Arts & Culture
“ON EARTH AS it is in heaven,” wasn’t simply a prayer for the Shakers, a small Protestant sect that practiced communal living and peaked in the mid-19th century: It was the bedrock of their lives. In the mid-1800s, Shaker Sarah Bates depicted this collision of heaven with earth in “Wings of Holy Wisdom, Wings of the Heavenly Father.” In cobalt and inky blues, she drew churning stars and slivered moons, holy scrolls and books cracked open by birds, God’s hand reaching through dark heavens, trumpets and swords among unfurling flowers.
The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming originated in England in 1747 and were guided to America in 1774 by Mother Ann Lee, an illiterate factory worker who became the community’s charismatic leader. Their ecstatic dancing during worship led some to call them “shaking Quakers,” later shortened to “Shakers.” Lee preached ideals such as pacifism and gender and racial equality, and in the new communities in America, she introduced celibacy and no private property. Lee was persecuted and imprisoned for her beliefs, and among many Shakers, she was considered the second coming of Christ in female form.
From about 1837 to 1857, some Shakers began receiving images and messages — many believed to come from Holy Mother Wisdom, who the Shakers saw as the “personified feminine” aspect of God along with the “Almighty Father” as the masculine personification, art historian Sally Promey wrote in her book Spiritual Spectacles. Some people believed the messages came from departed loved ones, and they recorded them in paintings, dances, songs, drawings, and spirit writings, in which a scribe would capture characters and designs that looked like words and letters but whose meaning was unknown — kind of like a “visual equiva-lent for speaking in tongues,” Promey wrote. This period was known as the Era of Manifestations or “Mother’s Work.”
The “gift drawings” of that era burst with geometrical shapes, holy symbols, and heaps of color. The creators of the gift drawings called themselves “instruments,” not artists, and most were women and young people — typically “the least powerful members of Shaker society,” Promey wrote.
When a Child Sees War
Adapted from Alexandra Fuller’s memoir, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight centers 8-year-old Bobo’s life on her white family’s farm in what is now Zimbabwe at the end of the wars for independence and racial equality. We see both sides of the war through Bobo’s eyes. Sony Pictures Classic
BY DESIGN, BODY horror is a genre that’s hard to stomach. It trades jump scares for lengthy exposure to imagery that gets stuck in both your mind and gut. These depictions of the degeneration or mutilation of the body offer embodied critiques of societal problems, like unrealistic beauty standards (The Substance) or online surveillance (Possessor), or, as is the case in Michael Shanks’ forthcoming film, Together, dysfunctional romance.
One moment in particular sticks out. In a scene from the first half of the film, we watch Tim (Dave Franco) and Millie (Alison Brie) kiss tenderly. But as the kiss ends, the couple finds that their lips have fused together. While Together features many gruesome scenes of Millie and Tim testing the adage of “till death do us part,” Shanks’ film has more on its mind than just grossing you out; it explores the dual discomforts of romantic complacency and romantic codependency.
Tim and Millie move to the remote countryside for Millie’s job at a small school. Tim, a musician, has felt creatively stuck and emotionally hollow. And while Millie is hopeful that the move might be a fresh start for their relationship, the transition is looking more like a continuation of moorage. Franco and Brie — who are married in real life — distinctively capture the complacency that can come in a long-term relationship.
UPON READING THE news that the U.S. deported hundreds of migrants to El Salvador, I felt ill. Neri José Alvarado Borges had studied psychology and worked in a bakery. Luis Carlos José Marcano Silva is a barber with the face of Jesus tattooed on his stomach. As the daughter of an immigrant, I wept, thinking of their fear and families’ grief. In the face of a government that thrives on cruelty, we need resources that help us preserve our human capacities for hope, courage, and compassion.
Recently, I’ve found comfort in paintings from books of hours, a form of prayer book popularized in Europe in the 1200s to make contemplation simpler for the laity. These paintings, known as “illuminations,” are distinctive and, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Wendy Alpern Stein, include “some of the greatest paintings and drawings of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance.”
Once the most published texts of their time, books of hours were often bespoke, commissioned by monarchs and aristocrats and crafted by luminary artists of the day. Each unique book of hours contains a liturgical calendar, gospel excerpts and psalms, and “The Hours of the Virgin,” which Stein calls “the heart” of the form, “a series of prayers and praise for the Virgin Mary [recited] at the eight canonical hours.” The books were made and written by hand. The illuminations include beautiful borders, often of botanical elements like ivy or flowers that decorate the edges of each page. Passages of text begin with an ornately decorated and framed capital letter. And the illustrations that complement the prayers and readings are drawn with vibrant colors and metals like gold and silver.
BEING A YOUNG girl can be confusing. Perhaps you’ll be adored but not respected. Admired, but only if you suppress your inner longings and become the perfect vessel for your parents’ expectations. Silenced girls can grow to be silent women, stripped of agency, never taught that true power comes from deep within.
“The first time I read the New Testament as a little girl, I broke out in hives,” writes feminist theologian Meggan Watterson in her latest book, The Girl Who Baptized Herself. “With little girl clarity, I was finely attuned to detect inequity.” Into adulthood Watterson couldn’t shake the feeling that her received understanding of God was incomplete. Her understanding of God as a “love that liberates” simply didn’t align with the patriarchal and oppressive power structures she witnessed in the church. Then she discovered the story of Saint Thecla, a young woman who, after hearing the Apostle Paul preach, converted to Christianity and joined him in ministry.
The Girl Who Baptized Herself is a blend of memoir, historical analysis of early Christianity, and fictionalized inner narratives for Thecla. The story begins in Thecla’s bedroom, when she hears Paul’s preaching through her window. Thecla, born into wealth and status in Iconium (in modern-day Turkey), has lived a privileged life. When we meet her, she is soon to marry a powerful nobleman. But as she listens to Paul share the gospel, she sits motionless for three days and three nights. There is an inner shift; Thecla realizes that no matter how beautiful her life may be, a gilded cage is still a cage.
THE DISSENTERS is a powerful literary portrait — part love story, part elegy, part testimony to Egypt’s shifting soul over seven decades. At its center is one woman, Amna Abu Zahra, fractured into three identities: Amna, the girl chasing autonomy and education; Nimo the striving student and journalist; and Mouna, the wife of a socialist husband, reimagined not as “mama” but as a woman seeking love on her own terms.
Told through a series of letters from Amna’s son Nour, a newly divorced father, to his sister Shimo, a Stanford doctoral student in California, the novel dissects their mother’s life with aching intimacy. As Amna asks, “What have I done?” her son seeks to understand, “Who am I?” — a question inseparable from his mother’s story.
The gripping and vivid narrative is nonlinear. Though fictional, it felt real, evocative of the Egypt my immigrant father left and loved. But unlike the memories he shared with me, this is the story of a woman who tried to live unapologetically, only to be let down by love, religion, and society. The book reflects her internal chaos as she endures arranged marriage, female genital mutilation, betrayal, the failure of men to lead, and society’s refusal to enact change.
Amna’s journey crosses sharp political and emotional terrain: the collapse of Arab nationalist president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s socialist dream in 1970, Anwar Sadat’s conformist middle class in the ’70s, and the enduring grip of military authoritarianism under current president Abdel Fattah El Sisi. Religion becomes both a rebellion against Nasser’s socialism and resignation to Sadat’s religious convictions — a phase of strict piety driven by longing for meaning and the hope that faith can absolve even the sins she doesn’t regret.
In her personal mission statement, Matthews says she strives “to amplify the voices of the unheard, to shed light on the unseen, and to be a steadfast reminder that hope, and love are the truest pathways to equity and justice." Influenced by Bernice Johnson Reagon, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, Melissa Etheridge, Ani DiFranco, and, of course, Tracy Chapman, to whom she has often been compared, Matthews brings her whole self into her work.
To be queer means resisting the repression of our true selves and the forces that demand we conform to others’ ideas of who we should be. It’s a declaration of our commitment to live authentically — who God created us to be — not who society or religion says we must become.
The Mississippi Delta. 1932. A young Black man (Miles Canton) drives up to a small church building. He climbs out of the car, clutching the neck of a broken guitar. He is covered in blood.
As he approaches the closed doors, a children's choir sings "This Little Light of Mine." The doors open and the young man staggers inside. The left side of his face bears deep claw marks. The pastor, unperturbed, opens his arms and demands the young man — Sammie — come forward. A sudden cut transforms the Black preacher into a white creature, its mouth open and dripping blood, its arms spread wide.
I don’t know that I have what I could exactly call a “favorite artist,” but if I did, it’d probably be Bruce Springsteen, and I’m glad he’s speaking out about the importance of things like attacks on free speech and the exploitation of kids. What I don’t love is how quickly this stand is flattening him into just another liberal mascot. A fake photo of Springsteen in a “Keep America Trumpless” T-shirt has gone viral.
So far, this escalating feud is a rather depressing back-and-forth, a cycle of violence for which there doesn’t seem to be any way out. But instead of letting us bask in Ellie’s righteous violence a la John Wick, the series questions the line between justice and revenge, asks whether mercy has any part in the equation, and doesn’t offer any easy answers to these reflections.
PANKAJ MISHRA OPENS The World After Gaza: A History with the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising in German-occupied Poland. The Jews imprisoned in the ghetto fought their Nazi captors for “a few desperate weeks” until they were crushed. Mishra quotes one of few survivors, Marek Edelman, who “was ‘terribly afraid’ that ‘nobody in the world would notice a thing,’ and ‘nothing, no message about us, would ever make it out.’”
The Israel Defense Forces’ ongoing destruction of Gaza following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israeli civilians by Hamas has been livestreamed by journalists, mothers, and teenagers. Globally, many suffered “an inner wound,” Mishra writes, from watching these cruelties: Israel’s bombs targeting children, schools, and hospitals; military dogs mauling disabled Palestinians; and IDF soldiers denying starving people access to food. Despite Palestinian efforts to broadcast the war crimes, Gaza still burns. Mishra contrasts reactions to the atrocities in 1943 Warsaw and in Gaza today to explore Western state-sanctioned violence.
Although Western Allies pledged never to let the genocide of the Holocaust happen again — a promise that has defined Western morality for decades — the violence unleashed in World War II death camps has been repeated across the globe in Japan, Vietnam, Rwanda, Iraq, Syria, and Gaza.
Mishra, a British Indian writer, links the rhetoric of Israel’s ethno-state to the Hindu nationalism of his native India. From a Hindu Brahmin family, Mishra recalls his childhood admiration of Israel’s leaders and how he, and many other Hindu nationalists, admired their macho tactics.
SPARROW HAS EVERYTHING under control. They know which clothes their mom likes them to wear, what kinds of grades reflect well on the family, and what topics to never ever talk about with their mother. But one day the formula collapses and Sparrow’s mother gets in a car crash. Now they must live with a relative they have never met and know nothing about. Used to a life of moving around due to their mother’s struggles with addiction, Sparrow thinks they have the perfect formula for how to blend in at their new school, but soon new friends, a magical creature, and a series of personal revelations take the middle schooler out of their comfort zone to somewhere much more beautiful.
Ash Van Otterloo’s The Beautiful Something Else follows the journey of a preteen living in the South. Sparrow, who is unknowingly nonbinary (at least at the beginning of the novel), has long played the role of an adult. Because their emotionally unstable mom has surrounded Sparrow with so many carefully constructed rules, the young protagonist hasn’t been able to find out who they really are — gender identity included. When Sparrow is forced to move in with their Aunt Mags (their closest relative), they are suddenly living in the one place their mother never wanted them to go: their mother’s childhood home in Tennessee. But Aunt Mags has reclaimed the space, renaming it Rainbow House. The property, with its many trailers and main house, is a haven for mostly queer families and local college students.
As an agnostic person, I don’t often reach for religious language, but Rainbow House reminded me of the reign of God, a collective utopia with no more suffering. Led by a loving and welcoming queer community, Rainbow House is a place where people farm the land, protect wildlife, host community gatherings and festivals, and practice radical forgiveness and generosity.
Layperson’s Terms
Each week, The Bible for Normal People podcast offers deep cultural and historical context to scripture. Hosts Peter Enns and Jared Byas have challenging and engaging conversations with notable guests, including Richard Rohr and Amy-Jill Levine, on topics like biblical inerrancy and mental health. thebiblefornormalpeople.com
ECCLESIASTES 1:9 TELLS us “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.” I used to read that verse with a sense of existential fatigue, but as I’ve grown older, it reminds me that the struggles we face now are different forms of struggles as old as time itself. As hard as things might get, we’re never without hope that good will come back around, because it has before.
Examples of this exist in art as well as scripture. Take, for example, the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter, which addresses religious extremism, hypocrisy, and spiritual abuse. Director Charles Laughton’s dark and impressively modern approach to those ideas didn’t sit well with audiences at the time, but 70 years later, the film has only grown in influence.
Laughton’s film follows Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), a Depression-era preacher who funds his “ministry” by marrying widows and killing them for their money. We watch Powell court, manipulate, and murder a guilt-stricken woman, Willa (Shelley Winters). Willa’s children, John (Billy Chapin) and Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce) escape Harry’s clutches and find refuge with Rachel (Lillian Gish), a kind woman who helps them recover from their trauma.
WHEN ANTONI GAUDÍ became the chief architect for Barcelona’s Sagrada Família Basilica in fall 1883, he had no illusions that he would live to see its completion. “There is no reason to regret that I cannot finish the church,” he said. “I will grow old, but others will come after me. What must always be conserved is the spirit of the work, but its life has to depend on the generations it is handed down to.”
After 142 years of construction, Gaudí’s masterpiece is slated to be finally completed in 2026, 100 years after Gaudí’s death. The finished basilica will have three distinct facades, only one of which was completed in Gaudí’s lifetime, and 18 towers — 12 for the apostles, four for the evangelists, one for the Virgin Mary, and the tallest and most central tower for Jesus. When you look at the Barcelona skyline from Park Güell, where the architect lived for almost 20 years, the basilica soars above the rest of the city, clothed in scaffolding. From far away, the cone-shaped, sand-colored spires look like intricate, naturally occurring stalagmites, reaching toward the heavens.
Gaudí’s iconic style — lots of curves, a heavy use of mosaic, and motifs from nature and Catalonia — was an extension of the broader artistic movement of Modernisme, the Catalonian cousin of Art Nouveau. Even though some of the visual language of the Sagrada Família had precedent in buildings such as the Castell dels Tres Dragons or the Palau de la Música Catalana, both by Lluís Domènech i Montaner, the basilica was still controversial. George Orwell once said that the Sagrada Família was “one of the most hideous buildings in the world,” and lamented that it hadn’t been destroyed during the Spanish Civil War. But more than a century later, Gaudí is widely recognized as an artistic genius, and his works have UNESCO World Heritage site status.
There are no exact right angles in the Sagrada Família’s design because Gaudí believed right angles didn’t occur in nature. Instead, you will find the spiral of a shell, the honeycomb structure of a beehive, the branches of a tree, and the unique curvature of a leaf. He also pioneered the mosaic technique known as trencadís, where pieces of ceramic or glass were broken into irregular shapes and applied to the surface of a form.
R.O. Kwon, the bestselling novelist of The Incendiaries and Exhibit, does not believe in God. Even so, Kwon’s writing about God and faith feels more familiar to me than that of many who do believe.
As someone who very strongly believes in God, I find that kinship feels a little scary and a little dangerous. To avoid too much psychoanalyzing, it makes it feel like the waters between belief and unbelief are rather porous. This line of thought is tempting to run from, as all scary things are, but it’s here that I return to Kwon’s work.
Conclave’s message goes beyond papal elections: Before I saw the film, I couldn’t have predicted just how shockingly relevant it would be to me and my experience as a trans person still doing my best to remain in relationship with the church.
Until recently, the young women at the forefront of conservative politics were largely evangelical Protestants. They looked like the kind of young women you might see showing their OOTDs on RushTok, marrying a certain Southern-bred feminine aesthetic with a defense of President Donald Trump. These young women aren’t fading into the background during the start of the second Trump administration, but they now have company. Young Catholic women have emerged as instrumental messengers of the MAGA message.