Arts & Culture

WHEN ELIZABETH MAGIE invented The Landlord’s Game, known today as Monopoly, she drew up two sets of rules: one “monopolist,” employing fierce competition and cutthroat property snatching, as the game is played today; the other “anti-monopolist,” namesake of a larger movement intended to demonstrate the dangers from unregulated wealth accumulation by the few and economic inequity in the late 1890s. Magie hoped that soon “men and women will discover that they are poor because Carnegie and Rockefeller, maybe, have more than they know what to do with.”

For Magie, daughter of an abolitionist and anti-monopolist, game creation was not simply an innocent pastime. She resonated with how games could provide a way to envision a new reality and usher in robust ideas.

When I was in college, several of my classmates in a world Indigenous literature class talked about how games we grew up playing—from Monopoly to Settlers of Catan—embodied settler colonialism and capitalism. In Settlers, the goal is to build as much as you can in unoccupied land and accumulate resources. In Monopoly, you aim to procure ownership of as many properties on the board as you can, raising rent to force other players into bankruptcy while you elude jail. Ticket to Ride-USA encourages players to build railroads across the United States, invoking the forces of manifest destiny without a critical lens. Jamaica is a board game where European pirates surround the island and battle for the most resources. Bang! The Dice Game catalogs life in the “Wild West,” where the French, Mexicans, and “Indians” fight each other; one dice roll can “save” a player from an “Indian attack.”

 A year ago, I thought it’d be a stretch to get most folks to take abolition seriously. Then the pandemic hit.

Where the particularly eclectic Venn diagram of true crime enthusiasm and religious history nerdery overlap, you’ll find your binge-worthy streaming recommendation for the weekend: Netflix’s compelling new limited series, Murder Among the Mormons.

Stories for all of us who’ve had the courage to admit that nope, we’re not okay, and this is hard.

HOW DO WE love someone with a mental illness? In a NAMI blog post titled “How To Love Someone With A Mental Illness,” the writer notes, “Choosing to love someone who acts or feels unlovable can be part of what helps them see they are valued as a whole person, they are not the sum total of their pain … Mental illnesses are illnesses, and sometimes they can change someone’s circumstances … they can even change their personalities for a time, change their interests, their spirit. But they are the same person you have always loved, and they need you to see that person in them—even when they can’t see themselves clearly” (emphasis mine).

After all, mental illness does not change the fact we are beloved children of God. Even though they are the same person you have always loved, it can be hard to recognize them. Looking through God’s eyes helps us to see past the label and the diagnosis.

A great example of “choosing to love” came to me through a story from my friend Monique. Over lunch, I asked Monique what I thought was a philosophical question about marriage and mental illness. The conversation turned personal very quickly, however.

Monique shared with me that her vision for her marriage is to flourish, knowing both she and her partner have mental illness. She said flourishing for their marriage happens when they are up front with each other about their mental health status, can state their needs, and can get the support they need.

Reprinted with permission by Chalice Press.

SOMETIMES I WONDER if my “Black card” is in jeopardy. The main source of this concern is that my encounters with the Black church are few, the most consistent being the yearly family viewing of the 1996 film The Preacher’s Wife, though even I know the brevity of that movie’s scripted sermons is far from accurate. My few in-person Black church experiences taught me the basics: Wear your Sunday best, and expect the service to be long. But beyond that, the Black church has always been a bit of a mystery to me, a place that has never felt familiar.

Yolanda Pierce’s In My Grandmother’s House provides an intimate entry into this world. From tarry nights and foot washing to patriarchal structures, Pierce details her experiences and invites the reader into the tension of celebrating the beautiful aspects of the Brooklyn Holiness-Pentecostal church of her youth while also laying bare the ways in which that church, and the Black church at large, has failed to be the loving and inclusive body it professes to be.

In the preface, Pierce describes her book as “a work of Grandmother theology,” a womanist theology that draws on the generational wisdom of older Black women and provides a different way to know God. With the childhood stories she tells, Pierce seems to identify her grandmother Vivian—the woman who raised her, served faithfully in the church, and whose home displayed a portrait of a Black Jesus—as the primary theologian in her life. In a culture that so often elevates the thoughts and analysis of white, male theologians, to read and reflect upon the lessons that Pierce learned from her grandmother and her church mothers makes an impact, lessons that continue to inform how she lives today.

Future Soul

Virtuoso keyboardist Cory Henry’s 2020 album Something to Say encapsulates a trying year—traversing elation and sorrow. He brings Herbie Hancock-worthy skill and range to what he calls “future soul.” Featuring the Funk Apostles on four tracks, this self-produced project is required listening. Henry House Entertainment.

A Divine Puzzle

Author and public theologian Grace Ji-Sun Kim’s essays read as meditations in her newest book, Hope in Disarray: Piecing Our Lives Together in Faith. Sifting through today’s complex array of personal and societal injustices, Kim approaches readers with the gift of generative hope. The Pilgrim Press.

IT'S UNLIKELY THAT Donald Trump is fretting over his presidential portrait. With further legal troubles and several industries turned against him, the man has bigger fish to fry. But as we’ve learned time and time again through the ravages of the coronavirus and police violence, just because Trump isn’t worried about something doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. The unconfirmed, though expected, portrait offers a chance for him to shape a legacy that is in dire need of salvaging. Trump’s painting could serve to underscore—or attempt to elide—the unconventional nature of his time in office, potentially adding a glossy filter to a difficult period in American history. Of course, filtering is more than part and parcel of portraiture. It’s the very nature of the job.

Throughout the centuries, portraiture has been the province of the wealthy and, despite its biographical nature, is a genre that conceals nearly as much as it reveals. Louis XIV, another larger-than-life leader, exhibits this multiplicity of meaning all too well in his portraits. Painter Charles Poerson clothes Louis XIV in the garb of Jupiter—complete with lightning bolts in hand—to signify his victory over a series of nobility uprisings known as the Fronde. By shrouding the king’s humanity, Poerson makes Louis into someone divine, armed with greater might than mere mortals. Who needs the imago dei when you can simply be God? A different portrait replaces the gouty king’s legs with the calves of a younger man. In short, the sovereign portrait is synonymous with a kind of psychological trompe l’oeil, created to preserve power and project glory. American presidential portraits differ in their ends, though they are invested in other kinds of self-delusion: equality and equanimity.

It’s hard to be far away when tragedy hits close to home. (Well, maybe not for Ted Cruz.)