Arts & Culture
In a climactic moment of the crime-comedy Roofman, Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum) enters a Presbyterian church. It’s a moment of respite, both for him and the audience. Until then, the Army veteran had been a man on the run: After robbing more than 40 McDonald’s to support his family, police unceremoniously arrested Jeffrey at his daughter’s birthday party. Though sentenced to 45 years in prison, he escapes and camps out in a hollow wall behind a bicycle display in a Toys R Us (Here is where I’ll mention that the film is based on a true story).
Pretty quickly, Jeffrey’s refuge becomes isolating. What good is a store full of toys if you have nobody to play with? While it would be risky to enter a public space, the desperation for connection drives Jeffrey to the pews.
The Spiritual Life podcast, hosted by Father James Martin, features thought-provoking and honest conversations on faith and meaning. Stephen Colbert, Whoopi Goldberg, Pete Buttigieg, and other guests infuse wisdom and playfulness into the role of spirituality in public and personal life. America Media
WHAT’S THE BEST use of our lives? Should we, as Jesus advises in Matthew 19, sell our possessions and “give the money to the poor” in hopes of a “treasure in heaven”? Or can we interpret this verse in a slightly less extreme way, instead holding up Jesus’ words as a sort of aspirational metaphor?
This question is at the core of The Greatest Possible Good by Ben Brooks.
We meet the Candlewicks, a wealthy but disaffected family of four living in the idyllic Cotswolds in England, surrounded by every luxurious distraction they could desire. Their lives change drastically when the father, Arthur Candlewick, falls into an abandoned mine shaft, sustaining a head injury. While stuck there for three days with his son’s stash of drugs and his daughter’s book on effective altruism, Arthur experiences what he calls his “road to Damascus moment.” The ordeal transforms Arthur, leading him to give away his entire fortune to charity.
This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.
I’m not on TikTok, so I’d never heard of 22-year-old content creator, Taylor Cassidy. Cassidy rose to prominence after she started creating engaging and easily digestible videos about Black history. During my interview with Cassidy, she told me her goal is to make sure her audience feels uplifted and excited about learning.
IN A PERENNIALLY timely 2014 article about the lessons she learned from her experience with trauma, Catherine Woodiwiss wrote, “Trauma is a disfiguring, lonely time even when surrounded in love; to suffer through trauma alone is unbearable.” We need people around us when we’re suffering, if only to know that they’re there to call on when we need something.
When my trauma and anxiety journey started in 2016, I quickly learned that putting up a front of “Everything’s fine!” only made things worse. It was humbling to admit I needed support. It was empowering to realize people wanted to help. I knew that someday, when I felt better (and I would feel better), I would return the favor.
The film Sorry, Baby, from writer-director Eva Victor, is the most accurate depiction I’ve seen of how trauma stays in your mind and body and what it takes to reach a place of stability. After Victor’s character, Agnes, experiences sexual assault, she relies on the help of close friends and a neighbor, and a stranger’s kindness, to help her through the three-year period that follows.
IN STREGA NONA, author and illustrator Tomie dePaola’s most widely known picture book, an Italian witch has a magic pot that produces pasta on command with a song. Strega Nona is a town healer, concocting love potions and curing warts and headaches. In her old age, she hires a man named Big Anthony to help keep her home and garden. She assigns him a list of chores and warns him to never touch the pasta pot.
When Strega Nona leaves for a trip, Big Anthony ignores her warning and tries the spell for himself, singing, “Bubble, bubble, pasta pot, / Boil me some pasta, nice and hot, / I’m hungry and it’s time to sup, / Boil enough pasta to fill me up.” Out comes the pasta! Big Anthony invites everyone to eat, but once the village has had their fill, a horrifying reality sets in: Big Anthony doesn’t know how to stop the pot, and pasta overtakes the village. Just as the townspeople are about to be buried in pasta, Strega Nona returns. She blows three kisses to the pot, stopping the pasta and saving the town. The charming book ends with an image of a very full Big Anthony after having eaten the mess he’s made.
You may be familiar with the tale of Strega Nona; it comes from a long history of folktales. In 19th century Germany, it was known as “Sweet Porridge” and recorded by the Brothers Grimm. The story goes that a poor, hungry girl receives a pot that makes endless porridge. When the girl is away, her mother tries to use the pot and porridge floods the town. Just as the final house is about to be overtaken, the girl returns to say the magic words. Anyone wishing to return to the town had to eat their way back. In the Chinese folktale “The Water Mother,” it wasn’t a pot, but a pail of water that overflowed and created a stream that drowned the pail’s owner. All these tales might call to mind “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” made famous for some in Disney’s Fantasia. In that folktale, an apprentice, tired of doing his mentor’s chores, enchants a broom to do the work for him. The situation quickly gets out of hand, and he is driven to chop up the broom with an axe, but each new splintering creates a new broom. This continues until the sorcerer intercedes, then lectures his apprentice that only a master should invoke a powerful spirit.
“You know what freedom is? No fear,” says Benicio Del Toro’s Sensei Sergio in One Battle After Another, inspiring Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson to face an authoritarian manhunt right on his family’s tail. While both Bob and Sergio are, in certain senses, doomsday preppers, they react quite differently to an impending threat. And how we react when we feel under threat makes a big difference, both to our own wellbeing and to the movements we care about.
In the film, Bob is an in-hiding former member of the far-left revolutionary group called the French 75. For the last 16 years, while raising his daughter Willa in the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross, he’s lived with an intense paranoia about her safety and the potential of his old life coming back to haunt them both.
You may have heard that, at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, Erika Kirk said that she forgave her husband’s assassin.
You may have also heard that only a few minutes later, President Donald Trump said that while Charlie Kirk “did not hate his opponents—he wanted the best for them,” he was different: “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them!” This moment got a lot of attention, understandably so, but another moment stuck out to me even more. And even though we’re almost a week and a half removed from the memorial service, I think it’s still worth exploring today.
Oscar season hasn’t even started, and 2025 is already shaping up to be a strong year at the movies. We’ve seen small-budget standouts, from the thought-provoking body horror of Together to the empathetic dramedy of Sorry, Baby. Even the superhero blockbusters—Superman, Fantastic Four—had more to say about justice and community than I’ve come to expect from spandex cinema. And then there was Sinners, which was perfect.
When Robert Redford was 18 years old, his mother died—suddenly and young—following complications from delivering twin girls who did not live long. This harrowing loss left young Redford disillusioned with God. “I’d had religion pushed on me since I was a kid,” he would tell Michael Feeney Callan, his biographer. “But after Mom died, I felt betrayed by God.”
“I keep hoping that gets easier,” one character in The Long Walk says, shortly after witnessing the gruesome execution of a companion. Still visibly shaken, Cooper Hoffman’s character Ray Garraty replies: “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
A 2025 film adapted from the 1979 novel by Stephen King, The Long Walk depicts a dystopian near future where young boys from all over the United States voluntarily compete in a contest to walk at 3 mph continuously across hundreds of miles—with those who repeatedly fall below the pace being shot dead until there is one winner of glory and riches.
This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.
I’m going to let you in on a little secret: If you see a book about politics published in 2025, it’s very possible the world is different than what the author hoped for when they pitched it.
Why is it that, in our current era, the most emotionally resonant art often lurks behind the silliest premise? It has become something of a running joke in the rapidly emerging KPop Demon Hunters fan community that the movie, on the basis of the title alone, is incredibly difficult to recommend to people without being laughed off. KPop Demon Hunters may have a campy hook, but it explores ideas that cut to the heart of human experience.
KPop Demon Hunters is about Huntr/x, a trio of Korean singers whose pop star status conceals their true role as mystical demon hunters tasked with creating a supernatural barrier called the Honmoon. Through the power of music, this Honmoon keeps soul-consuming demons at bay from the world. When the evil demon king Gwi-Ma sends a demon boy band called the Saja Boys to fight fire with fire (or pop song with pop song,) our heroes’ defense against the demon army begins to break. And the darkest secret? Rumi, the group’s lead singer and the film’s protagonist, is actually part-demon herself.
Shortly after Hamilton was first released a decade ago, I found myself singing along to it rather loudly while building a new IKEA bed frame in a group house I had just founded.
As I belted out the words to one of the more familiar songs from Act 1, “My Shot,” my new housemate poked her head around the corner and added her own voice to the mix. “I’m just like my country / I’m young, scrappy and hungry,” we sang in unison, creating a moment of joy and connection between a Catholic and a Protestant that provided the foundation for a lasting friendship and community-building work.
“At their best, my videos are life-changing,” CJ The X tells me, with a laugh that acknowledges the immensity of the claim. From the mouths of many other internet creators, this statement might sound ludicrous—but the comments on CJ’s channel will reveal that they are not exaggerating.
“Every CJ The X video gives me about 5 metaphysical panic attacks before giving me some sort of closure,” one commenter remarked.
Aymann Ismail has a variety of identities that keep him busy. When I asked him to tell me about himself, he replied, “I’m a journalist, a parent, and a full-time Arab American.” He is also the author of the new memoir, Becoming Baba: Fatherhood, Faith, and Finding Meaning in America.
One of the things I appreciate most about Ismail, who is Muslim, is the way he subtly incorporates reflections on his faith into his writing. In Becoming Baba, Ismail relates how he sat down to read the Quran, only to vehemently disagree with what he read. This led him to explore his doubts and questions, which Becoming Baba explores in an engaging and refreshing way.
Hearing about the news of James Dobson’s death reminded me of a conversation I recently had with my sister while we were making our way to an Ethel Cain concert.
We were conversing as we hurried to the car, excited to profess our love to Willoughby Tucker, and I told my sister she was the only reason I knew about Ethel Cain—whose real name is Hayden Anhedönia. We then indulged in some cynical jokes about the “woke” impulse to cancel Anhedönia because of old social media posts, which she has since apologized for and described as “deeply shameful and embarrassing.”
God is not up in heaven thinking up bad things to happen to you. He loves you so much and only wants the best for you. But sometimes that means you have to go through a little bit of pain and heartache. But if you trust him and you love him, he will not let you down.
These words of comfort were given by James Dobson to a young girl in an episode of a Christian radio drama created by his organization. Within these few short sentences, you can find the entirety of Dobson’s ideology: God’s love entangled with the necessity of His punishment.
I didn’t expect church to be the place where I learned 803Fresh’s “Boots on the Ground,” the latest line dance taking the nation by storm. The song, which currently has more than 14 million views on YouTube and is known for the refrain, “Where them fans at,” has been danced to by folks like Shaquille O'Neal, Ciara, Kamala Harris, Tina Knowles, and Michelle Obama. And it’s been performed everywhere, from trail rides to graduations, news broadcasts to talk shows. But when people started performing the line dance in church, not everyone was pleased.
“Some of these so call [sic] churches is night 🌙 clubs,” wrote one Facebook user in response to a viral video of a “Boots on the Ground” line dance performance at a small church. “Put them boots on the PASTOR and scoot him out of the church,” another wrote.
When the House passed President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Act, House Speaker Mike Johnson gave glory to God.
Johnson, the Louisiana Republican and Christian, believes that his work and the work of the United States are divinely orchestrated. But if the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” is truly from God, then what are we to make of cuts that negatively impact the most marginalized in our society?