December 3, 2024

Airport Anxiety and Purposeful Publishing with Joy Allmond

When Joy Allmond was fresh out of college, she struggled to find a professional role in her field. She decided to make the most of her young, single years and…

PAID CONTENT FROM COMPASSION INTERNATIONAL

Raise Compassionate Kids in a Self-Centered World

Compassion International helps Christian parents build bridges between their children and God’s global family. Learn more about raising kids who care for the least of these. When Jesus taught us…

Read more

Paving the Way For God’s Perfect Plan

A Time for Wonder

New Christmas Music with Just the Right Holiday Vibes

The post CT Women 12.3.24 appeared first on Christianity Today.

THERE’S SOMETHING about the idea of starting from zero that makes me want to run and hide. As a recovering perfectionist, I like a beautifully constructed plan that articulates all the ins and outs of how things are supposed to go. The thought of being the one to “pave the way” without a guide or rule book is a daunting prospect for me. Have you ever been there? Maybe you’ve been the one who was called to be the “first” in your family. The first to graduate from college; the first to move outside of your hometown; the first to become a Christian. 

This is the position John the Baptist found himself in before he was even born. In Luke 1:17, we find the angel of the Lord proclaiming the pioneer that John would be: “And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” John was left with the honorable, and I’m sure unnerving, task of preparing people for Jesus, the promised Messiah. How’s that for paving the way? 

And while I know that God equipped John with everything he needed before he was put on this earth, I can’t help but think about the weight and real human emotions that John might have felt and been burdened by. Was he afraid of making a wrong decision? Was he overwhelmed by the idea of authentically articulating who Jesus is? I can’t imagine starting at square one with no books on evangelism, no sinner’s prayer or sermon illustrations. 

It’s easy for impostor syndrome to kick in when we look at “paving the way” through the lens of our own abilities. But the beautiful lesson we learn from the life of John the Baptist is that paving the way has nothing to do with our abilities, and everything to do with our availability to God’s call. Being an available vessel grants us the privilege of being in constant collaboration with the Spirit at work within us. And when we are operating from that place of collaboration, there’s no task or call too big for God to accomplish. 

He used an old, unlikely couple and their baby as the vessel to spread the good news about the coming of the Savior of the world. Though it will inevitably look different in our own lives, it can be powerful to contemplate what God is inviting us personally to be a vessel for through the Advent season and beyond. It is clear through the lineage of Jesus that God delights in working through our imperfect, unlikely stories to shine his light and love … even if that means you’re one of the “firsts” in your sphere of influence to do so. As Christmas dawns and we consider the life of John the Baptist, paving the way for Jesus and his world-changing work, we can consider the invitation that God has bestowed upon our own lives, and whether we will accept it. It may be that there is a host of people you’re paving the way for. 

Jasmine Jones is a mentor and connector, passionate about empowering others to boldly live out their faith through her online community, The Purpose Corner.

This article is part of A Time for Wonder, a 4-week devotional to help individuals, small groups, and families journey through the 2024 Advent season. Learn more about this special issue that can be used Advent, or any time of year at http://orderct.com/advent.

The post Paving the Way For God’s Perfect Plan appeared first on Christianity Today.

That’s the question that Lynn Cohick prayed through tears as she rode the train from Harrisburg to Philadelphia. At the time, Cohick was pursuing her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. She often used her morning commute as devotional time. This particular day, Cohick found herself discouraged as she read only masculine pronouns in her Bible over and over again. She thought of the women in her classes at Penn who saw no place for themselves in the church, and she mourned how many of them had let go of faith as a result.

For herself, and for her classmates, Cohick needed to know what God really thought about women.

“Society norms everything toward male,” explained Cohick, director of Houston Theological Seminary and distinguished New Testament professor at Houston Christian University. “But in the biblical text, is that what the divine revelation is promoting? [The Bible] was written in a patriarchal society, so it’s going to have that [influence], but is that what God thinks?”

Versions of this question have inspired Christians to dig into the Bible, the story of the early church, and the history of global Christianity in search of clues about God’s perspective on how women can participate. While their conclusions are not all the same when it comes to issues like church leadership roles or how marriage should function, one thing is incredibly clear: the answer to Cohick’s question, “God, am I anywhere in here?” is a resounding yes.

And while there is still work to be done to declare that truth, great strides have been taken to tell the stories of faithful women who have done remarkable work to the glory of God.

Finding Women in the Biblical Text

A quick glance at something as simple as the Bible’s table of contents can leave a reader wondering how important women really are in the history of faith. Ruth and Esther almost feel hidden among the dozens of male names. But if Bible readers look just a bit deeper, they’ll find that the Scriptures are filled with accounts of women. Not only that, but those women are often described, commended, and honored by the male writers of Scripture.

Author and Northern Seminary professor Ingrid Faro looks to Tamar, who brought Judah back to his senses. She considers the women who challenged the Pharaoh’s authority by saving Moses. Faro looks to Hannah, whose diligence and prayer lead to the Lord granting her Samuel. All of these women and more were included in the Scriptures by divinely inspired male writers.

Author Mary DeMuth explores Phoebe’s life in works of both nonfiction and fiction. DeMuth notes that Phoebe likely memorized the letter to the Romans, both for the content itself and for Paul’s pauses and emphases, so that she could accurately articulate the letter to its audience.

Phoebe bringing Paul’s words to the Romans draws DeMuth’s mind to other stories in Scripture when a woman played an integral role in carrying out God’s plan—most prominently the role of Mary, the mother of Jesus, who carried Christ just as Phoebe likely carried the letter. Or take the Samaritan woman at the well, the one often labeled an adulterer.

“If you want to count words,” DeMuth says, “she has the longest theological discussion with Jesus of any human in the Bible.”

Pause with that for a moment. The average American evangelical sitting in a pew has repeatedly heard the story of the woman at the well. They’ve learned that she had been divorced many times and was living with a man who was not her husband. They’ve very likely been told that she was a wayward woman engaged in serial sexual affairs, which is at best not explicitly in the text and at worst a tremendous leap given the fact that women had very little agency for initiating divorce in the first century.

What the text does clearly reveal is Jesus’ willingness to engage in a substantive theological discussion with a woman. And it reveals a woman who, upon accepting the truth of the Christ, was listened to, respected, and believed when she took the message of the gospel back to her community.

Dallas Theological Seminary professor Sandra Glahn brought scholars together to take another look at biblical stories of women in Vindicating the Vixens: Revisiting Sexualized, Vilified, and Marginalized Women of the Bible. Surveying women throughout Scripture, Glahn and company offer a reexamination of biblical women, all the way from Eve to Junia.

Author and professor at Northern Seminary Nijay Gupta discusses Junia with great honor in Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church. “I think of Paul as the great hero of the second half of the first century,” he says, “but I think of Andronicus and Junia as Paul’s heroes.”

Gupta notes Paul’s mention of Junia in his letter to the Romans and wonders what Junia was doing to draw enough attention that she would be imprisoned. “She's being rounded up just like Paul, just like other apostles, for disturbing the peace with this new religion,” he says. “She must have gotten onto the radar of the Roman authorities for them to say, ‘This woman is a threat to the good order.’”

In other words, Junia is one of the many women in Scripture who was wholly devoted to Jesus and whose story can inspire us to greater faith.

Old Stories for Modern Readers

Mimi Haddad, president and CEO of CBE International, describes her love for faithful women who have gone before her.

“Strange as it may seem, the women I’ve become acquainted with throughout Christian history have become very good friends,” she says. “I’ve learned from their challenges and seen Christ’s power in their struggles, making all of us sturdier in our faith. In this way, these women have been like pastors to me. Their words teach but even more so their lives model qualities that are contagious for those seeking holiness today.”

Like Haddad, Cheryl Brodersen, host of the Women Worth Knowing podcast, looks to women throughout Christian history for applications to today’s Christians. Alongside author Robin Jones Gunn, Brodersen shares weekly episodes with listeners about women in Christian history.

“I feel like these stories inspire us and tell us what we can be by the grace of God,” Brodersen says.

Authors Leanne M. Dzubinski and Anneke H. Stasson point out that these historical stories cast a vision for the roles women can play in the world. In their book, Women in the Mission of the Church, they hope to “challenge the idea that there’s only one way to be a good Christian woman today, the type that marries and has children, and sees her main role as caring for home and children. That is one vision of what a Christian woman can be. But it is by no means the only one. Women can be nuns. They can stay single and not be a nun. They can marry and not have children. They can marry and work outside the home. All of these are fine options for women. And history is replete with examples of all of these types of women.”

Author and professor Beth Felker Jones points to Susanna Wesley, known for being the mother of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. But, Jones says, Susanna was fierce in her own right. When Susanna’s pastor husband left his congregation in the care of an interim minister while he traveled, Susanna deemed the interim minister’s skills to be lackluster and decided to hold her own prayer meetings in her kitchen. Her husband caught wind of this and wrote to tell her to stop.

She wrote him back to say that if he would absolve her of responsibility for the souls he had left in the care of someone inept, she would gladly stop.

As we look to women throughout Christian history, we are, of course, discovering stories of flawed people. The goal of unearthing and telling their stories is not that we might create a roster of idols who call for our worship. Instead, these stories can remind us that ever since the fall of humankind, God has been working through sinful people.

In that spirit, Hunter Beless and Lauren Bowerman encourage listeners of their Journeywomen Ministries podcast to “consider these women in their humanity. They weren’t perfect and they probably didn’t desire the difficult set of circumstances they endured,” they say. “In fact, oftentimes we can see in their stories their struggles with fear, insecurity, and doubt. They point us to the greater hero, Jesus, who empowered them to do great things for God’s glory. By God’s grace, we can do the same by continually orienting ourselves to him as we go about the work he has set before us.”

Author Simonetta Carr looks to Argula von Grumbach, a Bavarian writer and noblewoman, who spoke publicly against the church in the early 1500s. Carr notes how female theologians have had a profound effect on male theologians throughout church history. Renée of France, for example, influenced John Calvin. By sharing her own theological questions and doubts, Elizabeth Bowes encouraged John Knox to face his uncertainties.

Similarly, podcaster Jasmine Alnutt highlights two women—Marcella and Paula—who were “instrumental in Jerome’s translation of the Latin Vulgate, so much so that he dedicated much of his work to Paula.”

When we only hear about Calvin, Knox, or Jerome, it’s easy to assume that they did not have female influences. In her book Buried Talents: Overcoming Gendered Socialization to Answer God’s Call, Susan Harris Howell explains that when people only hear stories or examples about men or in male terms, they pick up on an implicit message that women are not full participants.

One effective way to counteract that messaging? Find the stories.

Start with a podcast episode or a book. Get curious about the wives of theologians or writers like Martin Luther or George MacDonald, whose spouses’ stories have been explored and told. Let a Google search for “Christian women in the 13th century” take you down a rabbit trail until you find the woman whose story catches your eye. Visit the online Visual Museum of Women in Christianity, a collaborative project of Cohick, Glahn, and George Kalantzis to create a curated, permanent visual exhibit of women in the history, ministry, and piety of early, Byzantine, and medieval Christianity.

Whether on a podcast episode, the page of a book, or a screen, the woman whose story that will speak to your heart is out there. When you find her, as Gunn says, may you “feel like you found a treasure.”

The post The Hidden Figures of Christianity appeared first on Christianity Today.

Her story is significant because she is not the only one. In death, Taylor joins an unfortunate sisterhood, including Atatiana Jefferson, Rekia Boyd, Kathryn Johnston, Sandra Bland, and Aiyana Stanley-Jones, to name just a few black women and girls killed by police violence.

The absence of Breonna Taylor from evangelical conversations about racial justice is indicative of a broader issue. Despite being the most religiously devout Christian demographic in the country, black women are underrepresented in almost every significant public facet of evangelical life, from black heroines in church history to black authors in Christian publishing.

In this moment, we are already starting to see an initial spike in attention toward female black voices. But the church cannot make meaningful progress toward racial justice without sustained, intentional efforts to acknowledge black women, our powerful witness, and our contributions to the body of Christ.

Overlooked but Seen by God

Scan the bookshelves for Bible studies written by African American women, and you will typically find two authors (Priscilla Shirer and Jackie Hill Perry).

According to InterVarsity Press editor Edward Gilbreath, “For many years, publishers did not believe there was a market for such books.” Yet, according to the American Bible Society, African Americans are more avid Bible readers than other ethnic groups, with 69 percent turning to Scripture multiple times a year compared to a smaller number of whites (44%) and Hispanics (52%).

Black women often serve as the spiritual center for our families and regularly rank among the most devout demographics in the country. According to the Pew Research Center, black women are most likely to believe in God with absolute certainty (83%), pray daily (79%), and attend church weekly (52%).

“I watched my mom, like a lot of women in the churches I grew up in, raise money for the church and serve as the cornerstone of their churches, their communities, and their families, yet they are denied formal leadership roles,” said Stachelle Bussey, a minister and founder of The Hope Buss, a nonprofit organization based in Louisville.

Part of uplifting black women is listening to us when we say we feel erased.

In evangelical leadership, black women may be brought in for diversity initiatives but not empowered as decision-makers.

“I often find myself feeling as though I need to defend my knowledge, expertise, and leadership ability in both Christian and secular settings due to the pervasive gender and racial prejudices that still exist,” said Shantel Crosby, a leader with Be the Bridge Louisville and a grant administrator in the Louisville mayor’s office.

Kristina Button, a writer for The Witness: A Black Christian Collective, said black women are “relegated to certain stereotypical roles and not given the opportunities to lead in roles we feel called to lead in.”

Black women who have branched out to start ministries on our own risk having our efforts looked over or co-opted. Recently, a well-known male African American pastor launched a racial reconciliation ministry with a name similar to Be the Bridge, popular nonprofit founded by Latasha Morrison.

Morrison was circumspect in discussing the situation, but reiterated that African American men have a special duty to lift the voices of African American women. “Impact over intent,” she said. “Your intent may not be to erase black women, but the impact of certain actions is erasure, and part of uplifting black women is listening to us when we say we feel erased.”

The erasure of black women in the church has a long history, evidenced by the absence of African American women from sermons and Sunday school lessons, even as leaders make efforts to reclaim the legacies of civil rights heroes like Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and Fred Shuttlesworth.

In the proportion of evangelical lessons that reference women at all, we are more likely to hear about the faith of Elisabeth Elliot, Corrie ten Boom, Hannah More, or Ruth Graham than Jo Ann Robinson, Autherine Lucy, Ida B. Wells, or Fannie Lou Hamer.

Even among the women of the Bible, we celebrate the stories of Sarah and Deborah, but what about Hagar, Shiphrah, Puah, and Jael? The depictions of most women in the Bible rarely reflect the reality that all women in the Bible were “women of color,” said Kristie Anyabwile, author of His Testimonies, My Heritage: Women of Color on the Word of God.

The first person to name God in the Bible was an Egyptian woman named Hagar. She called God El-Roi, “the one who sees.” The story of Hagar reminds women of African heritage that they, like Hagar, are seen and valued by God.

A Change Gonna Come

It is easy to get discouraged and feel as though not much has changed since Sojourner Truth boldly asked a group of mostly white suffragettes, “Ain’t I A Woman?” But a change may be on the horizon.

The Gospel Coalition (TGC) just launched a podcast for women called Let’s Talk, where two of the three women co-hosts are black: Jackie Hill Perry and Jasmine Holmes. The audience for TGC is predominately white women, although it has made strides to increase diversity among its writers and conference attendees. In positioning two black women as authorities in Scripture and theology, TGC is helping to expand the imaginations and expectations of its audience of what black women in the church can be. The show ranked No. 1 on the Christian podcast charts its first day.

Moody Publishers recently named Trillia Newbell as an acquisitions editor, making her one of the few black women employed in that role. “[At Moody], I have not had to fight my way to the table—I have a seat and a voice. That kind of freedom and support is important and encouraging as I prayerfully consider authors and topics,” said Newbell, herself the author of a half dozen Christian titles.

Black women matter to God, and therefore they ought to matter to the church.

Last week, following a nationwide push to read and learn from black authors, both Austin Channing Brown and Latasha Morrison had books hit The New York Times best-seller lists.

Cindy Bunch, associate publisher and editorial director for InterVarsity Press, credits the success of Brown’s I’m Still Here for opening new doors for African American Christian women in publishing. “Brown’s [success] has both spurred on publishers to seek out these voices and has encouraged many authors to submit book proposals. We have a long way to go, but I am hopeful that recent events will continue to create space for African American women to write.”

In his painting “Beyond the Myth of Benevolence,” artist Titus Kaphar reveals the portrait of a black woman hidden behind the portrait of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson. In an interview about the painting, Kaphar describes the work as symbolic of the “many black women whose stories have been shrouded by the narratives of our deified founding fathers.”

The church has also failed to fully reveal and celebrate the unseen black women, whose work, sacrifices, and suffering have been woven both into the foundations of this country and church. But even where the church fails to see and value us, “we are seen by the only who matters in the fullness of our humanity and [we] have no reason to be ashamed because God fearfully and wonderfully makes us in our embodied blackness,” says theologian Ekemini Uwan.

By exposing the unseen black woman and her labor, Kaphar exposes the myth of the benevolence of slavery. A myth that pervades much of evangelical public life is that it is benevolent to expect black women to conform to the narrow frames set out not by Scripture, but by men. Yet even those who do conform find their contributions overlooked and undervalued. I realized that the narrow confines were a myth—a distortion of Scripture and a tool to deny my calling.

There was a time when, as a black woman, I felt like I had to make myself fit into spaces to be seen. I worked hard to be softer, to smile more, to shrink so that others would not be threatened or made uncomfortable. Doing so was in some ways a rejection of the good gifts God had given me. It is a much harder, lonelier road to choose to live into your createdness, to occupy all the space God has given you. And yet, we must walk like our foremothers before us.

Ida B. Wells and Fannie Lou Hamer had a testimony the world needed to hear, and even when the church refused to listen, they kept speaking. There is a generation of black female leaders with a divine calling and a testimony that the church of today needs to hear. God hears our cries, God sees our pain. I believe he will answer our prayers.

Black women matter to God, and therefore they ought to matter to the church.

Kathryn Freeman is a master of divinity student at Baylor University’s Truett Seminary. She is a writer, lawyer, and the co-host of the Melanated Faith podcast.

The post The Hidden Figures of the Church appeared first on Christianity Today.

In 1992, Parks and a few friends moved to LA following the riots sparked by the acquittals in the Rodney King trial. It was an act of faith, inspired by Parks’s experience as a summer intern with John Perkins and the Voice of Calvary Ministries in Mississippi. The friends found a pair of rental houses just off Jefferson Boulevard in the Exposition Park neighborhood and set up a tutoring program at a storefront around the corner.

There was just one problem.

Their new home was not far from Lucky Liquor, a haven for crime in the neighborhood. The store served cheap beer and sold cups full of ice with their liquor, encouraging customers to hang around outside the store and drink, according to city zoning department complaints. Prostitutes and drugs dealers often hung around the store as well, and the street nearby was littered with broken bottles and other trash.

Sam Comen

Then there was the violence. In their first year in LA, Parks says, there was one homicide at the store and more shootings than they could count.

“We quickly learned that gunfire was a call to hit the floor and pray,” he said.

One night as the bullets smashed their walls, the friends prayed the Lord’s Prayer—“Your kingdom come, your will be done.” Afterward, Parks was furious.

He’d grown up in a quiet suburb, where the kind of chaos he saw on a daily basis in his South LA neighborhood would never have been tolerated. So why was it tolerated in his new community?

The next morning, he and his friends set out to answer that question—and to shut down Lucky Liquor as a public nuisance. Parks, with help from his landlord, organized neighbors and local businesses to rally against the store and hounded public officials to take action.

Today that store is home to the El Rey Market, a local grocery store, where neighbors shop for produce, tortillas, and queso fresco.

The violence and chaos once common outside the liquor store have vanished. The gang activity, the drug dealing, the public drunkenness, and the prostitution are gone.

Across the street, 30 kids attend weekly tutoring sessions at Adventures Ahead, a program run in that same storefront Parks and friends rented 25 years ago. Their fledgling Bible study eventually launched Church of the Redeemer, a thriving local congregation, and the Redeemer Community Partnership, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the community. The streets along Jefferson are lined with newly planted trees and will soon feature new bike lanes and repaired sidewalks, part of a $6 million grant that Redeemer Community Partnership helped obtain for the community.

Parks and his neighbors are now taking on a new public nuisance: three dozen 1960s-era oil wells they believe are a menace to the community. It is part of a broad, recent shift in the long tradition of Christian community development, where churches are increasingly confronting local environmental injustices. And it’s all part of the same mission, Parks says—bringing the good news of the gospel to life, so the neighborhood can flourish and experience the abundant life that God offers.

Black Gold, Texas Tea

Before it was home to swimming pools and movie stars, as the theme song to The Beverly Hillbillies puts it, Los Angeles was an oil boom town.

Edward L. Doheny first struck oil in 1892, not far from where Dodger Stadium now stands, according to the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. Within five years there were 500 active wells in Los Angeles. By the 1960s, a quarter of the world’s oil and gas came from California, which exported 133 million barrels of oil each year, according to “Drilling Down,” a report from the Liberty Hill Foundation.

Sam Comen

Today, the city is home to more than 1,000 active wells, many in the middle of residential neighborhoods.

Most of those oil wells have operated with little oversight. A 2015 audit by California’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources found that the office in charge of overseeing wells in Los Angeºles had “inconsistent permitting, monitoring and enforcement of well construction and operation,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Many of the wells were developed before the Clean Air Act and other environmental laws came into effect. So they operate with little oversight, says Bhavna Shamasunder, an assistant professor in the Urban and Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College in LA.

Among them: the Jefferson drill site, home to 36 oil and gas wells and hidden in plain sight.

Even zoning regulations and building permits have a place in God’s plan.

The site’s walls resemble those surrounding a church or home—covered in ivy, while the grounds outside the walls are decorated with shrubs and palms. During the summer, residents will sometimes set up their hibachis and hold cookouts in the shade of the wall—unaware that on the other side of the wall are dozens of oil and gas wells.

The closest house is three feet from the wall. A neighborhood school is just a few blocks away.

Kevin Blue, pastor of Church of the Redeemer and a longtime neighborhood resident, said church members really didn’t worry too much about the oil wells until a few years ago. There were always more pressing things to worry about.

“It’s really a hierarchy of needs,” Blue said. “If people are getting shot and it is not safe to walk down the street and there is all this public drunkenness, and the schools are struggling—you deal with that first.”

The church’s activism against the oil wells began with a lesson from the Book of Deuteronomy, Parks says.

Parks, a former Eagle Scout who now teaches public policy at the University of Southern California, loves to say that God cares about every detail in life. Even zoning regulations and building permits have a place in God’s plan, he says.

Sitting at a table at Adventures Ahead in early November, his eyes light up as he recites Deuteronomy 22:8: “When you build a new house, make a parapet around your roof so that you may not bring the guilt of bloodshed on your house if someone falls from the roof.”

“It’s details that matter,” he said. “There is a place for us to be concerned about these nitty-gritty things—there’s a biblical mandate to do so.”

About three years ago, Parks got an email alert about a permit for some new work at the Jefferson drill site. When he pulled the file at city hall, Parks learned that the site’s then-owner Freeport-McMoRan wanted to drill three new oil wells at the site. The drilling could go on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for as long as two years. And the site’s owner had asked the city to waive any public hearings on the permit.

His interest piqued, Parks and some church members began canvassing the neighborhood, asking neighbors about the site. That’s when they began to worry. Neighbors would tell them about their homes being sprayed with oil from leaks at the site and about the noise and exhaust from the massive trucks hauling chemicals into the site.

The more they learned, the more concerned they became.

The Jefferson drill site, it turns out, is a relatively late addition to the neighborhood. Most of the houses in the community were built in the 1900s, about six decades before the Union Oil Company of California began drilling in the community. The company bought up a number of homes and tore them down to make way for the oil wells. They also acquired four parcels just to the north of the drill site. Two were vacant; two had empty structures on them. The idea at the time, according to the initial zoning approval, was that those vacant properties would serve as a buffer between the operations of the site and their neighbors.

Then in the late 1990s, the company that owned the site sold off those properties.

The deed filed with the sale acknowledged that the site could be considered a nuisance to the community. According to the 1998 deed:

Buyer shall acknowledge and agree that the operations of Seller or its successors or assigns may emit noxious odors and fumes, and may cause vibration, loud and continuous noise, safety hazards, unsightliness and/or extensive truck traffic. None of the foregoing matters, or any other operations of Seller or its successor or assigns on and in the Jefferson Street Drill site, shall constitute any nuisance to or for Buyer or its successors, assigns or tenants.

In the early days, getting oil and gas out of the site was relatively easy, Parks says. The oil company could simply drill wells and pump out the fossil fuels. But those days are over.

“All that easy-to-obtain gas and oil is gone,” he said.

These days, the site’s owners use more extreme techniques to extract oil and gas from the site. Among those techniques is “acidizing,” which Parks refers to as “fracking’s toxic big sister.” It involves pumping tens of thousands of gallons of hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acid down the oil well—to clean out the rust, scale, and other debris that clog up pipes; to dissolve sand, clay, and other sediments that block oil from flowing; or to fracture the rock below the surface, according to the American Petroleum Institute (API). It’s a method that requires between 10 and 500 gallons per foot of pipe, according to the API.

What that means at the Jefferson site is that tanker trucks hauling as many as 20,000 gallons of toxic chemicals regularly show up at the site.

Some of those chemicals are stored less than ten feet from a neighborhood’s homes, says Niki Wong, community organizer for Redeemer Community Partnership.

Standing on a railing in the alley outside the drill site, Wong peers over the wall and points out the tubs containing chemicals stored at the site.

Among them: Sufratron DQ-86, hydrogen sulfide, Nalco EC60191A water clarifier, and Chemco Odor Control Jasmine—all of which come with warnings about being known carcinogens or endocrine disrupters, “suspected of damaging fertility or unborn children,” says Wong, who holds a master’s in public health.

The chemicals used on the site could hurt residents of the neighborhood for generations to come, she says.

Sam Comen

And neighbors have almost no protection from chemicals used on site. During so-called “acid drops,” Wong says, workers are decked out in full hazmat gear, while neighbors pass by on the other side of the wall.

“What really gets me is how many kids live in the area,” Wong says. “There is an elementary school just two blocks away, 700 feet away, from the drill site.”

Compounding concerns about the well is that the Exposition Park neighborhood already has other public issues. This part of Los Angeles has a higher rate of infant mortality and a higher percentage of babies born with low birth rates than other parts of the city, Shamasunder says.

Rates of asthma are also higher. Using these chemicals on the site can makes things worse, Shamasunder says.

“We do know that this area is already impacted—and that these chemicals do have an impact on public health,” she says. “So we can ask whether we should be adding to that burden by allowing this well to operate.”

A church of neighbors

John W. Mack Elementary School on South Catalina Street, about a two-minute walk from the Jefferson drill site, is also the place where Church of the Redeemer worships on Sundays.

A fold-up chalkboard sign by the front entrance greeted worshipers on a Sunday morning this past November.

“Church of the Redeemer, 10 AM,” it read. “All are welcome.”

In the auditorium, the praise band warmed up with a bilingual version of Michael W. Smith’s “You are Holy” as volunteers set up chairs for worship. The church draws about 125 people most Sundays. The congregation numbers about 200, including kids. It’s as diverse as Los Angeles itself, with a mix of Hispanic American, Asian American, African American, and Anglo members.

Many are former USC students or alumni of Servant Partners, an urban ministry internship the church partners with. There are also a fair number of neighbors like Marvin Aragon and his wife, Claudia Guadron, who joined after their kids were invited to the church’s youth group.

Almost everyone in the church lives nearby. Their kids go to local schools and many have long-term roots in the community.

“It’s a church of neighbors,” Blue says.

Before the service began, Corissa and Nathan Pacillas Smith sat at a picnic table on the playground behind the school. They live across the street from the drill site, where they’ve got a bird’s eye view of the goings-on from their porch. Downstairs, their neighbor’s porch is littered with scientific equipment—a local college’s science project to monitor the air quality outside the site.

Moving to the apartment across from the drill site was part mission, part practical concern. Nathan and Corissa needed a bigger place, with room to host a weekly Monday night Bible study from the church.

They also knew it would be helpful to have church members living near the site to keep an eye on things.

Soon after they moved in, they began to experience the headaches of living so close to a drill site. Some of the worst days, Corissa says, are when a 50-foot tall oil derrick is up at the site. It’s an eyesore, she said, and so loud it rattles her brain.

“It will often shake the house,” she said. “Like a minor earthquake. That’s pretty disruptive, especially since I often work at home.”

Then there are the smells—diesel fumes and odors from the chemicals used on the site. Most days Corissa keeps the windows closed because the smell is so bad. Since 2010, community members have filed about 30 complaints with the South Coast Air Quality Management District, according to published reports.

And there’s constant anxiety that something could go wrong.

The couple plans to stay in the community despite the concerns over the drill site. Both feel a call to live in the neighborhood and have made deep ties to the church. Living in the city, in a parish-model church that’s focused on the community, has strengthened their faith, they said.

They have both come to see being a good neighbor as an essential part of their discipleship.

“The reason I was attracted to this community is that there is a certain intentionality and even at times a certain relentlessness in their approach to discipleship,” Nathan said.

Corissa and Nathan know they are lucky. They’re young, well educated, have lots of friends and family—so they have options if there’s an accident at the drill site. They worry about their 90-year-old neighbor, who has lived in the same apartment for more than 50 years. Where would she go if something went wrong?

It’s not out of the realm of possibility. In October 2015, a gas leak at a storage facility in Porter Ranch, a wealthy suburb about 30 miles away, forced thousands of residents out of their homes for months. The Southern California Gas Company paid a $4 million fine and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for a delay in notifying local authorities about the leak, according to the Los Angeles Times. The company still faces civil lawsuits from residents.

If there’s an accident at the Jefferson site, Nathan and Corissa plan to grab their neighbors and run as fast as they can.

“Our plan is to get as far away as possible, as soon as possible, with as many people as possible,” Corissa said.

Making Jefferson beautiful

There are signs that the community’s advocacy is working. Church members showed up in force back in 2015 to oppose expansion at the site, causing Freeport-McMoRan to give up on plans to expand the site. The company later sold the site to Sentinel Peak Resources.

This past fall, church members and other community leaders filed a nuisance complaint with the city, asking for the drill site to be shut down permanently. It’s the same tactic they used against Lucky Liquor. In February, church members again showed up in droves at a hearing on the nuisance complaint. They hope to hear a ruling later this year.

They’ve also had support from the media and from celebrities. Last February, Mark Ruffalo, Leonardo DiCaprio, Rashida Jones and other members of Hollywood United—a group of celebrities opposed to neighborhood drilling—toured the neighborhood and got a firsthand look at the Jefferson drill site. The Redeemer Community Partnership also produced a short documentary about the site.

The city of Los Angeles has already shut down at least one nearby drill site. In 2016, the oil company AllenCo agreed to pay a $1.25 million fine to settle a lawsuit against a drill site less than two miles from the Jefferson site. The site could re-open in the future, with strict restrictions.

In the long term, members of Church of the Redeemer want to see the Jefferson site shut down. At the very least, they want the kind of protections that better-off communities get.

The Pico-Robertson neighborhood, about eight miles away, is home to a pair of drill sites, including the 175-foot-tall Cardiff Tower. There are 40 active wells on that site, according to StandLA, enclosed behind an ivy-covered stone wall at least three times as high as the one at the Jefferson site. Most of the wells are enclosed in the tower. The closest house is 100 feet away—as opposed to the 3 feet at the Jefferson site. Among its neighbors are a synagogue and school. A gentle whoosh of the drills can barely be heard over the sounds of traffic in this busy neighborhood.

Sam Comen

About six miles away from the Cardiff Tower, another 51 wells at the Packard Well Site are enclosed in the shell of what looks like an ordinary office building at 5733 West Pico Blvd. The nearest home is about 125 feet away, and again, the sound of the pumping is barely audible over the sound of traffic.

“We don’t have that here. All we have is a 10-foot wall,” Corissa said.

Shamasunder says that Church of the Redeemer has a crucial role to play in deciding the future of the Jefferson drill site and other neighborhood wells. They bring up ethical concerns that scientists and zoning administrators sometimes overlook.

“The church raises some really important moral and ethical issues,” she says. “Should these oil wells be there? Should a child be living next to a drill site? Should a pregnant woman be worried about her pregnancy because of where she lives? Scientists don’t do as good a job asking these questions.”

For Parks, shutting down the oil well is part of a bigger story of how the gospel is transforming the Exposition Park neighborhood. Members of Church of the Redeemer have tied their fate to the fate of the community. They want to see their neighbors flourish.

Shutting down oil wells or nuisance liquor stores, planting trees, tutoring kids, holding neighborhood Bible studies, and making friends with neighbors during a community service project are all part of how a neighborhood is reached with the gospel, Parks says.

“In the context of friendship—there are normal, natural opportunities to talk about our love for Jesus,” he said. “Our church is made up of people that our kids go to school with, our kids play soccer with, neighbors that we clean up trees with. That is how the gospel is going out in our community.”

His favorite night of the year in the neighborhood comes on Halloween, when the church holds its annual harvest carnival.

Sam Comen

When Parks and his friends first moved into the neighborhood in the early 1990s, Halloween was a dark night with a lot of gang violence. Most families either locked their doors and stayed home—or drove their kids to the city’s west side where there was more candy and less violence.

So Parks and his friends organized a neighborhood carnival instead. They blocked off the street, put up a jump castle, organized some games, and gave away candy. They also surveyed neighbors about their concerns and offered to let folks sign up for neighborhood Bible studies.

“Every year, we get about 30 people who want to join a one-on-one Bible study,” Parks said. “I don’t know how to find 30 neighbors who want to study the Bible except to have a harvest carnival. It’s amazing. It’s just such a sign to us that God takes what is dark and broken in our neighborhood and he redeems it—just like he does in our own lives as well.”

Bob Smietana is senior writer for Facts & Trends magazine and a CT contributor. He lives near Nashville, Tennessee.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect Richard Park’s new position at the University of Southern California.

Have something to say about this topic? Let us know here.

The post God, Guns, and Oil appeared first on Christianity Today.

This past Monday, January 11, was Alexander Hamilton’s 259th birthday (or possibly his 261st; historians aren’t sure). People celebrated on social media like they’d celebrate a living celebrity. And for the most part, the well-wishing was aimed at a living recipient, the man unexpectedly stewarding the Founding Father’s legacy: hip-hop artist Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Miranda wrote the song and book for Hamilton: An American Musical—in which he also stars. It’s a rap musical about Hamilton’s life and the founding of America, and it’s the hottest ticket on Broadway. Its success alone is newsworthy; in just under two years, including its initial run at the Public Theater, the show has earned nearly $70 million, and after just three months on Broadway, it dethroned The Lion King for a week as the highest grossing show. Its influence on Broadway has been nothing short of revolutionary (c’mon, I had to): reviews have lauded it as the most original and genre-changing musical in years, and critics are already predicting that it will sweep this year’s Tony Awards.

There are hundreds of articles breaking down how a wacky concept like Hamilton made it this far. I had the special pleasure of coming to it not from the reviews or local New York City hype, but through its fans. Despite being probably the least accessible work of art in existence (you can buy tickets, but only after July and only for several hundred dollars a pop), Hamilton’s reach is broad and diverse thanks to its spectacular cast recording. This piece at Indiewire by Liz Shannon Miller details how the album brought the musical to a global audience and skyrocketed Secretary Hamilton to a stardom that goes much further than his political legacy ever could.

Here’s what I knew about Alexander Hamilton before I bought the cast recording: he was among the youngest of the Founding Fathers and the first of them to die; he had a scandalous affair; he was the first Secretary of the Treasury. I had him filed away under “Thanks for your help, but you’re not as significant as Washington or Franklin or Jefferson.” I was actually a little clueless as to why he, of all people, was on the $10 bill. (If any of my professors are reading this, I swear it wasn’t you, it was me).

The last place I expected to find engaged, accurate, intelligent discourse on American political history was Tumblr. (Check out the “#hamilton musical” tag on Tumblr if you don’t believe me.)

Joan Marcus

It started as a trickle of debates between bloggers about things like whether Thomas Jefferson’s political ideals are still credible given that he owned slaves. I chalked it up to history nerds having a spat and ignored it. But then there were more posts, with more variety and more hits and more people getting involved. In a matter of weeks I was enthralled daily by thesis-level analyses of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” George Washington’s “Farewell Address,” John Adams’s foreign policy, Ben Franklin’s humanist philosophy, and on and on.

And the name that connected all of it was Alexander Hamilton.

I was, and am, astonished. The reason I visit Tumblr is to get my fill of the ridiculous and benign, a chance to take a break from in-depth comparative discussions on the Federalist Papers (professors, again, sorry!). Tumblr is where I go when I want to turn my brain off and find out which bagel suits my horoscope.

But here’s the thing: sites like this, including Reddit and Twitter, facilitate an almost obsessive passion for fandoms that want to flesh out their stories with as much detail and "realism" as possible. What would Captain Kirk's favorite tea be? How would Aragorn handle Gondor's standing army? What's General Leia Organa's approach to supplying the Resistance? These are all posts I've read, fans speculating on the wider world of the stories they love.

So what happens when that passion for speculative storytelling gets applied to Hamilton? Essentially, it became a massive communal history class. These are the Founding Fathers, after all, which means Hamilton fans have 250 years of historical analysis to fill in the blanks for these characters. And, of course, they end up understanding these people as more than just characters.

Joan Marcus

Say, for example, that a student who’s fallen in love with Hamilton decides she wants to learn all she can about her favorite character, John Laurens. All it takes is a quick Internet search, and instead of having to imagine what his childhood was like or what his favorite pastimes were or where he got his values from, she can learn the facts, the history. She can’t make Laurens in her own image; she has to take the real man for who he was at face value.

Apply this process to all the Founding Fathers, and suddenly when two people are arguing about their “problematic fav” (a character they like who has at least one questionable trait), they’re arguing over real issues about real people whose choices have real consequences for the nation we’re living in now.

Demographically, sites like Tumblr, Reddit, and Twitter are dominated by young adults with liberal leanings who use their blogs for a plethora of modern causes. Some arguments are informed, just, and effective, others not so much, but overall these communities foster a generally "stick-it-to-the-Man" attitude.

The people they admire do not normally fall into wealthy, white, male, traditionally religious categories, and anything that happened in the past is by default the less enlightened, wrong way of doing things. This is a typical postmodern attitude, this idea that we should pull away from history as a thing that has real bearing on how we should live right now.

Joan Marcus

Furthermore, for young people today the idea that the founding principles of our country were built by wealthy, religious, slave-owning, white men is reason number one why America Is Not In A Good Place Right Now.

I’ve been in these internet communities for a long time, and there is a clear “before Hamilton” and “after Hamilton” when it comes to conversations about America. In the past, the internet might have been full of nerds—but if you loved ranting about history, you were still the dork in the chat room.

And these conversations are happening in such a way that their participants are encouraged to be informed and allowed to like what they read. I would never have called it, but there are posts out there now defending George Washington’s Christianity as a good and necessary value for our first president to have had. People who have built up an attitude that puts them in opposition to traditional ideas about government are now getting excited about the type of politician they would normally despise.

And sure, there’s still plenty of “Which Founding Father Is Your Soulmate?” -type content. But Hamilton fans are going back and reconciling themselves to their own history in ways they didn’t have the chance to before. It’s crazy and uncharacteristic, but my peers have found in Hamilton a reason to be patriotic.

The show’s tagline is “The story of America then told by America now.” It’s why the music is hip-hop, rap, and pop, and why the cast is almost entirely made up of people of color. But the consequences of directly tying America now to America then are wider-reaching than just the production details of the show.

Joan Marcus

Hamilton made history cool. It made American history cool. In Hamilton, the Founding isn’t idealized or idolized. It’s painful and real and problematic. It’s not something locked away in a boring textbook or thrown in our faces by a huffy politician.

It’s our history, and like our present, it includes things to worry about and things to be inspired by. True patriotism is knowing both and choosing to be proud.

Jessica Gibson is a former intern with Christianity Today Movies and a student at The King’s College in New York City. She tweets only to fangirl and gripe @GibbyTOD.

The post How ‘Hamilton’ Made American History Cool Again appeared first on Christianity Today.

Evangelicals are showing an increasingly lively interest in the arts, and a more critical eye and ear. We welcome this, and respond with a new feature, “The Refiner’s Fire,” under the direction of Editorial Associate Cheryl Forbes. For its premiere we offer two items. First, an engaging introductory article on critical discernment by Bonnie M. Greene, who teaches English at Bellevue Christian High School in Bellevue, Washington, is a free-lance writer, and has B.A. degrees from Seattle Pacific College and the University of Washington. Next comes a sprightly review of the film “Time to Run” by Miss Forbes, graduate of and graduate student in English literature at the University of Maryland, a member of our editorial staff for two years, a singer and music lover, and the only person we know who reads Milton for pleasure. “The Refiner’s Fire” will appear every other issue. Perhaps it will be the area of the magazine that calls forth the most reader dissent, for criticism is always a subjective realm.

Discerning Artistic Spirits

Of all the paintings and prints in my living room, only one is by an artist whose name brings instant recognition. And it is that print which often prompts a guest to ask if I am an amateur artist. I explain that it is a print and attempt to change the subject, for I know he’ll blush and laugh nervously when he hears that the painting reproduced is by Van Gogh. In his embarrassment, he’ll probably mutter something about how long it has been since he took art appreciation in junior high. His discomfiture is too great to allow the kind of chuckle the situation deserves, nor do I really feel free to drive out the old myth about the “world of art”—an exotic place that we may all visit on our vacations, but that is open during the off-season only to the rich and to the artists themselves.

Whether they know it or not, even people who claim to prefer the “objective verities” of the sciences participate in the world of art every day. For art is a means of stylizing a basic heart commitment, whether it comes from the brush of an artist who makes his living by giving shape on canvas to his understanding of life, or whether it is reflected in the hard-cash purchase of a seascape to fill the blank space over the fireplace. A person who visits an art gallery only when he’s on a tour to Paris or Rome is nonetheless likely to decorate his home with prints of the safe masterpieces, or perhaps with the large garish scenes found in the drugstore. He pays taxes to support art collections in municipal museums, to fill libraries with fiction, poetry, and drama, and to staff state schools that train many of the nation’s future artists. If he watches the nightly news on TV, he glimpses glittering events at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and he may bristle when a presidential council suggests federal funding for the arts. He watches movie adaptations of Hardy and Conrad novels to relax before going to sleep, and he may even go to a play or two—Fiddler on the Roof, if not The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. And so the average person does participate in the aesthetic life of his community, as an involuntary patron if not an actual consumer.

The major art movements can affect a person more subtly than he could imagine. One of the best examples of art’s broad influence is in the use of asymmetrical magazine layouts, which were introduced in Vogue back in 1920 by an art director who loved the work of Pieter Mondriaan. Within thirty years Mondriaan’s ideas about art had changed the face of nearly all the better-known magazines in the country. The average person read the magazines without knowing that serious art was pushing its way into his life.

If art didn’t have much influence on the rest of life, it might be all right for a Christian to choose to ignore art except when it intruded into his life unavoidably. But art is powerful, and it is persuasive. Furthermore, art is important because it forms a part of the way we put our lives together. In the paintings, the dances, the sculptures, and the music with which we surround ourselves are found the spirits—whether of apostasy or of faithfulness—that shape our heart’s understanding of life.

“Highbrow” art aside (ordinarily a fruitless distinction for the Christian), the spirits of the age shout loudly from the art produced for mass consumption. For instance, one branch of American mass art is a sort of dehumanized paean to technology. The furniture is made of cold chrome and vinyl, and the vibrant, geometric shapes of the paintings and sculptures reflect the power and might of the machine. And the women’s magazines translate the methods of modern technology into simple terms so that a reader can create decorative art from tin cans and doweling while the children are at school.

Another branch of mass art rejects the power of technology in a back-to-nature stylization of the old romantic concern for individual freedom. The hand-crafted look turns up in ethnic art, in macramé wall-hangings, in découpage on dressers, in batik screens, in jasmine-scented sand candles, and in many other forms. It makes little difference how odd the piece is, as long as it obviously was made by hand rather than by machine.

Art for the mass market also breathes the romantic spirit in the escapist pieces that fill department stores, Bible bookstores, and discount houses all across the country: seascapes that never saw an oil slick or a dead gull, pictures of children with over-sized eyes, portraits of families who never heard an angry word or the whining of a tired child, and ceramic moldings of panthers, peacocks, and every conceivable kind of exotic plant. This never-never-land kind of art fits perfectly into the plushly romantic decor of many American homes. Even the “highbrow” art that reaches the masses of people comes in condensed versions of the classics and in such television romances as Jane Eyre, which stripped the novel’s heroine of her classic feminist trappings, substituting a beautiful actress for the thin and ugly Jane.

Whether one chooses to decorate his surroundings with reproductions from the supermarket or original prints from the Museum of Modern Art, the art he chooses grows out of a perception of life that is rarely articulated and that might dismay him if it were.

Art is powerful and persuasive not only because it is a part of a person’s life style but also because many artists have something important to say about their heart’s perception of life. An artist’s perception of the meaning of life engages the whole man—the senses, the emotions, the intellect—and calls for a commitment of some sort from his audience, whether a minimal response of sympathy for a character or a major response of devotion to an ideal. For instance, Shakespeare’s dramatizations of events taken from Holinshed’s Chronicles gave uneducated Elizabethans an afternoon of entertainment and beauty and also, without straying into propaganda or didacticism, aroused their sensibilities to basic human issues: questions of morality, justice, the source of government’s authority, the limitations of power. The same questions were implicit in the histories of Holinshed, but Shakespeare’s dramatic art, which was not essentially intellectual, drew a fuller response from the viewer than did the historian’s prose. Even art that is only mediocre as art can prompt a reaction to important issues. The reader of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man chokes with anger and frustration at the injustice and exploitation the hero encountered as a child and in college. Although he probably does not close the book with an articulated plan for combating injustice and racism, he knows he can never again gaze indifferently at racist institutions and customs.

Because art is powerful, because it is important, and because it is unavoidable, the Christian should learn to discern the spirits that move it. Part of his personal commitment to Jesus Christ is a responsibility to grow in his understanding of how Christ’s redemption claims his entire life, even his participation in the arts. The Christian who does not test the spirits of the art he encounters makes himself vulnerable to subtle influences he might heartily disapprove were he aware of them. Furthermore, the Christian is called to speak the prophetic Word of the Lord for aesthetic life to those around him, whether they be his own children or skilled playwrights, painters, poets, and musicians.

Admittedly, discerning the spirit of an art work is no easy task. The critical tools taught in high school and college develop skilled readers, but only the eye of faith can see beyond the intricacies of the technical performance to perceive the artistic response to the Law-Word of God. What the artist sees and puts down in words, colors, or sounds grows directly out of his heart’s perception of life. If he sees the healing redemption of Christ coming to men in need of real salvation from real sin and guilt, his basic outlook (though not necessarily his style or his subject matter) will be totally different from that of the person who thinks of the world as an intriguing, if perverse, place to be manipulated and developed for man’s pleasure. There are as many different attitudes toward the world and man’s place in it as there are artists, of course, but only the eye of faith will recognize the apostasy or the faithfulness that motivates the artist’s heart direction. For instance, Picasso’s broken figures and distorted human faces suggest an irreparable brokenness of life, but Janice Russell, a Christian painter from Chicago, gives her people a look of serenity in the midst of the brokenness. Russell shows Picasso’s influence in her style, but her own vision of healing transforms that style to reflect the Truth.

Exercising the eye of faith takes considerable practice. Courses in art criticism seldom speed up the process, for the job is much more than a critical exercise. The Christian faces a battle of spirits involving the whole person. To enable him to get to the heart of a work without being sidetracked by less important considerations, Calvin Seerveld, in A Christian Critique of Art and Literature, offers three questions that lead to a basic understanding of the artist’s heart attitude toward Jesus Christ. He asks himself: (1) What does the work say about man? (2) What does it say about the universe? and (3) What does it say about sin?

Many modern writers portray man as a helpless victim or an aimless wanderer for whom satisfying life is impossible. Heinrich Böll’s novel The Clown relates the downfall of a mime who begins to disintegrate when his common-law wife leaves him because friends convince her that the church must sanction her marriage. The novel’s final scene pictures a dissipated mime playing the part of a jongleur on the steps of a Bonn railway station among people who remain nameless and indifferent to his anguish. With similar hopelessness, Robinson Jeffers’s poem “To the Stone-Cutters” expresses what many serious writers feel:

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated

Challengers of oblivion

Eat cynical earnings.…

For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun

Die blind and blacken to the heart

The hopelessness depicted in many European plays and films like La Dolce Vita suggests that while man’s life is terrifyingly empty, he is incapable of salvation because he doesn’t have the ears to hear, and the prophet is dumb as well.

Other writers do not express despair as much as they picture men who are sickly parodies of the whole, healthy men intended to reflect God’s image. John Updike’s couples are inclined to little more than illicit sexual relations. B. F. Skinner’s scientists in Walden Two are so scientifically programmed that they hardly seem to breathe. In the film The Twenty-fifth Hour Roumanian peasants are reduced to cringing shells of human beings by their political conquerors, who are themselves reduced to unfeeling beasts. Sartre’s prisoners in No Exit testify that human beings are fiendish hypocrites, driven by total selfishness.

At the other extreme are the optimists who paint a hyper-rosy world. Although the happily-ever-after novels and the cheerful movies enjoy wide audiences, they seldom reach the plain of serious art and therefore do little to counter the black resignation of much of the modern art world.

But what about artists who say something positive and true about man? Although incisive revelations of the human heart occur quite frequently in serious art, few artists elicit a biblical response from the viewer. One who does is Georges Rouault. One of the most moving paintings in modern art is his portrait of two sagging prostitutes, which with grey-blue hues suggests that the artist sees sin and what it does to human beings, but also knows that above all they are human beings and need compassion. Flannery O’Connor continually asserts that the cripples, the fat, and the ugly are human beings who must be treated as such, and not as cases for developing social responsibility, or experiments in applied psychology, or just plain trash. F. J. Powers’s short stories portray priests in the pettiness of daily life, but they are men who live in true faithfulness to God because they are whole men, not waxen figurines who whisper ineffectual prayers to occupy their time.

The characters in a book are usually clearly drawn, but the author’s understanding of the kind of world they live in may be only suggested by such elements as the role of “fate,” the successfulness of the hero’s struggle, and the kind of salvation deemed possible. For instance, Hemingway leaves Frederick Henry without a country, without Catherine, and without hope; as A Farewell to Arms closes, he is at the end of a road in a closed world where men suffer under cosmic frustration. In Waiting for Godot Lucky and Pozzo wait interminably and pointlessly in a wasteland world in which salvation is continually promised but never realized. Camus’s narrator in The Fall describes an inferno-like world of growing evil in which the judge/penitent confesses his way into a superior position and thence into the spot vacated by the God of his ancestors. Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage plods along in a world to which she knows salvation will never come; her only response is to keep plodding and to continually whittle human needs down to the sliver that men can expect to fulfill. And in The Great Gatsby the only supernatural force is the feeble remnant found in the celebrated eyes of Dr. Eckleburg, which stare across an ash heap at the tragedies of human life.

Among more popular artists the most common views of the world are probably epitomized by two films of the sixties, The Graduate and Easy Rider. In the first view, the “good guy/little guy” breaks through the evils of the system and creates a new world for himself through courage, luck, reason, or whatever happens to fit the artist’s tastes. Works of this sort might include Jane Eyre, Zadig, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Seize the Day. On the other hand, Easy Rider is an example of the kind of work in which the “good guy/little guy” takes the brunt of the senseless outbursts of an implacable system. Other works like it might include The Stranger, All My Sons, and The Pawnbroker, works in which the protagonists struggle but find the obstacles too great for them to overcome.

Few modern artists have a biblical sense of the world and man’s place as the crown of the creation, yet subject to the law of God. One who does is Jerry Koukal, a Seattle artist, who frequently expresses the idea that some things endure in this life despite the chaotic changes most people encounter from one year to the next. His style is almost anachronistically representational, with old but working pumps, weatherbeaten barns and rural houses, and beached dinghies filling his landscapes. Flannery O’Connor’s gothic tales express the horrible violence that breaks forth when the spirits of good and evil clash in a world suffering under the weight of spiritual battles. In one of her best-known stories, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a foolish old woman is murdered when she presses her feeble faith on a convict who holds her at gunpoint. The woman’s death is horrible and shocking, but O’Connor recognizes that the world marred by sin is not a place where good always prevails and evil men fall before the tin swords of the puniest Christians.

When the Christian confronts the portrayal of sin and evil in art, he has to keep his wits about him, for many authors use very complex narrative devices that disguise their personal attitudes. For instance, Salinger’s Holden Caulfield and Defoe’s Moll Flanders tell their own stories, but they are not to be trusted implicitly because at times they may be ignorant, naïve, overly emotional, or simply deceived. In a similar manner, Antonioni used the out-of-focus shot in The Red Desert to suggest the viewpoint of a woman who didn’t understand everything she saw.

Many artists are more straightforward in their narrative technique, and therefore their attitudes toward the sin they depict are more easily discerned. In The Morning Watch James Agee describes a churlish teen-ager who blasphemes while he genuflects at a pre-dawn Lenten watch; Agee’s sympathies are so clearly with his sensitive companion who struggles to worship sincerely that there is no doubt what the author thinks of the young hypocrite.

Sometimes the Christian faces the problem of determining what the artist considers to be sin. Some look on evil as a result of poor conditioning, while others see it as simply an asocial phenomenon. Probably the most widespread attitude toward sin is the reduction of real sin and genuine guilt to transgressions of society’s rules and mere guilt feelings. The pattern begins in children’s books (which seldom pretend to be art, of course): no one plays with the neighborhood bully until he stops picking on the little children on the block. In books for adults, a democratic consensus on what is sinful is so widespread a standard that it often goes undetected until a particular evil is traced back through several generations of writers. For instance, though abortion has always been a popular form of birth control throughout much of the world, few serious authors treated it sympathetically until quite recently. John Barth’s The End of the Road has a modern stamp because he creates sympathy for the lovers who are forced into incredible trickery to find an abortionist because the mores of their small-college town are so “old-fashioned.” Clearly, enough people now approve of abortion to allow Barth such an open attack on the anti-abortion faction.

It is extremely important that the Christian apply a biblical standard for judging sin, rather than one that sees sexual sins as the only ones worth worrying about. For instance, Robinson Crusoe and Horatio Alger are guilty of greed and exploitation, which are just as immoral as Tom Jones’s sexual problems. The Christian’s task in such a case is to be careful that he is not subtly induced to join the author in approving evil that many would not call evil because they live by the wrong spirit.

In an age that prides itself on its honesty and frankness, it’s not surprising that many serious writers recognize what sin does to man. Even apart from social-protest literature, the broken relics of sinful living fill the pages of many modern novels. Shirley Jackson’s parable “The Lottery” describes the terrible selfishness that results from clinging religiously to irrational tradition. In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams clearly pictures the paralysis and slow death that a sick mother inflicts on her children. Some of the best-known paintings of the century express the tragedy of sin’s effects on human life: Chirico’s “The Anguish of Departure,” Picasso’s “Guernica,” Shahn’s “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti.”

Nevertheless, the artist who perceives the horrors of sin seldom offers more than sympathy or an appeal to the nation’s social conscience. Few artists know the hope of true healing through Christ’s redemption, and those who do run the danger of turning their aesthetic efforts into polemic, dogma, or theology. There are some, however, who reveal a rare Christian understanding that sin reaches deep and complicates life so much that simple solutions and perfectly happy endings are not possible.

The Christian’s analysis of art will be an arduous and lonely task, for there are few teachers to encourage and even fewer critics to guide. If grappling with the spirits of aesthetic life leaves us tired and discouraged because the armies of the Lord are so few in number, we need not worry; fatigue is not deadly. The real cause for alarm will come if we allow ourselves to shrink from this gargantuan task because our faith is too small, too simplistic, to meet the despair and perplexity expressed in the works of the artists among us.

BONNIE M. GREENE

The post A New Feature on the Arts: ‘The Refiner’s Fire’ appeared first on Christianity Today.