What we could not see as beautiful
When I told my reading group we’d be looking at one of Brian Staveley’s dark fantasy novels alongside Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theology, they balked.
Essays and Feature Stories
Essays at the intersection of religion, media and peacebuilding. You can find more of my writing on these topics at the unRival archive.
Postliberalism and the romantic lie
Since becoming vice president, J. D. Vance has been a scandalous presence in these pages. It makes sense: While President Trump seems fairly uninterested in religion even at his most performative, Vance actually speaks the language of the faithful. He is outspoken about his spirituality and about the streams that nourish it. From his association with Catholic integralism to his anti-immigrant scapegoating, Vance has come to embody everything that is wrong with the religious right.
Dionysios, The Crucified, And “Christofascism” — Earth and Altar
To plead one’s case as a victim of injustice: Trump and Vance want Americans to see this as contemptible behavior. As a new and caustically “Christian” rhetoric puts it, they want us to see “empathy” with such victims as a sin. But I believe the goal goes deeper: they and their allies want to consolidate their power in the public eye by stigmatizing “victimhood” as a whole.
A survey of peacebuilders uncovers the harsh yet inspiring truth of working for nonviolent social change
UnRival is the hub of a global network for artisans of peace working tirelessly for nonviolent social change. Their grassroots work is vitally important, but their localized work keeps them out of the news. Their work goes unseen, understudied and under-funded. By serving these leaders, we aim to amplify their impact in their contexts and around the world. Since the summer of 2020, we’ve interviewed peacebuilders from diverse places. These include Croatia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, South Africa...
Training for Belonging
We met Justin and Nate Beene outside Rising Grinds cafe in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The cafe is a partner in a larger network the brothers helm, the Grand Rapids Center for Community Transformation (GRCCT). Their mission: “Creating opportunities for transformation. ”Rising Grinds is one such opportunity. It’s a bold start-up in a town historically lacking employment for minorities. The cafe “challenges and breaks social barriers,” says the GRCCT website...
Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor and the Spiritual Lessons of Dark Lords
The Lord of the Rings is hard to adapt. Yes, we have Peter Jackson’s masterful films, but Tolkien’s world is difficult to modify for other media while retaining its spirit. In part, that’s because the bad guys are really, really cool.
As a teenager, I understood I was supposed to admire Aragorn, Elrond, and humble Frodo—but I covered my amateur sketchpads in Balrogs. My friends and I used to play a miniatures game based on the wars of Middle Earth, something between Dungeons & Dragons and chess...
As a teenager, I understood I was supposed to admire Aragorn, Elrond, and humble Frodo—but I covered my amateur sketchpads in Balrogs. My friends and I used to play a miniatures game based on the wars of Middle Earth, something between Dungeons & Dragons and chess...
The Promises of Open Wounds
Though many of Julijana’s stories grapple with violence, still more display the possibilities of peace. They are full of willing spirits who reach out into the precarity of conflict and do something truly astounding: “I met a Catholic guy who received a call from his [Serbian] Orthodox friend; ironically, her church was being bombed by the Serbian paramilitaries during the attacks on Osijek. The bell tower almost fell, and she didn’t know who to call. So she called this Catholic guy she’d met at...
My Brother, My Keeper
These memories include the violence of her alcoholic father, newly stalking her dreams like a ghost only she can see. “My fear was that my memory was all messed up and nobody in our family saw what I saw, didn’t remember certain things that I remembered. ”What she describes to me is a kind of existential disaster—like a sailor looking up at the sky and finding all the stars flung apart, the constellations unfamiliar and impossible to navigate. But in that blank, black sky, her older brother Tom e...
The Struggle of Beauty
During the agrarian reforms of the 1950s, the landowners of Guatemala sought to depose then-president Jacobo Árbenz and re-secure their interests. Despite Árbenz’s transparently capitalist ambitions, the dissenters took advantage of growing Cold War paranoia and sought the aid of the United States. The upper class appealed to the interests of the United Fruit Company, who in turn appealed—in 1948—to “the father of public relations,” Edward Bernays. Bernays believed in the power of high-profile “...
The Lurid Profanity of Blasphemous
The “serenity” of the crucifix dates back to the middle ages and remains common in our own churches despite the oddity of the image. Christ hangs from the wood, looking clean and unblemished. Only pin-pricks mar his hands, feet and head. In cast-bronze statues, uniform metal further blends away the wounds. Empty crucifixes signify Christ’s resurrection and conquering of death—but they also remove our need to face his dirt and sweat and screams on a Sunday morning.
Even when I was too young to s...
Even when I was too young to s...
Omakase
Once a year, my wife and I venture out from our semisuburban roost in northern Chicago and make our way to the southeast corner of Humboldt Park. Our destination is Kai Zan, a higher-end sushi restaurant run out of a humble red-brick building. A single banner assures us we’ve come to the right place and aren’t about to strut into the office of the used-car dealer next door. Making sure to turn right once inside—turning left would take us into the tattoo parlor—we’re received into a low-lit dinin...
Hacksaw Ridge and the Strange Sovereignty of God
I was thrilled when Ben Smitthimedhin closed his recent article on Underoath and Emery with a meditation on Shusaku Endō. “I think Endō is on to something about the God who seems, at times, to abandon us,” he writes. “Rather than letting us be, our Lord is a God who haunts us into submission, a God who won’t leave us alone, a God whose words will never be erased.” Smitthimedhin’s point is ultimately about letting God be God, whatever our expectations of what that ought or ought not to look like,...
It isn’t rest until it isn’t for anything
Feelings of “rest” and “restlessness” seem to shake out differently for creatives than they do for others. Rest for the artist often looks a lot like work. Once an idea grips us, we hurl ourselves into sustained activity—like a runner who hits her stride and finds that stopping actually requires much more effort than continuing. We’re often most calm in the eye of the storm, dreading the void that’s waiting for us when the maelstrom passes.This ambivalence comes to us from all sides, not only fr...
A Perfect Circle: Elephants and End-Times
On Sunday, March 8, 2009, with morning light peeking through rain and warming the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral, the Bishop of Paris listened as an Italian philosopher—one who has characterized his work as an “ink-blot” and theology as the ink—delivered, in his own words, a homily against the Church. He made a strange distinction between the “end times” and the “time of the end,” or, as he read it in the Apostle Paul, “the time that remains.” He argued that the church, desperate to put down its o...
The Spiritual Topography of Sleep Well Beast
When I was still dating my wife (not that I ever stopped, of course), our romance was conducted over a space of 200 miles between 2 suburbs in southeast Michigan and semi-suburban Ohio. Skype, or one of its many analogues, was our go-to method of dealing with the distance, and given that both of us were working full-time, we often had to be satisfied with what snatches we could get: 15 minutes here, 5 there, even little 30-second hellos if we were desperate. But the double-edge of such sporadic...
