This interview is a special collaboration with Ekstasis, CT’s imaginative NextGen project, and originally appeared in the Ecstatic Newsletter, an extension of Ekstasis on Substack. Together, we’re building a digital cathedral that offers space to ponder and lift our eyes to Christ in wonder.
How five women leaders are reinventing the pro-life movement.Many Americans did not grasp the severity of the Vietnam War until television news brought it into their living rooms. Flaming village huts and countless stretchers of broken young men: such images distilled the war for the masses.Around the time the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam, another war erupted. The 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision sparked a civil war over abortion that has been escalating ever since. Like Vietnam, it is a struggle often reduced to pictures on the nightly news: scuffles at abortion-clinic doors, grim placards, handcuffed protesters loaded into police vans.Last year the murder of abortion doctor David Gunn intensified the conflict. The broadcast media put angry pro-life extremists on everything from network news broadcasts to Donahue. To the casual observer, it might have appeared that these defenders of violence spoke for the pro-life movement.Not only are defenders of the preborn said to promote violence, they are also accused of being anti-women. “Four, six, eight, ten,” the pro-choicers at the barricades shout at pro-life activists, “why are all your leaders men?”But the media caricatures have missed the beating heart of the pro-life movement. Most of its mainstream leaders are women, such as the five depicted here. And for these pro-life leaders, it was their experience as women that led them to their positions.Their profiles do not match the parodies. They are articulate, passionate, eccentric, witty, refreshing. They are Black, White, Hispanic. They are Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox. They include mothers, attorneys, home schoolers, and executives.Their diversity accentuates what they have in common. They decry violence. Rather than advocating the politicized feminism of the militant women’s movement, they argue for a classical feminism rooted in the God-given dignity and equality of human beings created in God’s image. They head organizations that plead the cause of the unborn while working with creative, practical compassion for the born.HINDU FLOWER CHILD“I would have been proud of having an abortion. I didn’t happen to get pregnant, but if I had, I would have had an abortion in a minute. I would have seen it as a revolutionary act in which I declared my independence.”With those words, Frederica Mathewes-Green sums up her views on abortion during her days as a campus flower child in the early 1970s.Crowned by a cascading tide of long, curly hair that was usually decked with flowers, she wore muslin, Indian-print dresses. She stopped shaving her legs. After sampling a salad bar of Eastern religions, she settled on Hinduism. She affirmed gay rights, women’s rights, abortion rights.During a semester in Washington, D.C., Frederica wrote for off our backs, the underground women’s newspaper filled with angry, rambling poetry and dubiously helpful articles about how to make recyclable sanitary products from natural fibers. When Roe v. Wade came down in 1973, she and the rest of the staff cheered wildly.Then something odd happened. Frederica’s boyfriend, Gary, had to read one of the Gospels for a philosophy of religion class. He chose Mark—it was the shortest. An atheist, Gary was nonetheless intrigued by Mark’s portrait of Christ.“There’s something about Jesus,” Gary would tell Frederica, looking up from the Gospel he was now reading over and over. “He speaks with authority.”Frederica, furious, hoped this fascination was just a phase.In May 1974, Frederica and Gary married, offering a Hindu prayer to bless their union, and then donned backpacks for a trip through Europe. In Dublin, as they toured yet another looming cathedral, Frederica stood before a statue of Jesus. “Behold the heart that so loved mankind,” read the emblem beneath it.Suddenly she was on her knees on the cold, stone floor, weeping before the Christ. “I am your life,” she sensed Jesus saying to her. “You think your life is in your personality, your intellect, in your very breath itself. But these are not your life. I am your life.”“I stood up,” says Frederica, “and I was a Christian. I read the Bible. There were parts of it I didn’t like. But I was now submitted to an authority greater than myself.”Still pro-abortion for a year or two following her conversion, Frederica picked up the January 1976 issue of Esquire magazine. There Yale University surgeon and essayist Richard Selzer described his observation of a second-trimester abortion. To his surprise, the fetus jerked and writhed: evasive actions against the doctor’s needle. Wrote Selzer, “In the flick of that needle … I saw life avulsed—swept by flood, blackening—then out.… It is a persona carried here as well as a person … it is a signed piece, engraved with a hieroglyph of human genes. I did not think this until I saw. The flick. The fending off.”“At that point I wouldn’t have yet been reading magazines like CHRISTIANITY TODAY,” says Frederica. “But this article in Esquire, of all places, upset my grid for the world. I had never thought about there being a real life in the womb. The article changed my mind.”Today Frederica is director of Real Choices, a research project of the National Women’s Coalition for Life, a coalition of 15 organizations whose combined membership includes more than 1.8 million women.Frederica’s research on postabortive women shows that most women facing a crisis pregnancy do not truly want to get an abortion. A woman “wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg,” she says. So Real Choices aims to identify the factors that make an unplanned pregnancy feel so desperate—and then to develop networks of people who can help women over these hurdles so their desperation will not result in the deaths of unborn children.Former flower-child Frederica’s Nefertiti tresses are now cropped short; her “women’s power” jeans patches and earth shoes have been replaced with a briefcase with a Bible in it and navy-blue high heels. Gary, whose conversion began with Mark’s Gospel, is now an Orthodox priest. Their home in Baltimore is a haven of happy, holy confusion, populated by three cats, one Dalmatian, and three children.“My heart,” she says, “is broken for my sisters in the pro-choice movement.” Frederica works hard to build relationships and share her research findings with those who are pro-choice. “I was there once, and I want to throw them a lifeline. My heart yearns for the women who are damaged, deceived, duped; the women whose arms will always be empty. Abortion leaves only the broken body of the child, and the broken heart of the woman.”SINGING THE BLUES AT MOTEL 6She holds “one of the most visible—and controversial—positions in American Catholicism,” the St. Petersburg Times reported about Helen Alvaré. As spokesperson for the National Council of Catholic Bishops, Helen heads the Catholic church’s public-relations campaign to present persuasively its pro-life position, and she does so with passion and panache, traveling the nation a hundred days a year.But on any one of those hundred nights, look in that room with the light on in a Motel 6 in Muskegee or a Hyatt in Helena, and you’ll see another side of Helen Alvaré: barefoot, sitting on the side of the bed, playing the guitar, and singing the blues for all she is worth.Helen has discovered that the torrent of words she expends on debate during the day does not abate when she gets to her room at night. So she had a miniature guitar built, and she packs it on every trip. During those evenings, she belts out the blues, clearing her mind for the next day’s debates, which she relishes.A summa cum laude graduate of Villanova University, she received her law degree from Cornell University when she was 23, has a master’s degree in systematic theology from Catholic University, and is working on her doctorate. She has worked as a trial lawyer and has written friend-of-the-court briefs for the U.S. Catholic Conference on a variety of cases.From a Catholic Cuban family, Helen attended her first pro-life rally in Washington when she was 13. She realized she was outspoken, “even a little pushy,” and that that pushiness could be used for others, particularly those who could not speak for themselves.“Arguing on behalf of the underdog is its own reward,” says Helen, “but I am also compelled by the incredible cogency of the pro-life arguments. Then as I read abortion literature I am struck by the absolute inadequacy of their arguments.”Opponents do not let that stop them. Helen cannot count the number of times pro-choice advocates have dismissed the Catholic church’s position on abortion because, after all, the church did not acknowledge that Galileo was right.Helen frames the issue in terms of human rights. “We are confronted with human life. We can do no less than afford that life the dignity and respect that all human lives deserve. We can’t discriminate on things like size, development, lack of legal protection, lack of physical abilities. All must be treated with dignity, simply because they are human.”The same arguments support true feminism, she says. Women are equal because they are human. Founding feminists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were staunchly pro-life; the abortion ethic utterly violates the feminist ideals of nonviolence and inclusiveness.Helen’s articulate, persuasive point of view often surprises those who expect from the Catholic church dusty theological statements emanating from a graying cleric. She also has experienced the media’s preference for pro-lifers who fit their caricature. Several times she has prepared for national television interviews, only to be replaced at the last minute by others who espouse violence for the sake of the pro-life cause—a position that Helen unequivocally condemns.In spite of such frustrations of life on the road, however, Helen’s travels have led her to believe that people are weary of the mindset of absolute license birthed by the abortion ethic. “People are looking for real freedom,” she says. “Freedom involves giving yourself over to God and being enabled to do what you ought to do, not whatever you want to do.” It entails discipline.That discipline is not unlike the disciplines of art and music. It demands daily repetitions of the fundamentals. And that is why Helen Alvaré continues to practice the guitar, doing all those finger exercises in the Motel 6, so she can sing the blues with glorious abandon.SAVING BLACK BABIESJean thompson lay on the examining table, her heart beating fast. She and her husband, James, had waited long and prayerfully for a child. But now, 11 weeks into her pregnancy, she was bleeding heavily. The doctor was telling her she needed a D and C.“Doctor,” said Jean, “if you scrape out the womb, what will that do to the baby?”“Baby?” the doctor responded brusquely. “What baby?” “You know I’m pregnant,” Jean said softly.“You’ve passed tissue,” the doctor said. “You’ll have to have a D and C.”Jean paused. “But the nurse said my cervix is closed,” she said hesitantly.“Then we’ll just have to open it,” he said.“You don’t understand,” she said. “My husband and I have been waiting 12 years for this baby. Isn’t there some other kind of test I could take to make sure.…”“No, you don’t understand,” said the doctor angrily. “You are bleeding, your life is at stake, you need to have a D and C immediately.”Jean said she would have to see another doctor. She signed papers absolving the doctor of responsibility. Her husband helped her walk to the car, and they saw another doctor.After a physical examination, he did a sonogram—and there was her baby, alive and well. The doctor looked up from the flickering screen. “If you had let them do a D and C,” he said, “they would have scraped out a live baby.”Today Jean Thompson relates that story with a mixture of tears and tenacity from her office at the Harvest Church International in Mount Ranier, Maryland. Jean and James copastor the 2,000-member church, and Jean is president of the International Black Women’s Network, an association that equips African-American women with job skills, community opportunities, and other resources. It is also a member organization of the National Women’s Coalition for Life. A large, framed portrait on the wall behind her shows Jean, James, and Sherah, a small, grinning girl in a white dress: their only child.Narrowly avoiding an unwanted abortion has sensitized Jean to the insidious targeting of African Americans by abortion providers.“Abortion is deadly in the Black community,” she says. “It’s not a friend.” Though Blacks make up only about 12 percent of the U.S. population, they account for 43 percent of abortions performed in this country. Seventy percent of Planned Parenthood’s clinics are in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. This presence has not brought about a decrease in the number of pregnancies, but it has brought an increase in the number of abortions; for every three Black babies born, two are aborted.Jean hears from the teenagers who attend her church how Planned Parenthood pressures them. Representatives regularly visit their schools, extolling a trinity of condoms, contraception, and abortion. “Pastor Jean,” one young girl told her, “they talk to us like we’re cats and dogs, like we just gotta go out there and do it, and if we don’t, we’ll go crazy.”“The pressure comes not so much from other young people,” says Jean, “but from these organizations. They are encouraging promiscuity, which leads to pregnancy, which leads to abortion.”Jean’s gentle speaking voice and attractive composure—she is a former Miss Black Virginia—do not soften her message about abortion. Invited in 1992 to appear on a Linda Ellerbee television debate on the issue, she carried a large handbag onto the set. When her turn came to speak, she reached into her bag, pulled out a thick, white noose, and placed it around her own neck. “Would you call this freedom of choice?” she asked the astonished panel. “This is what abortion does. It is a new means of Black lynching.”Jean is careful to say that Christians must love and pray for those on the other side of the issue, but she minces no words in speaking up for the unborn. “Sometimes Christians say, ‘You can’t come on religiously.’ But I believe that Christians have not been articulating the Word of God enough. God says that the unborn person is a life. We must choose life.”ADDING JUSTICE TO COMPASSIONIt is july 23, 1993. the unblinking eye of C-SPAN focuses on the long, narrow table before the massive pulpit of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Witnesses are preparing to testify in opposition to President Clinton’s nomination of Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the U.S. Supreme Court.Leading the testimony is a tall young woman who speaks with surety. “My name is Paige Comstock Cunningham,” she begins. “I am an attorney, a graduate of Northwestern University Law School, a wife, and a proud mother of three children. It is likely that I have reaped, in my own professional career, from the seeds sown by Judge Ginsburg in her efforts to abolish sex discrimination.“I am also the president of Americans United for Life [AUL], the legal arm of the pro-life movement.… [We are deeply disturbed by] Judge Ginsburg’s attempt to justify the decision in Roe v. Wade on the ground that abortion is somehow necessary for women’s equality.…“Judge Ginsburg has testified before you that abortion is ‘central to a woman’s dignity.’ … I believe it has actually set the clock back on women’s dignity.… Abortion goes against the core values of feminism: equality, care, nurturing, compassion, inclusion, and nonviolence. If we women, who have only recently gained electoral and political voice, do not stand up for the voiceless and powerless, who will?”The pleas of Paige Cunningham and others who testified that day did not stop Judge Ginsburg’s evolution into Justice Ginsburg. But for Paige, they represented an ongoing, dual appeal: first, a call to justice, to concern for the human rights of the voiceless unborn; and second, a call to compassion for the millions of women for whom abortion has not been a means of achieving dignity, but a degrading wound.On C-SPAN, Paige looked like a coolly competent attorney, a woman whose life is a grid of flight schedules, interviews, and debates, yet who can emerge from an 18-hour day with her composure still intact. Yet Paige’s journey to her appearance before the Judiciary Committee was shaped most profoundly not by professional forces, but by intense personal suffering that has caused her to identify deeply with women who have been wounded by abortion.Born in Brazil of missionary parents, Paige excelled at excelling. Academics, music, and maturity seemed to come easily. Yet through her stint at Taylor University, then law school at Northwestern, she often felt like an outsider.That feeling extended to her faith: though she had committed her life to Christ as a young girl, she sensed she was missing an abundant life. She felt a subtle dissonance between the outwardly confident young woman who eventually married, had children, practiced law, and did it all, and the inner person who fought back tides of depression.Paige maintained the veneer as she practiced law with two Chicago firms, then became associated with AUL, serving in various general-counsel capacities and later as a member of its board of directors. But eventually the multiple stresses burned her out.Paige attended a three-day Episcopal church retreat; the unconditional love expressed by the laypeople there began to incarnate Christ’s love for her personally. She had known the truth of his love intellectually, but its power had been suppressed by the dark secret she had long hidden: a traumatic violation as a child by someone she trusted.Some time after the retreat, while on an extended visit with her brother and his family, Paige immersed herself in the nurture of his Dallas-area church. During a small-group meeting, she asked for special prayer.And then, Paige Cunningham saw in her mind’s eye all her sins upon an altar, with a mighty fire burning them away. She saw herself, a small girl again, timidly looking up at Christ on the cross. Then Jesus came down, flung his strong arms wide, and held her close. And then she knew that he would never let her go.“For me,” Paige says today, “that was the beginning of deep, real healing.” And she began to feel, welling up from the pool of her own suffering, an intense compassion for women who had been violated, exploited, and hurt, women who had felt not the “empowerment” of “choice,” but chains binding them to make just one choice. And she found, with this new empathy and vulnerability, a paradoxical sense of confidence that propelled her to speak out with passion before the Senate Judiciary Committee.Paige sees her journey to compassion mirrored in the wider pro-life movement. “God is doing a new thing among us,” she says. “The first 20 years since Roe v. Wade have been characterized by justice. We’ve gone to court again and again, seeking to limit abortion. And these efforts must continue.“But now we must set a pattern of mercy. Women facing crisis pregnancies have seen themselves as a kind of political football. Many have felt that to pro-lifers, they are merely a means to an end. Abortion hurts them, and they must know that we’re on their side. We must love the wrongdoer, without embracing the wrong. With compassion and mercy, we must touch women’s lives, saving not only women, but their babies as well.”EXECUTIVE FOR THE UNBORNIt begins with her voice. never mind the Phi Beta Kappa key from Wellesley College, the Harvard MBA, the classically trained, logical mind that fueled high-level corporate planning and a controversial rise to the executive suites of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the Bendix Corporation, Joseph E. Seagrams & Sons—all by the time she was 32 years old. Never mind the humanitarian awards, the board of directors positions, the citation as one of the “most influential women in America.” Never mind her New York Times bestseller Powerplay.No, Mary Cunningham Agee’s voice is the key to her persuasive power, for in it is the perfect merger of style and content: a modulated, seamless method of speech and a compassionate message of Christian love.That message was shaped long before Mary came to the ivory towers of the Ivy League and the glass towers of corporate boardrooms. It began in a mossy rock garden, when Mary was seven years old, the morning of her First Communion. Decked in a white cotton dress, she sat on a small rock while Father William Nolan—her Uncle Bill—sat on a larger one.It was a special day, but even happy days had a hole in them for Mary, whose father had abandoned their family a year and a half earlier. Uncle Bill had stood in the gap, but even he could not take her dad’s place. Now he was talking to her quietly about the Lord’s Prayer.“As he did,” Mary says today, “I suddenly realized that as I prayed, ‘Our Father who art in heaven,’ God was a father to me. I had lost something very precious to me, but that loss made room for grace in my life. I learned that only in suffering and loss can we be prepared to be filled by grace.”That childhood epiphany stayed with Mary, carried her through professional storms in the early 1980s, and comforted her when she experienced the most painful loss of her life. After marrying William Agee, former CEO of Bendix, now CEO of Morrison Knudsen Corporation, they joyfully anticipated the birth of their first child.But after seeing her tiny daughter dance on the sonogram screen, Mary suffered a second-trimester miscarriage in January 1984. For months afterward, she stared at the empty nursery, aching within.As she prayed, she began to think about other women who had lost children, but who were not surrounded by loving support, as Mary was, who had seen no way out of their predicament other than an abortion.Feeling called to act on such women’s behalf, Mary called ten abortion clinics around the country. In each call, she asked the clinic to give her phone number to ten women who might be willing to discuss their experience with abortion.Over the following weeks, 91 of those 100 women told Mary that if they had had any sort of reasonable alternative, they would have chosen to give birth. Abortion, for them, had not been a matter of making a choice, but of feeling they had no other choice to make.Mary’s response was to found in 1986 the Nurturing Network, a nationwide resource providing women in crisis pregnancies practical support. Today, after serving more than 4,500 clients, Mary knows of only one who, faced with the helps the Network offers, chose abortion.Pregnant women who contact the Nurturing Network through its 800 number (1-800-TNN-4MOM) are asked to do just one thing: fill out an extensive questionnaire about themselves, their dreams and goals, and the obstacles their pregnancy presents.Some need a leave of absence from their current job and a similar short-term position in another company. Others need free medical care, or a transfer to a different university. Some need a safe place to live, or adoption counseling, or parenting training.The Network, which now includes over 18,000 contacts, prides itself on creatively meeting those needs. Each client receives counseling. Seven hundred Nurturing Homes are on call. An informal coalition of doctors provides services for free or reduced rates. A network of employers and colleges accept short-term, pregnant employees and students.Last summer, a CBS48 Hours crew filmed the Nurturing Network in action and talked with one young client. Tall, with curly brown hair spiraling over her shoulders, she held a relaxed, smiling baby in her arms. She confessed, “I wouldn’t have had an abortion; I would have just killed myself. Without the Network, I wouldn’t even be here. I would have been just another statistic.” Woven into the philosophy of the Nurturing Network is the truth Mary learned herself years ago: suffering and loss provide an avenue for grace.In her calm, kind way, Mary counsels clients, “The pattern you choose in response to this pregnancy will be played out again and again in your life. Rather than flee the pain, embrace it, and you will see grace poured out. In sacrificing short-term ease for a long-term benefit for someone else, you have an opportunity for lasting personal growth.”In her multiple roles as counselor, mother, home schooler, volunteer, and executive, Mary has an unlikely time each day to replenish the well of her energies. At precisely five minutes to three—every morning—she awakens. The house is quiet. She reads her Bible, prays, writes in her journal.During one of these middle-of-the-night interludes some years ago, a phrase recurred in Mary’s mind: “The violence that is committed against women by society today.…” Reflecting on those words fuels her efforts to help women who have been led to believe that abortion is the only solution to their crisis pregnancies. “Abortion is really the ultimate form of violence, disguised in a slogan called freedom,” says Mary. “The Nurturing Network is just one little voice that is calling out to say it doesn’t have to be that way.”Paul Brand is a world-renowned hand surgeon and leprosy specialist. Now in semiretirement, he serves as clinical professor emeritus, Department of Orthopedics, at the University of Washington and consults for the World Health Organization. His years of pioneering work among leprosy patients earned him many awards and honors.As you scroll through this story, you are embarking on a form of pilgrimage.
We tap incessantly at our phones for the same reason our forebears traveled repeatedly to the Holy Land, says art historian Christian Gonzalez Ho: to commune with something greater than ourselves, to express a “longing to go to another place, or to have another place reach [us].”
Gonzalez Ho and photographer Kieran Dodds are the creators of a new exhibit, “Heading Home: Glimpses of New Jerusalem.” The show is curated by John Silvis and is running this fall and winter at the Ahmanson Gallery in Irvine, California. Featuring Dodds’s photographs of pilgrimage sites on the route between London and Jerusalem, placed in an interactive gallery space designed by Gonzalez Ho, “Heading Home” asks us to revisit the ancient practice of pilgrimage and consider its relationship with contemporary Christianity.
Images of stops along the pilgrimage route—the Florence Duomo, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—are paired with sound installations and physical structures that reinterpret the experience of interacting with each site. Christianity Today spoke with Dodds and Gonzalez Ho about the possibilities and challenges of interpreting these sites for modern believers.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Let’s start with the origins of this exhibit. Why did you two choose to focus on this topic for this moment?
Kieran Dodds: I was invited on this pilgrimage trip by Roberta and Howard Ahmanson, curated along the theme of the New Jerusalem—the Eternal City, you know, at the end of Revelation.
We were looking toward the breaking through of this city as a place where there is no more crying or pain, because God is with his people. What we saw was how the church had really been focused on that vision through the centuries, and this shaped how it displayed itself in different times and cultures.
After ruminating on the experience for about a year, I had the real pleasure to work with Christian and create a show in two gallery spaces. Gallery One is centered around classic framed works. I employed tilt shift lenses, which are usually used in architecture, to give us a perspective shift in each image. People [at various pilgrimage sites] then appear to be miniaturized, making the images look like architectural models—models of this New Jerusalem.
Then I’ve got some grids, which are large pictures but split into grids like a mosaic, referencing the idea of mosaic as all these fragments you need to make one image. In a sense, the [pilgrimage] was us picking up these different fragments and visions of a New Jerusalem to bring them together.
Gallery Two was an installation with a structure and projection space, which Christian was really focused on, so Christian had better talk about that.
Christian Gonzalez Ho: One of the first things that I thought about when designing the gallery space was how people generally interact with photography in a consumeristic way. We are flooded with images all the time, and we forget that the act of looking at media or engaging with any type of film, photography, music, etc., is a longing for pilgrimage—it’s an engagement we undertake while desiring to go to another place.
So the whole theme of pilgrimage struck me as very contemporary. Now, you know, our technologies are so closely fit to our bodies and our consciousness that we don’t realize they’re taking us on journeys. Another aspect of this exhibition was to cause people to become aware that they were moving their bodies as they were looking at images and entering these spaces. For example, in order to view some of these images you have to bend under a pavilion that is only five feet tall.
I mean, bending down to look at your iPhone or pulling it out of your pocket is a devotional act. We’ve lost the understanding that our repeated actions are fill-ins for ritual and devotion. We wanted people to notice that what they do with their body in this gallery space is a devotional act.
It’s interesting to think about these daily routines as contemporary forms of pilgrimage, especially as people have varying degrees of familiarity with the concept of Christian pilgrimage and of what the practice consists of.
Considering how diverse the present-day church is, and how much or how little people may know about historic pilgrimage sites, how do you want audiences to respond to what you’re presenting?
KD: I mean, I wrestled with this after the trip—how can you even try and compare an exhibition space with these sites, which are some of the best examples of human creativity ever made? We cannot recreate them, of course, but what we can do is to try and give a glimpse of the beauty of the experience of being in these places.
The idea was to create a new sense of place. When you arrive in the gallery you have to look around because there are different projectors that create images to be gazed up at. Inside the “octacube,” an eight-sided plywood structure that brings audiences to stand in a linen cube at its center, you crane your neck upward to the screen. The structure simultaneously references Renaissance-era baptistries, which are octagonal, and the New Jerusalem, which Scripture describes as having the dimensions of a cube (Rev. 21:16).
One of the central themes of this exhibit comes from a photo of sunlight beaming through the oculus of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and how it appears to show light resolving on an empty tomb.
I want to reverse that idea: Is light coming in to illuminate the tomb, or is the empty tomb releasing light into the world to make sense of what lies beyond? The gallery provides an opportunity to have a physical interaction with these images, and to see the ambiguities that arise when you study them together.
In the past few years, the notion of pilgrimage sites and what they represent may have become even more foreign to large swaths of the church. I’m thinking about the ways in which people who were accustomed to, say, one service a week, had this basic practice disrupted by the pandemic. Options like commuter churches, Zoom services, and sermon podcasts give us the option of a disembodied relationship with our communities.
Within this context, the historical church seems like an afterthought. How can Christians in our cultural moment find significance in these images?
CGH: That’s a really interesting question. Although people talk about disembodiment as something that occurred during the pandemic, I believe it was already happening. This is why pilgrimages were created in the first place: because alienation is fundamental to the Fall.
We are fundamentally separated from ourselves, our bodies, God, others, and the cosmos. So when pilgrimages emerged, they were a way of removing us from the mechanisms of enslavement. Think back to Moses and the children of Israel. The request to go into the wilderness was a request for a pilgrimage, because there needed to be a removal from the environment of enslavement into a sacred place where they could worship. And so I think it’s interesting because people have not only experienced disembodiment in our time but in every time, so pilgrimage has always served as this way of becoming embodied once again.
So this show is not an attempt to reproduce pilgrimage sites as if you’re there—its structures are created with two by fours. They’re very crude material. For people who are beginning to explore the history of pilgrimage, I think of this show as an invitation. The gallery, the images, the act of building are urging us on pilgrimages toward Christ. They are crude attempts to approximate the glory.
KD: We also wanted to strip back the elements of each image to show the aspects of our faith tradition that unite us with the believers who preceded us. For example, there’s an octagon shape in a photo of the Baptistery of St. John. It represents the eighth day, which is the day after the resurrection. When people are baptized, they go through the eighth side into the new life.
We just loved that. The building wasn’t a puzzle to be solved, a “da Vinci code” with a puzzle we had to unfurl. It was there, speaking to people something that the church once understood and that we’ve forgotten. These images are attempts to show all these incredible things that have been given to us through the centuries to weigh and understand.
Our society is turning stay-at-home moms into invisible women. Psychologist Brenda Hunter is not amused.
The Utne Reader, a kind of Reader’s Digest of the countercultural, “alternative” press, is not known for championing typically conservative causes. But a recent cover declared, “Mom and Dad are working, day care’s on the skids, our tots are strapped to latchkeys—Who Cares About the Kids?”“If the Zoë Baird brouhaha showed us one thing,” one editor remarked, “it was how conflicted Americans still are about work and child rearing.”That is especially true when it comes to moms. But Brenda Hunter, psychologist and specialist in infant attachment, believes that American society may encourage mothers who work, but it devalues mothers who don’t. Her book Home by Choice (Multnomah) has led to appearances on the Today show, Larry King Live, and Sally Jessy Raphaël. Her most recent book, What Every Mother Needs to Know (Multnomah), came out late last year. Here she discusses what fuels her convictions.You argue in Home by Choice that our current cultural climate is hostile to “mother love.” What do you mean?Our culture tells mothers they are not that important in their children’s lives. For three decades, mothering has been devalued in America. It has even become a status symbol for the modern woman to take as little time as possible away from work for full-time mothering.I believe it started in the 1960s. We can’t blame everything on radical feminists, but some of them suggested that work in the office would take care of women’s angst. In the 1980s, we saw the emergence of the myth that anyone could care for a mother’s children as well as Mother herself. And in the 1990s, we hear that fathers are unnecessary, that children thrive in any family setting, whether it be homosexual or single-parent.“Dan Quayle Was Right,” the much-discussed article in the Atlantic by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, stated that children do better in intact, two-parent families. Unfortunately, we’ve made it too costly psychologically for many women to take time out from careers and stay home with their child.What kind of cost do you see?The mother at home is either forgotten in the secular media or she is denigrated. This past Mother’s Day weekend, I read the Washington Post and USA Weekend, and most of the articles in one way or another put down the mother at home. On that day, at least one national daily chose to say that the mental health of housewives was poorer than the mental health of employed mothers. It’s not a happy image for mothers who are struggling with little kids.Then why are more mothers staying home, as you point out in Home by Choice?In 1990, for the first time since 1948, the number of women in the work force dropped. Also in 1990, the birth rate rose 10.5 percent from 1980. In 1990 the Roper Organization found that for the first time since 1980, the majority of women polled—51 percent—said they preferred to stay home. Poll after poll indicates that about two-thirds of mothers would prefer to spend more time home with their children if money were not a problem.I’ve heard from mothers across America whose hearts are home even if their bodies are at the office. Some say, “I’m not home now but I will be in six months,” or “after my second child is born.” After I was on the Today show on a Saturday, over 100 mothers called, inquiring about working from home.Don’t mothers find support in the church?I hear younger women saying all the time, “Where are the older mothers? Grandma’s on a career track or on a cruise. Where is the kind of woman mentioned in Titus 2 who can help me with my life?”Fortunately, some churches are starting mentoring programs. As a psychologist, I know that women are better wives and mothers if they have sufficient emotional support.You argue that the issue is more than one of modeling or getting training in parenting techniques, but of healthy patterns of intimacy established in infancy. What do you mean?The eminent British pyschiatrist John Bowlby believes that a baby’s emotional bond or attachment to his mother is the foundation stone of personality. If my parents are emotionally accessible and they love me, I feel loved and worthy. If not, I feel unloved and unworthy. That in turn affects my ability to be emotionally accessible to my children in adulthood.But is maternal deprivation more damaging than paternal neglect?That’s hard to answer. And I believe that mothers and fathers are equally important. I do not believe they are interchangeable. But I believe that mothers and fathers do different things for children. Children learn to be intimate primarily from their mothers in that early maternal relationship. Freud emphasized the singular importance of the mother or mother figure in the child’s early life as “unique, without parallel … as the prototype of all later love relationships for both sexes.” I believe that Mother is very much the architect of intimacy. Cross-culturally, infancy seems to belong to mothers.What about the mother who feels emotionally unequipped for parenting? Is it better for the child for her to be home?Women who stay home need to keep the intellectual life alive. I’m not trying to put people on a guilt trip. But I suggest that there are many things a mother who stays at home can do to thrive. If a mother is depressed at home, she may need to recognize that there is an absence of nurture in her past and work through this pain through psychotherapy or nurturing relationships with older women. Some in the mental health profession have discovered that older women can provide an invaluable resource to younger, struggling mothers. Why the church doesn’t do more with this is a mystery to me.If children need accessible parents, when does that need stop?Obviously children of school age need less time with their mothers than babies and children. That’s why I encourage women to develop their gifts at home. Lots of women go back to work. If they can have a full-time job that lets them off after school, great. I’m big on at-home careers; what I am against is the empty house. Children do not flourish in the empty house. I once heard an authority on teen pregnancy say that usually a girl has her first sexual experience in her or her boyfriend’s empty house.Newsweek said there are some 10 million latchkey children in this country. I was a latchkey child. I know what it feels like. I know about the fear of the burglar. I used to look under the beds and check the closets every day when I came home. And I felt lonely. Having my mother telephone and say, “How are you?” helped, but a phone call is no substitute for a mother’s presence.My girls were in high school when I went back to school for my doctorate. I had an experimental psychology lab late in the afternoon twice a week. I didn’t think my girls would notice. But I remember Holly—a high-school senior—commenting several times that she missed me. It was important for me to be there to talk to and have a cup of tea with my teens after school.What’s at stake in all this?We have to put it into a larger, cultural perspective. I recently reread Brave New World, and it was frightening. When we weaken attachments between parents and children, all kinds of anomalies occur, as Huxley showed. We’re headed there. In the book Generations, William Strauss and Neil Howe argue that the twentysomething generation has the highest incidence of maternal employment and parental divorce of any American generation. It’s also the most aborted generation. It has the highest rate of incarceration and the second-highest suicide rate. Moreover, I believe we already have a daycare generation among us, and we’re working on another.So I appeal to parents and churches and ask, What about the children? In our career pursuits—mothers and fathers—let’s not forget them. Our lifestyles as mothers may have changed, but our children’s needs are the same.By Jill Zook-Jones, a homemaker and freelance writer in Carol Stream, Illinois.
The idea that these sites continue to speak to the church is so gorgeous. I love that, and I also struggle to reconcile the beauty of the pilgrimage route with its history. As the two of you prepared this show, did you wrestle with how Christian pilgrimage informed the Crusades?
KD: Yeah. Well, I mean, the buildings themselves are this kind of strange mix of extraordinary wealth and gold and stand in contrast to the pilgrims, who were probably covered in rags and struggling. But along the path, there are other structures representing this sort of rich legacy of pilgrimage, which I didn’t realize were there. Hospitals, hostels, all these Western institutions [developed in part] to help pilgrims as they journeyed along the way. So there’s that aspect of it: Do disparate elements of the church go together?
It’s not something you can resolve lightly because it’s history, and history is problematic because humans are problematic. Yet even in the fractured brutality of human history, there are these flashes of glory which endure, which all nations are drawn toward, literally. They come from across the world to see these sites today. And that is the bit we are trying to pick up on, to give a framework for people to make their own minds up as they look into these things.
I appreciate how you want people to see the ambiguities. Interestingly, while some portions of the church may be deeply suspicious of pilgrimage and its history, there are other portions that idealize it. For example, there is a complicated relationship between evangelicalism and the idea of returning to a divinely appointed city, or a divinely ordained government.
When Christians are coming from that angle, how do you want this exhibit to contribute to their thinking?
A corporate mission statement is a professional necessity in today’s high-stakes marketplace, and we invest countless hours drafting one. Knowing where you are going as a company, and the part each employee plays in getting there, is a key to business success.Our families, too, need a vision. Moms and Dads sometimes act as if it is enough simply to feed, clothe, shelter, and educate their children. They hope their kids will automatically become men and women of purpose, integrity, and compassion. But how?Even the “good kids”—those who don’t get involved with drugs, sex, or violence—are often at loose ends. Every family needs a vision statement of its own to keep the household focused and enthusiastic.We found that by putting our family vision in writing, we greatly reduced lying, stealing, fighting, gossiping, and self-centeredness. Parents and children cease to be adversaries when they share a common vision. We discovered for ourselves the biblical truth that “a house divided against itself … cannot stand.”But how does a family go about drafting a vision statement? Here are a few suggestions:• Call a family meeting. To take ownership, everyone must have input.• Ask the key questions: Why were we given to each other? Why this particular mix of personalities and temperaments? What special gifts, talents, and insights does each family member bring to the table? What are the biblical standards for our success as a family? How can we maximize our effectiveness as a family team?• Create a draft statement based on the common goals stated in that meeting. Bring it back to the family to edit.• Post your family vision in a high-traffic location where everyone can read and affirm what you stand for.• Broach the vision at dinner periodically and ask how the family thinks it is measuring up.Here is what our family of six agreed would be the Kelly family vision statement: “We have been given to each other in order to spur one another on to personal excellence. We will pray, encourage, cheer, and weep with one another until and beyond the point each is able to stand life’s gale without falling. We will give love unconditionally, forgiveness without measure, comfort at a moment’s notice, and a good report always. We will create a family life sorely missed when we are absent, one to be mirrored should any child of this family one day be favored with a home, spouse, and children of his or her own. We will seek and support ways in which each of us can express our faith in God to the world at large. We will, with God’s help, make a difference.”The biblical standard for personal excellence is exceedingly high. It is a stretch, and in our humanity, the Kellys fail often. If we want high results, we must set high goals.We saw some dramatic outcomes: Arguments lost their steam when we met in the living room to pray aloud for the family member immediately to each person’s left.And we experienced some emotionally charged times. When one of our children was caught shoplifting, we called a family meeting. What affects one, affects all. We prayed, wept together, forgave, and encouraged the fallen one to repent, make restoration, and move on in victory. Our support said, “We’re with you through thick and thin.” The shoplifting stopped.Be open and honest when someone’s actions fly in the face of your carefully crafted vision. When our son took the family van without permission in the middle of the night, we discovered it was not the first time he had clandestinely gone to visit a girlfriend.I told him I was surprised by what he had done and was at a loss to know what to do. I asked what he would do if he were me. To my surprise, he chose a punishment more severe than the grounding I would have given him.Maybe one day your grown daughter will come to you, as mine did to me, and say, “Thanks, Dad. You know, I never wanted to do anything wrong for fear it would come to a family meeting.”By Clint Kelly, author of Me Parent, You Kid! Taming the Family Zoo.Speaking Out does not necessarily reflect the views of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.KD: I can’t believe I’ve not mentioned it before, but Augustine’s City of Godwas really fundamental to this. We thought about the two cities—the city of man and the city of God, and how we were seeing glimpses of the city of God in the city of man. Augustine calls the city of man the “pilgrim city,” in which we can see the city of God beginning to descend.
City of Godwas written in a time where Rome was being destroyed. The city was being razed. So you look at these pilgrimage sites and think, well, this is a reminder to Christians of the temporary nature of the earth. We are trying to build cities and empires and political allegiances. We should be reminded that it is a pilgrim city we are traveling through.
Kingdoms rise and fall, and that, I suppose, would speak to Christians who try and pin their hope on some political empire that will solve all things. And there are political solutions to some things, of course, but I think it is very interesting that the Christian faith arose and was scattered across the world. Through this scattering is one way we see the New Jerusalem, intentionally moving across the earth.
CGH: Alexander Nemerov, my adviser, was sharing something in class this week, and I think it might be a helpful way to understand this. [Rogier van der] Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross is a pretty well-known piece, and Alex was explaining how this portrait was commissioned by the Great Crossbowmen’s Guild, which had been involved in the Crusades.
If you look at Jesus, he’s positioned in the shape of a crossbow ready to fire. But Jesus’ body is completely slack. There is no arrow. His body is a broken weapon.
Some people will look at this image and say: Look at this. This was commissioned by the Crossbowmen’s Guild and advocated for the violence that accompanied Christian pilgrimage via the Crusades. And I think that our history of violence is something that we have to reckon with.
Yet the person of Christ can undermine our bent toward destruction. That is why he is so fundamental to this conversation. He is the endpoint of the pilgrimage. No matter what side of the conversation you come from, you are ultimately unstrung by this weaponless weapon that’s so beautiful.
A corporate mission statement is a professional necessity in today’s high-stakes marketplace, and we invest countless hours drafting one. Knowing where you are going as a company, and the part each employee plays in getting there, is a key to business success.Our families, too, need a vision. Moms and Dads sometimes act as if it is enough simply to feed, clothe, shelter, and educate their children. They hope their kids will automatically become men and women of purpose, integrity, and compassion. But how?Even the “good kids”—those who don’t get involved with drugs, sex, or violence—are often at loose ends. Every family needs a vision statement of its own to keep the household focused and enthusiastic.We found that by putting our family vision in writing, we greatly reduced lying, stealing, fighting, gossiping, and self-centeredness. Parents and children cease to be adversaries when they share a common vision. We discovered for ourselves the biblical truth that “a house divided against itself … cannot stand.”But how does a family go about drafting a vision statement? Here are a few suggestions:• Call a family meeting. To take ownership, everyone must have input.• Ask the key questions: Why were we given to each other? Why this particular mix of personalities and temperaments? What special gifts, talents, and insights does each family member bring to the table? What are the biblical standards for our success as a family? How can we maximize our effectiveness as a family team?• Create a draft statement based on the common goals stated in that meeting. Bring it back to the family to edit.• Post your family vision in a high-traffic location where everyone can read and affirm what you stand for.• Broach the vision at dinner periodically and ask how the family thinks it is measuring up.Here is what our family of six agreed would be the Kelly family vision statement: “We have been given to each other in order to spur one another on to personal excellence. We will pray, encourage, cheer, and weep with one another until and beyond the point each is able to stand life’s gale without falling. We will give love unconditionally, forgiveness without measure, comfort at a moment’s notice, and a good report always. We will create a family life sorely missed when we are absent, one to be mirrored should any child of this family one day be favored with a home, spouse, and children of his or her own. We will seek and support ways in which each of us can express our faith in God to the world at large. We will, with God’s help, make a difference.”The biblical standard for personal excellence is exceedingly high. It is a stretch, and in our humanity, the Kellys fail often. If we want high results, we must set high goals.We saw some dramatic outcomes: Arguments lost their steam when we met in the living room to pray aloud for the family member immediately to each person’s left.And we experienced some emotionally charged times. When one of our children was caught shoplifting, we called a family meeting. What affects one, affects all. We prayed, wept together, forgave, and encouraged the fallen one to repent, make restoration, and move on in victory. Our support said, “We’re with you through thick and thin.” The shoplifting stopped.Be open and honest when someone’s actions fly in the face of your carefully crafted vision. When our son took the family van without permission in the middle of the night, we discovered it was not the first time he had clandestinely gone to visit a girlfriend.I told him I was surprised by what he had done and was at a loss to know what to do. I asked what he would do if he were me. To my surprise, he chose a punishment more severe than the grounding I would have given him.Maybe one day your grown daughter will come to you, as mine did to me, and say, “Thanks, Dad. You know, I never wanted to do anything wrong for fear it would come to a family meeting.”By Clint Kelly, author of Me Parent, You Kid! Taming the Family Zoo.Speaking Out does not necessarily reflect the views of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.The body of Jesus as a “weaponless weapon” is incredibly moving. It’s striking that this painting is conceptualized and funded as a direct result of the Crusades, but also subverts the absolute worst human impulses that the Crusades often represented.
Now that we’re considering the end goals of pilgrimage, I want to ask—how do you want this exhibit, which largely focuses on the past, to shape how people imagine the church of tomorrow?
CGH: The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty says when he sees an object, he always feels that there’s still some meaning beyond what he currently sees. There’s always a horizon of unseen or even invisible things around my present vision. I think this exhibit is not about telling people to build another church, but it’s about Christians seeing these sites and recognizing what we believe.
We are not here to create derivative images of what’s popular or beautiful in a particular moment. It’s about the knowledge of this real place, this New Jerusalem, and building frameworks that invite people to experience that reality.
KD: I think for me, the theme that keeps surfacing is the image of an empty tomb echoing out across the world. The shock waves of that event are still being felt today, and the way it shapes society is so diverse. The sites we visited are all products of their own time and place but reference the others. All are environments built to emphasize the negative space of the empty tomb.
I just love the fact that we saw culturally interpreted views of the Resurrection. If you get all these different fragments of Christian structures and societies gathered together, they will give you a unified picture, a glimpse of what the heavenly city will be like.
At the gallery opening, I thought, in Rome you do as the Romans do. In Florence, you do as the Florentines do. But when you’re in Christ, you do as the Christians do, and you build the New Jerusalem by living as you are called to do in your own space and time.
Yi Ning Chiu is a contributing writer to Christianity Today and a columnist for Ekstasis.
