“The Weekend Wanderer” is a weekly curated selection of news, stories, resources, and media on the intersection of faith and culture for you to explore through your weekend. Wander through these links however you like and in any order you like. Disclaimer: I do not necessarily agree with all the views expressed within these articles but have found them thought-provoking.
“Our Bodies, Aliveness, and the Built World” – Krista Tippett interviews Sara Hendren on On Being: “Our built world is designed around something called ‘normal,’ and yet every single one of our bodies is mysterious, and constantly adapting for better or worse — and always, always changing. This is a fact so ordinary — and yet not something most of us routinely pause to know and to ponder and work with. But Sara Hendren has made it her passion, bringing to it her varied vocations and gifts: being a painter and loving how art reveals truth not by way of simplicity, but by juxtaposition; teaching design to engineering students; parenting three beloved children, one of whom has Down syndrome. This is a conversation that will have you moving through the world both marveling at the ordinary adaptations that bodies make and asking, in Sara’s words, “restless and generative questions”: of why we organize the physical world as though vulnerability and needs for assistance are not commonplace — indeed salutary — forms of experience that reveal the genius of what being human is all about.”
“Long-lost $26 million masterpiece found in kitchen heads to the Louvre after 4-year campaign” – Jack Guy at CNN: “The Louvre Museum in Paris has added a ‘national treasure’ to its collection four years after it was discovered during a house clearance. ‘Christ Mocked’ by the Florentine painter Cimabue was found in an elderly woman’s house in the town of Compiegne in 2019. She had kept the rare artwork – which she thought was a Greek religious icon – in her kitchen. The unsuspecting owner of the piece did not know where the 10-inch by 8-inch painting had come from, said Jerome Montcouquil of art specialists Cabinet Turquin, which was asked to carry out tests on the painting following its discovery, at the time. The painting, which dates from 1280, went on to fetch almost 24.2 million euros ($26.8 million) at auction in October 2019, more than four times the pre-sale estimate. But the French government then stepped in to block its export, assigning the painting ‘national treasure’ status.”
“No Pawn in the Game: Fannie Lou Hamer, Mississippi, and the Struggle for Human Rights” – Richard Bailey reviews a new biography of Fannie Lou Hamer at Front Porch Republic: “Over four days in July 1965, many of the era’s most influential songwriters and musicians gathered at Rhode Island’s Festival Field for the Newport Folk Festival. Acts such as Joan Baez, Mississippi John Hurt, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Bill Monroe, Gordon Lightfoot, Pete Seeger, and Johnny Cash all graced the stage. The final day of the fifth annual installment of the festival is perhaps most famously, or infamously, known as the day one prominent folk singer changed his style. Launching into an electrified version of his “Maggie’s Farm,” Bob Dylan was met with a chorus of boos and jeers. While historians often remember Dylan’s electric set, they generally fail to mention that a short time following his acoustic encore, another powerhouse took the stage. When she did so, though, Fannie Lou Hamer’s message and style remained the same, sounding once again the chimes of freedom. This moment was not the first time these two major voices had shared a common ground, however. Two years earlier in July 1963, Dylan had joined Pete Seeger in Greenwood, Mississippi, to support the efforts of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). A month earlier, thirty miles away Fannie Lou Hamer and five other SNCC activists were brutally beaten at the direction of six white men: the sheriff, the jailer, and four police officers. The beating, which physically and emotionally haunted Hamer for the remainder of her life, kept the woman from being at the Greenwood office a month later to sing along with Dylan, Seeger, and the Freedom Singers. While the above two paragraphs illustrate only a few of the significant possibilities offered by a critical biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, they barely scratch the surface of this woman’s life, legacy, and influence on America’s civil rights movements. In Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, Kate Clifford Larson moves deeper than surface-level observation, vividly using her sources to argue that Fannie Lou Hamer’s work demonstrates ways ‘ordinary people can organize and build coalitions that can create momentous, perhaps even lasting change.'”
“Sweet Land of Michigan” – James Matthew Wilson in First Things: “When my wife and I moved away from the Midwest some fifteen years ago, we began an age of perpetual homesickness. I’d tear up at the sight of Notre Dame’s stadium on Saturday football broadcasts, recalling our years in South Bend where I did my graduate studies, only just ended. I watched every Michigan State basketball game that year, in part for the sake of seeing that small postage stamp of East Lansing that was the Breslin Center court. Tom Izzo, with his Yooper gruffness and continuous exasperation, reminded me of one of my own great complaints: Why could we not go on living where we had been born? In the decade that followed, nearly every morning, as I woke up, I would ask myself, ‘Why am I not in Michigan?’ I have a friend who felt a supernatural calling away from his native land. For decades, he served as a pilot for a Christian missionary organization whose work was conducted in impoverished and often hostile countries. He, his wife, and even his children longed to brave new lands and serve Christ at the farthest reaches of the globe. I admire his adventurousness. As for me, I have felt called to do many things in my life, including to serve the one universal Church, which looks on no one land as holy but rather seeks to make them all holy. ‘Wonderful,’ I would think. ‘Let me answer that call. Just let me do it in Michigan.'”
“First Woman Steps into Leadership of Evangelical Theological Society” – Stefani McDade at Christianity Today: “The Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) has instated its first female president in 75 years. Karen Jobes, emeritus professor of New Testament and exegesis at Wheaton College, will lead the professional society of evangelical Bible scholars and theologians in 2024. Her election marks a significant step for an association that has faced criticism over the years for the marginalization of women. In 2014 a qualitative study of women’s experiences at ETS gatherings, commissioned by Christians for Biblical Equality, found ‘an atmosphere that feels hostile and unwelcoming.’ Jobes, who joined in 1989, recalled uncomfortable experiences of her own at ETS.”
“Born-Again Engineering: Evaluating human impact on ecosystems” – Ben D. Giudice in Comment: “The quest stood upon the edge of a fillet knife. My feet cried out concerning my madness and folly—ten miles of hiking, one wader leg filled with Cowhee Creek, used boots overly snug, blisters inevitable. I had probed and prodded every bit of frog water I could find on this beautiful Alaskan creek. No sign of silver salmon. It began in February as an idle comment over church coffee in the fellowship hall in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. ‘I’m turning forty this fall,’ I said to my friend Chris. He wore his characteristic Sunday wool vest, his bald head gleaming in the pale fluorescent light, a passel of his plenteous offspring darting about him. ‘I’ll be on sabbatical too,’ I said. “I’m thinking of going to Montana for a fishing trip—maybe hiring a guide. I’ve never hired a guide.” Stricken, his face took on a stunned expression. He looked back at me with deadly serious eyes. His tone left no room for debate: ‘Dude—we should go to Alaska. I’ll be your guide.’ What followed was months of texts, conversations at church, internet research, coffee shop meetups, breakfasts cooked atop a woodstove in his hand-built woodshop. It took on a life of its own, and before I knew it, seven men (friends and friends of friends—one of them, oddly enough, my dentist) descended into Juneau seeking satisfaction via salmon.”
Music: The Porter’s Gate (feat. Paul Zach & Madison Cunningham), “Your Labor is Not In Vain,” from Work Songs
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Matthew Erickson 