things: “This brief and inadequate historical survey,” writes poet and literary critic Dana Gioia, “is offered to demonstrate the powerful continuity of Christian poetry in English. Our literary canon is suffused with religious consciousness, which has expressed itself in ways beyond the imagination of theology and apologetics. Milton boasted that his Paradise Lost would ‘justify the ways of God to men,’ but his masterpiece was only one of countless poems that engaged, enlarged, and refined the spirituality of the English-speaking world. Christianity went so deeply into the collective soul of the culture that its impact continues even in our secular age.”
He proposes, “All that is necessary to revive Christian poetry is a change in attitude—a conviction that perfunctory and platitudinous language will not suffice, an awareness that the goal of liturgy, homily, and education is not to condescend but to enliven and elevate. We need to recognize the power of language and use it in ways that engage both the sense and the senses of believers.”
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CANTATA: Rejoice in the Lamb by Benjamin Britten, performed by VOCES8 and the VOCES8 Foundation Choir & Orchestra, dir. Barnaby Smith: “Rejoice in the Lamb (Op. 30) is a cantata for four soloists, SATB choir and organ composed by Benjamin Britten in 1943 and uses text from the poem Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart (1722–1771). The poem, written while Smart was in an asylum, depicts idiosyncratic praise and worship of God by different things including animals, letters of the alphabet and musical instruments. Britten was introduced to the poem by W. H. Auden whilst visiting the United States, selecting 48 lines of the poem to set to music with the assistance of Edward Sackville-West. The cantata was commissioned by the Reverend Walter Hussey for the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the consecration of St Matthew’s Church, Northampton. Critics praised the work for its uniqueness and creative handling of the text.” (Wikipedia)
I know this poem from its famous passage about Jeoffry the cat, in which Smart celebrates his cat’s relationship with God: “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. / For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him. / For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his Way. / For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness. / For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer. . . .” See 3:52 of the video.
SONG: “Wild Strawberries” by Nick Chambers: This song from 2020 expresses yearning to know the God whose beauty is revealed in nature and who is mysterious, “divinely robed in dark and radiant haze.” It’s based on a 1819 Swedish hymn by Johan Olaf Wallin that was quoted by the aging professor Isak Borg in Ingmar Bergman’s multi-award-winning film Wild Strawberries.
“In the gospel narratives,” Chambers writes, “the risen Jesus is always one step ahead, beckoning us further. We follow after tangible touches and traces he leaves behind—folded grave clothes and broken bread. He travels with us but isn’t always recognizable, still teaching his friends how to fish, readying breakfast on the beach. Wherever he appears and withdraws, the background becomes the foreground, inviting us to see and seek him everywhere. Resurrection cannot be confined; all creation is drawn into its trajectory.” Read more from Chambers in the YouTube video description.
NEW SONG + CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Sing the Prayer from BibleProject: To cap off their five-part podcast series on the Lord’s Prayer this month, BibleProject commissioned singer-songwriters Brian Hall (of the family band TENTS) and Liz Vice to write and record a new setting of the Lord’s Prayer, using the translation by Tim Mackie and the BibleProject Scholar Team:
Our Father who is in the skies, may your name be recognized as holy. May your kingdom come and may your will be done as it is in the skies, so also on the land. Our daily provision of bread, give to us today. And forgive us our debts, just as we also have forgiven those indebted to us. And don’t lead us to be tested, but deliver us from the evil one. Amen. (Matt. 6:9–13; cf. Luke 11:2–4)
(You may be wondering, as I did, where’s the final line, “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever.” As Mackie explains, that line is not in the earliest manuscripts of Matthew or Luke; the addition first appeared in the Didache, an early Christian teaching manual.)
You can listen to and download Hall and Vice’s new setting of the Lord’s Prayer, which Vice sings to Hall’s guitar accompaniment, at the “Sing the Prayer” link above. In addition, the Good Shepherd Collective video-recorded a more fully instrumented arrangement for a digital worship service; see here. And here are links to the recent Lord’s Prayer episodes of the BibleProject podcast:
All you composers out there can get involved too! Through September 15, 2024, BibleProject is accepting submissions of musical settings of the Lord’s Prayer. You can sing the text verbatim using a translation of your choice, or you can rephrase it or write a song based on the prayer’s themes. Purely instrumental responses are also welcome. Send in a song file using their online form, and they will select some of their favorites to host on their website (for streaming, not download). View the early selections at https://bibleproject.com/singtheprayer/all.
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TV SHOW EXCERPT: Opening montage from season 3, episode 4 of The Chosen, “Clean, Part 1”: Several people have asked for my opinion of The Chosen, a television adaptation of the Gospels created by Dallas Jenkins. I think it’s great! Creatively (not woodenly, as is too often the case) written, culturally and historically immersive, high production values, and humanizing—it portrays the disciples (the Twelve and others, including the women) as complex, rounded characters with backstories, families, and distinct personalities. Jonathan Roumie is fantastic as Jesus; so is Liz Tabish as Mary Magdalene. If I were to identify a weakness in the series, it would be the portrayal of the Roman soldiers and rulers, especially Quintus, as cartoonish, one-dimensional—although that begins to shift with at least one Roman in season 3—and the occasional awkward dialogue that’s used to explain to the audience ancient Jewish practices and law codes with which we’re likely to be unfamiliar.
I’m in the middle of season 3 right now and was particularly struck by the opening montage of episode 4, a narrative embellishment of Luke 10:1, which says that Jesus “sent them [his appointed followers] on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go.” In the series, this is the first time the disciples perform healings. They’re surprised and confused by, and even a little fearful of, the power working through them; they don’t understand it and aren’t always sure how to wield it. This eight-minute segment shows them growing into their roles as they bring the gospel in word and deed throughout the region, preparing the way for Jesus.
This coming Sunday’s Gospel reading in the Revised Common Lectionary is Mark 5:21–43, which recounts the Healing of the Woman with an Issue of Blood and the Raising of Jairus’s Daughter. Here are two poems based on that passage. (As a side note related to the previous item: The Chosen, season 3, episodes 4–5 center on these two healing narratives; “Veronica’s” arc is especially cathartic!)
>>“Haemorrhoissa”by Leila Chatti: In her early twenties, the poet Leila Chatti [previously] had uterine tumors and suffered from severe bleeding and pain for two and a half years. She explores the shame, discomfort, isolation, and trauma of that condition as well as cultural taboos surrounding women’s bodies in her debut collection, Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), influenced by her dual Islamic-Christian heritage. In this poem she finds kinship with the unnamed hemorrhaging woman in the Synoptic Gospels and admires her boldness in touching Jesus’s hem. The title of the poem, a transliteration of “ἡ αἱμοῤῥοοῦσα,” is the Greek term used in the New Testament to refer to this woman, often translated as the “woman with an issue of blood” or “bleeding woman.”
>>“Jairus” by Michael Symmons Roberts: The poetry collection Corpus by Michael Symmons Roberts (Jonathan Cape, 2004) also centers on the body, especially on the relationship between corporeality, death, and resurrection. This poem from it, in which the speaker (a disciple of Jesus’s, perhaps?) addresses Jairus, celebrates physical appetite, an instinctive desire that helps keep us alive and that here also represents the hunger for living.
NEW DOCUMENTARY: God and Country, dir. Dan Partland: Released earlier this year, this documentary produced by Rob Reiner “looks at the implications of Christian Nationalism and how it distorts not only the constitutional republic, but Christianity itself. Featuring prominent Christian thought leaders, God & Country asks this question: What happens when a faith built on love, sacrifice, and forgiveness grows political tentacles, conflating power, money, and belief into hyper-nationalism?”
If you are an American Christian, you need to see this film. White Christian nationalism is becoming an increasingly larger threat in the US as it becomes more mainstream, and we need to be aware of it and denounce it. God and Country features interviews with several folks whom I’ve followed for years and deeply respect, including historians and best-selling authors Jemar Tisby and Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Holy Post podcaster and VeggieTales creator Phil Vischer, political commentator David French, and ethicist Russell Moore. Some of the footage from worship services is disturbing, to say nothing of the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
God and Country is currently available on Kanopy, an on-demand streaming service that many public and academic library patrons have free access to.
Art & Theology 