Indigo Ink

Photography by Diana D.S.

Meanwhile I am staining everything- the furniture, my frayed friendships with people I can’t reply back to on time, my schedules and lists- everything is stained by me. I want to shift the image. I want to be a bright, white cloth, folded precisely on the seams. I want to dip into the bowl of indigo ink that is God, to emerge dripping, so that when I stain things it will not be of myself but of God himself, and things will be left better than I found them.

Nicole Hunka is a mental health therapist in Denver, Colorado. She earned her B.A. in English Literature and Studio Art from Wheaton College (IL), and her M.A. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Denver Seminary. In addition to being a therapist, she is a poet, painter, and writer.

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Inkwell

The State of Christian Literature

Heidie Senseman

Smashing our small cosmos

Mount Vesuvius at Midnight by Albert Bierstadt

How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos. — G.K. Chesterton

WHERE ARE THE BRIAN DOYLES OF TODAY? I wrote in my notebook last month. And by that, I meant: Where are the literary Christian writers who aren’t overly cynical or overly sentimental? Where are the artful narratives born out of Christian belief?

I wrote this question while sitting in the lobby of a conference center that was hosting thousands of faith-interested writers for a weekend-long arts festival. I’d just returned from the conference’s exhibit hall—a room of booths staffed by editors and publishers and literary magazine representatives—where I’d gone looking for the heights of the Christian literary scene. I wanted to see what I might find there, if there might be a place for me in it.

I knew my work didn’t fit well with traditional Christian presses; they put out church ministry resources, religious self-help, devotionals—books that provide an encouraging Christian experience for a decisively Christian audience. I write essays that, though religiously informed, are too literary, too meandering, and too un-sanitized to deliver a tidy moral.

Mainstream publishers, on the other hand, wanted literary writing, and they were open to work that was spiritually conscious. But they wanted it slant. The subtitles on their display books helped me understand their angle. Lots of verbs like escaping and rejecting and shattering. Lots of breaking free and deconstructing. One editor, as he watched me scan his booth’s sample titles, announced that his press was “interested in the stories that Christianity wasn’t ready for.” At a different booth, I mentioned to an editor that I’d attended a Baptist college. She responded, “I’m so sorry,” with a tight-lipped grin meant to confer some sort of crooked empathy, or perhaps as a misguided gesture of solidarity.

MY INTERACTIONS WITH THESE EDITORS left me demoralized, but not merely because they were critical of religion. I believe in a sort of productive and generous critique, a Christianized version of what James Baldwin wrote in Notes of a Native Son: “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” These are the kinds of critiques that feel worthwhile to me. They have stakes. They abide with that which they criticize. They are full of love, which is why they criticize. The tone I’d encountered in the conference’s exhibit hall, however, was of a different sort. Its purpose was to declare the misery of traditional Christianity; it lacked love.

Staring blankly across the conference center lobby, I returned to my notebook: Of course there are dark stories in Christianity, I wrote. Massive, grave, ugly warts. But we can’t act like that’s all there is. That would be a lie of omission, a distortion.

I sat there, chewing on the cap of my pen. Then a Brian Doyle essay, “Fatherness: A Note,” popped into my head. It felt relevant all of a sudden. In the essay, Doyle considers how much the story of divine fatherhood holds: the bloody gift of the Passion, the wrath of discipline, unwavering self-sacrifice for a sin-stained people, transcendent love.

It was the tonal breadth of this essay that had initially captured me. Horror and beauty. Darkness and brilliance. Any writer worth their salt needed to be able to offer an account of both. It’s a matter of ethos, I determined, which helped me understand something—I didn’t trust the resentful “exvangelical” narratives for the same reason I didn’t trust the sanitized Christian ones: neither was telling the whole story.

I wrote a final blurb in my notebook: Cultivate balance. No saccharine accounts of faith. Too naive, unsatisfying, hollow, easy. And no bitter accounts either. Too dishonest, humorless, tired. Then I closed the cover and tried to source the angst that had seeped into my own entry.

I WAS ONCE A WRITER who told bitter stories about Christianity. When I applied to graduate writing programs during my senior year of college, I built my applications around a persona: the enlightened, progressive, “spiritual” girl trapped in an ocean of fanatics at a fundamentalist college. I purported a kind of private devotion that made me “interesting”—perhaps a bit more in-tune with the transcendent—but I distanced myself from the stripes of organized religion.

In my applications, I wrote that “my peers, more than most, [were] martyrs to a narrow and didactic definition of truth.” I wrote that I’d seen “bland, timid groupthink” prevail. I wrote plenty of other condescending things about Christians because that seemed to be the tonal strategy adopted by successful authors writing about religion, which was the group I wanted to be in.

To be fair, I didn’t outright manufacture my grievances. I also wrote those critiques because there was an element of truth in them. After four years of Christian college, my administration’s emphasis on theological purity in literature had started to feel like paranoia. I’d become an anxious and uncharitable reader, preoccupied with the moral acceptability of a text, so concerned with verdicts that I rarely took the time to discover and sit with a text’s ideas. “This environment,” I suggested to my application reviewers, “has stifled my literary work.” I knew these were loveless words. But then I clicked “upload” and “submit” in 11 university portals.

AROUND THE SAME TIME that I sent in my applications, I bought Doyle’s The Thorny Grace of It at the recommendation of a professor. It was my reward for having survived application season. I’d read some of Doyle’s nature writing and enjoyed his spiritual attentiveness, so I figured it’d be worth the $15 price tag.

When the book arrived, I spent a long time staring at the subtitle: And Other Essays for Imperfect Catholics. I couldn’t decide if I thought it was cheesy or earnest. I flipped the book open, determined to find out, and landed on an essay titled “Piléir” on page 61.

“Piléir” opens with Doyle and a friend—both Irish Catholics—discussing the long history of Catholic persecution in Ireland. They recall stories of starvation and stench and hiding and exile. Then they focus on a particular story, delivered to them by the generations who passed it down.

This story takes place in Donegal, near a remote hedge where a priest-in-hiding illegally leads a small congregation through the Mass liturgy. When it comes time for Communion, the priest lifts the host to bless it. And then a British bullet strikes him between the eyes. A bevy of soldiers rush toward the worshippers with chains. That’s how the Mass ends.

The Anglican soldier who shoots the priest has a son, about age ten at the time, and that son is a bright and sensitive boy, one who grows up and goes to university and studies theology and enters the ministry. But then, slowly, the boy becomes interested in Catholicism, and he nurtures this interest until, one day, he outright converts.

This displeases his father. He and the son fight. One night, the father loses his temper and howls something he has never told anyone: that back in his military days, he killed a priest, shot him clean in the forehead mid-Mass, and he had never once regretted that bullet because it was what the priest and his fellow conspirators deserved. Bloody story. Grieved story.

But here’s how that story ends. The son leaves his father’s house and heads straight to the annals. He finds a record of the incident. He travels to the village where it occurred, and he asks the locals if they can point him to the hedge where Masses took place in the dark days. The next morning, he calls the villagers there. He leads them through the liturgy and “finishes the Mass that was interrupted thirty years before by a bullet.” After the service, the group digs a hole and buries a bullet—a piléir—alongside an unconsecrated host. And then they tell the story of it to their children, who tell it to their children, who hope that “the more people who know it, the fewer bullets there will be, perhaps.”

WHAT SURPRISED ME AT THE END of “Piléir” was what I concluded the essay to be about. It didn’t strike me, ultimately, as a story of persecution or bullets, but rather, as a story about burying bullets, about a shocking act of grace in the face of evil. It left me in awe of the convert priest. It left me wondering how he’d been able to channel all his grief and rage into something restorative, something like love, which was far louder than his father’s murderous insistence.

I couldn’t recall an essay I’d read about faith and tragedy that took an angle like that. The essays I’d read were either angry or sentimental. This one was neither, but it had somehow tapped into the truest components of both: righteous grief, hard-fought hope.

I flipped ahead in Doyle’s collection and found more essays foregrounded by shocking moments of grace. Each essay had its route. Sometimes, like with “Piléir,” the stories were dramatic in their accounts of both violence and hope. Other times, like in “Sister Cook” and “Sister Anne”—two essays praising nuns for their service to schoolchildren—the stories were underwhelming, and the love came from Doyle’s dedication to exploring the “quiet corners” of his subjects. And sometimes, like in “Buying a Foot,” where Doyle’s war-maimed friend reviews different prosthetic materials (bamboo—terrible; tire rubber—pretty all right; wood—worthless; plastic—superior), humor was what carried us through the bleak details that might’ve otherwise consumed us.

The titular essay of The Thorny Grace of It provided more overt commentary on Doyle’s relationship with grief and grace. Structurally, the essay is a list of complaints. They start quippy—for example, the house is so musty “that slugs have their annual convention in the basement”—and with so much excess that we can laugh at the ways they reflect our own flair for the dramatic back to us. But as the essay goes on, the complaints become more serious. There really are “liars and charlatans in Congress,” and “the oceans are fouled,” and there are “millions of children in [our] country who will not eat tonight.” As these griefs compound, Doyle confesses that he sometimes looks around at all the suffering in the world and feels “naught but a great despair.”

And yet. One paragraph left. A turn. An appeal. Doyle remembers that “laughter and compassion, and creativity and wonder, and compassion and generosity” persist. So he arises from his bed, shuffles out into the bruised world, and “get[s] to work grinning.”

Usually, a sentiment like that would strike me as too easy. But not after Doyle has spent his book looking pain clean in the face. The word work—that we get to work grinning—implies a sort of productive struggle. I hear it with the same candor I imagine the Christ once spoke with when he told his troubled friends: Take heart! For I have overcome the world. A man of sorrows, foretelling tribulation and martyrdom and exile, still dead set on the bright message that Doyle whispers to himself in moments of despair.

The more I read The Thorny Grace of It, the more I thought about the failure of my grad school applications. I thought about my loveless, self-indulgent critiques. They had gotten me into an MFA program, sure, but they hadn’t helped my soul. I’d written pages criticizing my tribe, and I was still just as resentful; to call that sort of work “processing” would be a euphemism.

But reading Doyle’s essays helped me heal. I bought more of his books and let them teach me. I didn’t want to romanticize my resentment and call it “art” or “important.” I wanted to work, like Doyle had, to wrestle laughter and love out of seemingly barren places.

A COUPLE MONTHS LATER, I shared this epiphany with my sister over the phone. I realized that it wasn’t just me who needed stories of Christian delight. My sister and I were in another iteration of the same conversation we’d been returning to weekly via long phone calls for over half a year. The phone calls were about my sister’s spiritual weariness.

She was feeling wearied by the pet issues of her denomination’s loudest members: Quiverfull theology, “stay at home daughters,” exclusive homeschooling. She was gray-eyed, and underweight, and trying to fend off postpartum depression as the women around her wondered aloud when she’d be trying for her next.

And she was feeling wearied by the death of a nine-year-old girl in the church, whose transplanted heart gave out in the days leading up to Holy Week, whose silhouette the church thought of that Palm Sunday as all the other children bobbed up the sanctuary aisle with palm fronds.

And by two recent cases of church discipline—one man rebuked for conducting himself like a tyrant in his home, another for his racist posts on Twitter. “I’m grateful the elders will address this stuff,” my sister said, “but even just the presence of it is heavy.”

It seemed that each time my sister called, she had more grim stories. Sometimes she’d apologize for the bleakness. She’d tell me there were good things happening too, but then she’d pause, and I’d feel her throat lock across the line.

“I just keep asking myself how I got here,” she continued. “When I was a new Christian at 15, I cared about, like, reading my Bible and talking to the lonely kid at lunch. I prayed all the time. Now it seems all anyone talks about—I mean, bickers about, really—is Christian nationalism and homeschooling. How did that become our focus?”

We were silent for a few moments. Then I asked, “Can I read you something?” She mmhmm-ed, and I reached for the book on the top of my nightstand pile.

“It’s an essay from that Catholic writer I like,” I said. “I like him because he addresses hard things without polemics or spiritual aphorisms. He’s humble. And funny. He writes about Jesus and Christians a lot. He seems to genuinely love them. He says his favorite topic is ‘grace under duress.’ I kind of read his books devotionally.”

“That sounds nice,” my sister whispered.

“This one’s called ‘Jesus Christ: The Missing Years,’” I said. And then I read:

You know the story: we see Him at age twelve in the temple, giving his parents lip, and then we do not see Him again for eighteen years, until He goes on an extended speaking tour, seemingly finishing His run in Jerusalem, but then, stunningly, not.

My sister chuckled, sniffling and coughing the way you do when laughter cuts off tears.

“That’s good,” she said. “‘Extended speaking tour’ is good.”
“Keep going?” I asked, and she mm-hmm-ed.

So I read on. I covered each of Doyle’s theories about how the teenaged Jesus spent his time. I could barely get through a theory without my sister choking on her laughter, asking me to go back and reread a line. She especially liked the bit about Jesus’ dream of starting a falconry business with two friends. We went on like that for a bit. I read more essays, and her voice regained its warmth. I shipped her a copy of the collection right after getting off the phone.

A FEW WEEKS LATER, I sent my sister a picture of “Credo,” the titular essay of one of Doyle’s older essay collections. Since her copy of The Thorny Grace of It had arrived, we’d gotten into the habit of texting each other poignant or funny lines from the book. I wanted to expand our practice to include more of Doyle’s work.

This particular essay was short. Doyle wrote it after a friend asked him why he was Catholic. The friend had been satisfied with the first few reasons Doyle mumbled, but Doyle himself had not been, and so he took the task of apologetics to the page.

I sent my sister the essay because it put language to the questions she’d been asking herself: What is the substance, the core of my faith? Why is it worth fighting to preserve? I thought the essay might be a sort of balm for her, as I knew Doyle’s writing had been for me.

I didn’t write any of this when I texted the essay, though. I just sent it without context. When my phone buzzed a few hours later, I could see that her reply was longer than usual. She wrote—

This paragraph:

“Christianity is a house that needs cleaning, a house in which savagery and cowardice have thrived, where evil has a room with a view. But it is also a house where hope lives, and hope is the greatest of mercies, the most enduring of gifts, the most nutritious of foods. Hope is what we drink from the odd story of the carpenter’s odd son.”

is why I have not left the faith. I get depressed hearing stories of abuse within the church and living day in and day out in communities that bicker and seem to only grasp 1/10 of the Gospel, but this is what brings me back.”

Amen, sis, I texted. Everything else I thought of felt pithy in response.

And then I said a prayer of gratitude for Doyle. For that shepherd of words who’d cracked my sister’s grief and helped us find deep wells of hope alive in our chests—wells tended to eternally by the One in whom there is no darkness. Amen, I whispered to myself. Amen.

Heidie Senseman is an MFA Candidate at the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program.

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Inkwell

Instauration

Rachel E. Hicks

Photography by Reginald Van de Velde

My friend, I want to ask you: are you all at sea?
I feel I’m swimming bodiless through a drowned world.

You’re screened from me, busy fruitless days between us.
This home feels cavernous, the long table empty.

I want to ask: can we read aloud together
some ancient verse or prose—or maybe even sing?

You bring your yarn and needles; I’ll pour a good wine.
What are you reading these days to save your own soul?

Do you know a liturgy for chopping fresh herbs?
Will you pray it for me while we work together?

Is there one for withdrawing from the bits and bytes
that order our lives? For saying no to it all:

deleting accounts, materializing back
into the flesh of life—present and almost whole?

Or one for naming the chest’s weight, the brain’s vapor?
Is there a path that leads back to silence? A prayer

to surface ancestral memory, or coax neurons
back to life? And why am I homesick for highlands

I’ve never even seen? And tell me what to pray
when crying in the shower for a fading son

who’s receding from us like the tide. And why this
lament for seeding grass over the back garden?

What is this urge to bend and kneel? And why seasons—
how do I let them billow full, then fade away?

I’m trying to learn wintering: white, gray, muffled words,
the early dark, settling in, hunkering down.

Will you learn wintering with me—by the fireplace
or by the lake in the frozen dawn; in the door

of my son’s room, hunting a sign he’ll re-cohere?
Do words exist that might accomplish all of this?

Some days I find myself wishing I’d learned Latin,
or even Greek—those ancient, effectual tongues.

I remember the kyrie, and a little
Aramaic: Eloi, lama sabachthani?

Rachel E. Hicks’s poetry has appeared in Presence, Anglican Theological Review, Vita Poetica, The Baltimore Review, The Windhover, Relief, and other journals. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she also won the 2019 Briar Cliff Review Fiction Prize.

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Inkwell

The Castle Inside the Prison

Elizabeth Genovise

On Teaching Literature in a Jail Cell

Painting by John Martin

IT MIGHT BE the ultimate cliché: “My students teach me.” It’s not a phrase I would have used until my experience as a college instructor at a Tennessee State correctional facility in 2023, teaching modern American literature and eventually a seminar in creative writing. As a writer, I’ve long practiced following my intuition, and it was this raw intuition that pulled me toward the job. Those who knew I’d taken the position expressed concern for my well-being and wondered whether I might have some self-destructive tendencies. I punted these emails and phone calls with the words, “I’m looking for a challenge,” which, in a way, was true. Yet I could not adequately explain why I chose to do it nor why I fell in love with the work.

Those first few weeks, it was purely the educator in me who responded to the situation. Initially frustrated with the classroom conditions (tiny room, no Internet, miniature whiteboard, zoo-level ambient noise screaming through paper-thin walls), it wasn’t long before I forgot the room and the absence of technology. This, I quickly realized, was a different world from what I’d known over the course of 14 years of teaching.

During my first lecture, I told my students, “You don’t need to take notes tonight; just listen.” They took arduous notes anyway. The first written assignment they submitted was supposed to be half a page long. They submitted two to three pages apiece. Nearly all of them wrote in calligraphy, not the sort of textbook cursive that grammar schools used to teach, but unique and personalized fonts they had developed through the years. They were ferocious self-editors from the get-go, visiting with me after class to explain where they thought they’d gone wrong in their analysis of a story we’d read. I showed samples of their work to friends, who immediately said with disbelief, “They did not write that.”

Typically, if I encounter perfectionism in my students, it is pathological, a matter of seeking order for order’s sake. But my students at the prison were determined to grasp the meaning of stories, not for any expedient reason but for the stories’ sake. They were working with both intellect and feeling; they were capable of pointed analysis but could also experience stories viscerally and attend to the responses of their inner voice.

It was the latter that made the art personal and not some academic exercise. Nobody asked me to change a grade after he’d edited his work. In fact, the word points rarely surfaced, which was surprising in and of itself. I am long accustomed to a utilitarian outlook from students, who will ask, “How much is this worth?” and then do quick math to determine whether they ought to bother with the readings. That question is particularly crushing in a literature course. How does one address the worth of a T. S. Eliot poem or Steinbeck novel in terms of points? A course in the humanities ought to be a place of exploration and the savoring of art. Now, it is all too often a kind of convenience store, wherein one’s students will purchase nothing unless it is cheap and aligned with preconceived axiomatic conclusions about what is worth having.

The very aloneness that was their curse as prisoners had also gifted them with capacities I rarely encounter in others. Isolation has a way of orphaning us from our personas. It strips us down just as pain does; it forces us to listen to ourselves and ask the sorts of questions we’d otherwise prefer to lose to the noise of a crowd.

My students at the prison were entirely without access to cell phones, the Internet, or social media. It took time to register the full implications of this. Academically, it meant they could not cheat. No Wikipedia, no SparkNotes, no way to purchase an essay, and no Google to provide them with a lazy assessment of a labyrinthine story. No artificial intelligence spewing out faux papers. Put simply, they had to do their own thinking; they were accountable for every last word they put to paper. As a teacher, I was enthralled by the realization that any assertion they made was truly theirs and theirs alone, be it ingenious or obtuse.

I was struck by how articulate, socially adept, and well-read they were. Free of the senseless addictions of Facebook and Twitter, forced to consult either books or their own minds instead of a phone glued to their palm, they could navigate conversation at a level I hadn’t experienced in years. They made eye contact when they spoke publicly, and their vocabulary levels were high. Some had taught themselves a second language; others had trained themselves in comparative religions. They picked up my phraseology quickly and then used it effectively in essays or homework assignments. It seemed they only needed to hear a word or concept once before they mortared it into a larger castle of ideas.

I found myself humbled by their written work, amazed that they could spot daubs of color and flashes of light I had never noticed, even in texts I knew practically by heart. I also respected their willingness to go all-in, and began reevaluating myself as an artist in reaction to their total submission to the literature. Moreover, they expected me to hold them to the highest standards. It was implicitly understood from the start: They were here to improve themselves, not to be babysat or flattered.

One night, I watched as one of the inmates reorganized the desks in perfect alignment with the floor tiles. I’d gibed him for this before—the chemistry in that room was always one of good-natured nitpicking—but this time when I harangued him, he turned and said, “It’s overcompensation, that’s why I do these things. My life was pure chaos for a long time. I know it looks like I’m going too far the other way, but it’s what I have to do for now until I hit that balance.”

This sort of self-assessment, delivered so casually, was the norm among these men. Put as simply as possible, they knew themselves. This emerged in both their writing and their speech. They located themselves in the dark sides of characters; they empathized with the guilty and the wounded; they evinced real joy in a character’s redemptive arc.

Any persona I’d attempted to project my first few nights, mostly in an effort to win their respect and prevent any abuse, molted off me like an old skin. I realized that not a single one of them wore a costume. Their cards were on the table, the red and the black, and I lost interest in hiding mine.

NEAR THE END of that first semester, my students were required to choose a new story out of our anthology and do a presentation on that piece. I took a gamble on one student in particular, following an instinct to suggest a story outside of the text. It was Charles D’Ambrosio’s “The Point,” one of the most phenomenal pieces of short fiction ever composed, in my opinion, and a story I thought I knew down to the letter.

The following week, the student told me it was the story of his own childhood. It had rattled him so deeply that he tried to retell the story to his sister during visitation. In class, he delivered one of the most riveting presentations I’d heard in my entire teaching career. At one point, we locked eyes, both of us tearing up in response to a devastating passage he’d just read aloud, and I thought, This is what art looks like when it is allowed to live. The room was completely silent as he spoke, and I left the prison that night feeling as though I’d met that story for the first time.

I was also moved by their openness to me as both a teacher and a person. I’d anticipated disrespect, contempt, and rebellion; I am a 5-foot-2-inch-tall female, privileged and overeducated by most people’s standards. Yet here I was, strolling into a classroom to take charge of 11 grown men. But to these 11, I represented an opportunity to manifest their humanity.

They became fiercely protective. My first week, I made a joke (in poor taste) about being “disabled” when it came to using modern technology; several of the inmates overheard this in the library and misunderstood. Apparently, there was a debate regarding what my disability might be, until one of them finally approached me and asked. I explained it had only been a joke and asked why it mattered so much. Deadly serious, he said, “We can’t step up and help if we don’t know what’s wrong.”

It wasn’t the first time they’d assumed such a role. Previously, they’d worked with a professor who was suffering from burgeoning dementia. Instead of taking advantage of the situation, they discussed among themselves how to help him and divided up tasks—this one kept track of time, this one kept track of the syllabus, this one gently nudged the professor back on course when he began telling the same story for the third time. They took it upon themselves not just to maintain order but to protect the man’s dignity.

Viktor Frankl is famous for saying, “The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.” There are plenty of people who respond to imprisonment with roaring resentment and a lust for vengeance. But some cease projecting and instead look inward, confronting their dragons instead of pretending away their existence. They do battle with themselves instead of making enemies of the Other. They peer into mirrors and hold their ground, even if what peers back is frightening and fragmented. It is what an artist must do also, and I am certain there are artists among those inmates.

While several of my students had life sentences, most of the others were not due for parole for many years to come. When I tell people this, their usual response is, “Then what’s the point?” In other words: Why invest yourself in something that lacks all expedience? Why self-educate, why explore, why ask taxing questions when there is no career around the corner, no means of monetizing the experience or even advertising it to others?

The answer is that these students were hunting for more than a job or an item on their resumé. They were after much bigger fish—and from what I was able to witness, they were hooking them.

AS A WRITER, I rely heavily upon my own vivid, narrative dreaming. I understand dreams not merely as problem-solving mechanisms but as acts of exploration and compensation. They lend a visual life to the dark side of each private moon, unleash all that we try to subjugate during daylight hours—and they do this not to haunt or torment us, even in the case of nightmares, but to revivify us. We wither without access to our shadow side. We also need to confront that savagely creative life force that our careers and family duties often asphyxiate in the name of expedience, material comfort, or “keeping the peace.”

Near the end of my first semester at the correctional facility, I had one of those dreams the shamans of old would have called a “big dream,” a message incarnate that belonged not just to me but to every person in my life.

In my dream, I was on the prison campus for some kind of open visitation day. The atmosphere was that of a large family reunion—people milling about everywhere, picnic tables laid out, a pickup baseball game somewhere in the background. I wandered through the crowd and passed many of my inmates engaged with family or friends, and each encounter was deeply revealing.

One of them was asked to carve a ham, but when he removed a knife from his pocket, his family collectively backed away, then accused him of “refusing to change.” They seemed almost gleeful at having this excuse to demonize him. The knife drooped in his hand; he said, “This is how I got here in the first place—I did what you asked. I was ten f—ing years old.”

A few yards away I spotted another, in military garb, sitting under a tree with two or three other men also in uniform. “Only with you guys, and here,” my student was saying, “only with you, and here, was it okay to admit we might die.”

The most poignant encounter involved the same man who had done that presentation on “The Point” story. He passed me and was carrying a beautiful little boy on his shoulders, giving me the distinct impression that he’d been carrying the child for miles and miles. I stopped him and asked, “Is this your son?” He turned haunted eyes on me and responded, “He’s me,” before continuing his lonely trek through the crowd.

I wandered further. I began spotting people I knew from outside the prison—family members, old friends, colleagues. A dear friend from my hometown was at the perimeter fence, trailed by a crowd of people I recognized from our old high school. They were all clawing at him, pulling him back from the fence, though he’d found a breach and could have easily escaped had they let go of him. I suddenly understood: In real life, he was still living in our hometown where high school football games and house parties had been the pinnacle of everyone’s existence. They couldn’t let him go, nor could he shake himself free.

Elsewhere, I spotted a line of my traditional students all holding iPhones over a huge open vat of boiling coffee. They were weeping, desperate to let the phones drop to their own deaths but unable to open their fingers. I glimpsed two of my closest friends hunched over on the grass, unable to rise because they were so weighted down with rosaries and icons; they were clad in white damask as though they’d stripped an altar and stepped into its clothing. For them, religious practice had been turned inside-out, becoming a refuge from self-analysis; their loyalty to doctrine had prevented them from determining their true vocations or sorting out their deepest needs.

As I wandered on, I saw people hauling Radio Flyer wagons full of family members or material goods, people turning in literal circles as they read the same book again and again, people trying to set up offices at picnic tables with such urgency that you’d think an hour away from their jobs might put them in mortal danger. One person went about frantically with a magnifying glass, studying everything on hand but oblivious to the fact that a stunning exotic bird sat on his own head, radiant as a lighthouse beam. Another walked around with a big pack of nametag stickers and kept replacing the label on his shirt with a new name. I approached this man and asked what his original name was. “Don’t ask me,” he fairly screamed. “Can’t you see I don’t want to remember?”

We were all there—each personality type and demographic. We were all in a prison of our own making, appearing to resist the tyranny of our own minds but secretly in love with our captors. For no one tried very hard to leave, despite the fact that fences sagged everywhere and guards were few and far between. We loved our provisional identities, loved our meaningless responsibilities, loved the people and the practices that filled the silence so as to cancel out the inner voice.

We loved our phones and televisions; we loved housework and errands and pointless committee meetings and empty chatter in hallways stalling us from the long solo drive home; we loved video games, news of bad weather, political dramas, tabloids. We loved the stories we had made up about ourselves and we loved our own refusal to revise them. We loved denying our own mortality. In real life, some of us had broken obvious laws, but serious moral questions pick up where the penal code leaves off, and who among us could say, “I am living in truth”? If the answer to that question determined whether one was incarcerated or not, the vast majority of us would be behind bars.

Upon waking from this dream, my first thought was that of all the people in that crowd, only the literal prisoners seemed to comprehend their own hell. Everyone else was engaged in an elaborate deception, smiling brightly, keeping busy with activities of no consequence. I recall someone cutting the same cake on repeat, another woman pouring sugar from one container into another and then back again.

My visceral response each time I passed one of the inmates was relief, akin to the way I felt on a backcountry hike when I became briefly lost and then spotted a rock cairn. Here was something solid and real that marked a trail out of the thickets. These men had looked into the abyss. They were struggling, but this struggle was honest. While they were shuttered from what we all call “real life,” they knew the city within down to the darkest alley. The rest of us lacked the basic orientation skills necessary should life suddenly shove us off that familiar strip of carpet we’d elected to call home.

There is no story without a shadow. The man who casts no darkness has no hero’s arc. And yet despite the fairy tales and movies that stirred us as children, too many of us grow up unconsciously hoping never to have a story—to be without shadow until the very end. Our cultural climate affirms that avoidance strategy, emphasizing via every possible medium that comfort is the ultimate end, that all forms of stress or suffering are intolerable and should either be banished via medication or else projected onto some enemy whose destruction will magically reinstate our peace.

It was not just as an educator or even as a writer that I found myself so drawn to my work at the prison. Something in my spirit yearned for the personal quest embodied in these men. Their presence in my life continually begs the question: Where would we be, had we made early inmates of our shadow sides, lived in close quarters with them, listened to them, and integrated them into our larger understanding of ourselves and others?

Do we want a flatline existence like an EKG gone dead, or do we want to rise and fall, rise and fall, crawling through tunnels like Gilgamesh or Tolkien’s heroes in hopes of emerging worthy of starlight and new harbors?

Elizabeth Genovise is a poet, literature instructor & author of Third Class Relics.

- More from Elizabeth Genovise

News

Mike Pence Shares the First Thing He Said to Trump in Four Years

Harvest Prude and Kate Shellnutt

The day after Jimmy Carter’s funeral, the former VP spoke to CT’s Russell Moore about what happened in the presidential pews and his prayers for his former running mate.

Mike Pence and Donald Trump

Jacquelyn Martin / AP Images

Though Mike Pence hadn’t seen Donald Trump since leaving the White House, the former vice president said he was grateful to get a moment to speak with him at Jimmy Carter’s state funeral this week.

The day after the funeral, Pence talked with Christianity Today editor in chief Russell Moore about his continued prayers for his former running mate; his impressions of the incoming administration, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; and his interactions with Carter.

“The opportunity to speak to the president yesterday is something that I appreciated, I welcomed,” he told Moore, in a CT podcast episode that will air Wednesday. “I’ve really been blessed at how much I’ve heard from people around the country who saw [our] handshake, and in that handshake, saw some hope that we might be moving past those difficult days. That’s certainly my hope.”

As the former presidents, first ladies, and vice presidents sat together at the National Cathedral on Thursday, “Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe that God put me on one of these rows,” Pence remarked. Media coverage scrutinized the small interactions among them, noting Pence’s handshakes with the Trumps and former Second Lady Karen Pence’s refusal to acknowledge either.

“He greeted me when he came down the aisle. I stood up, extended my hand. He shook my hand. I said, ‘Congratulations, Mr. President,’ and he said, ‘Thanks, Mike,’” Pence said.

“You’d have to ask my wife about her posture, but we’ve been married 44 years, and she loves her husband, and her husband respects her deeply.”

pic.twitter.com/dmVImBx4Vs
— Russell Moore (@drmoore) January 11, 2025

The very public reunion was far from the only thing on his mind at the funeral. Before joining the Reagan Revolution and becoming a Republican, Pence had voted for Carter and was “greatly heartened that there was a born-again Christian serving in the White House,” he told Moore. Backstage at an event in 2015, Pence said he got to thank the 39th president for his service and commended how Carter “spoke plainly about his faith in Jesus Christ” in office.

Pence brought born-again bona fides to the Republican presidential ticket in 2016, and both he and Trump have applauded their work together in the White House and the legacy of their administration. Yet the two split political paths in the tumultuous aftermath of the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot and hadn’t seen each other in nearly four years.

Pence went on to enter the presidential race as a candidate in 2023 but dropped out by the year’s end. When Pence opted not to endorse Trump last year, the president said he “couldn’t care less” and that “we need strong people in this country, we don’t need weak people.”

Pence has repeatedly stood by his role of certifying President Joe Biden’s 2020 win, despite the political fallout.

During the interview with Moore, Pence’s most critical remarks came when asked about some of Trump’s nominees for his upcoming term. He said he doesn’t think the Republican-controlled Senate should confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head Health and Human Services, citing the former independent presidential contender’s pro-choice stance on abortion and lack of qualifications.

A stalwart advocate for the United States’ continued support of Ukraine, Pence also said he had concerns about former US Rep. Tulsi Gabbard potentially serving as national intelligence director, citing her “willingness to essentially be an apologist for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin over recent months,” and added that her 2017 visit with Syria’s recently ousted dictator, Bashar al-Assad, is also a matter of concern.

Since the close of the first Trump administration, Pence has stayed active in the advocacy world and founded Advancing American Freedom, which focuses on advancing conservative social and economic policies.

He’s also spent time praying for Trump, as he pledged he would do in one of their final conversations in office. Trump told him, “Don’t bother,” he recalls. But Pence reiterated the sentiment at the meeting’s end as he stood ready to walk out the door: “I said, ‘You know, there’s probably two things that we’re never going to agree on. … We’re probably never going to agree on what my duty was under the Constitution on January 6.’ And then I said, ‘and I’m never going to stop praying for you.’

“And he said, ‘That’s right, Mike, don’t ever change.’”

Update: The full interview with Pence was released on The Russell Moore Show podcast on January 15.

News

LA Pastors Wait on a ‘Gentle Miracle’ While Their Communities Burn

Emily Belz

Wildfire survivors say recovery from such huge loss is possible, but halting.

A person uses a garden hose in an effort to save a neighboring home from catching fire during the Eaton Fire in Altadena, California.

Photo by Mario Tama / Getty Images

Los Angeles has had wildfires before, but residents have never seen anything like the wildfires rolling through their city now, burning through brush and buildings and leveling whole neighborhoods. It’s the worst destruction in local history.

But the sight of block after block of destroyed homes stings with familiarity for residents of Paradise, California, whose community similarly went up in flames in the 2018 Camp Fire.

Pastors there know the grief of such widespread, incomprehensible devastation—and the challenges of rebuilding.

“The loss of your home and community in basically a few hours—every aspect, all at once—you go through the mourning process,” said Samuel Walker, a pastor in Paradise who lost five congregants and his home when the town caught fire six years ago. “You don’t realize, ‘Why is this so hard?’ It’s because you’re mourning the loss of so many things all at once.”

Today, hundreds of miles south, 100-mile-per-hour winds are whipping up flames around LA, with the Palisades Fire spreading to the coast, the Hurst and Kenneth fires igniting northwest of the city, and the Eaton Fire burning near Altadena and Pasadena to the east.

Since Tuesday, the fires have destroyed entire blocks of homes, businesses, and churches—more than 10,000 structures so far. People have scratchy throats from breathing in smoke, and evacuation orders are continually shifting. At least seven people have died.

Firefighters and water supplies have been stretched thin to fight the fires over tens of thousands of acres. Local pastors recounted widespread loss of homes among their congregants. They couldn’t give a number because the fires were still burning and information was unfolding; as of Friday morning, officials described the Palisades Fire as eight percent contained and the Eaton Fire as zero percent contained.

“It feels like we’re losing part of our city. The Palisades seems to just be gone,” said Alex Watlington, senior pastor of Pacific Crossroads Church in Santa Monica. “There’s not just damage; it’s just gone. Like it was never there.”

Two elders at Pacific Crossroads and many of its congregants living in the Palisades and on the east side of LA have lost everything; the church is coordinating aid through its Hope for LA ministry.

“Everybody needs help, but you don’t know where to start,” Watlington said. “In ministry, whenever someone dies and you do a funeral, you feel really under-resourced and under-equipped to walk into that. It’s not the same thing, but it’s akin to that. You’re walking into people’s loss, and it’s just irretrievable.”

Walker remembers that overwhelming feeling. The Camp Fire had burned for more than two weeks, displacing 50,000 people and smoldering 19,000 buildings. He found himself weeping uncontrollably over a close friend who died, and then furious about someone breaking into his car and stealing the last two objects his family had saved from the fire.

But getting his emotions out helped him be ready to listen and pray with his congregants. Walker was incredibly angry at God for allowing the fire, and he found it healthy to admit that rather than pretend he was fine.

So he advises pastors in LA: Cry if you need to cry, and yell if you need to yell.

“Let the Lord do what he wants to do in you, so you in turn can minister to the people,” he said. “The biggest thing people will need right away, besides basic needs … is hope. Somebody to share their story with.”

Fellow pastors who survived California wildfires said churches in Los Angeles should prepare for a long and nonlinear recovery. The early days are focused on meeting basic needs like housing and meals. But then grief begins to set in, as well as angst about moving or staying to rebuild.

“What you find three or four months later, there are spiritual challenges—people disagreeing on how long grieving should take or missing their old church building. All the baggage that comes with hurt,” said Josh Lee, the lead pastor of Ridge Presbyterian Church in Paradise, which lost its building in the Camp Fire. “That’s the kind of thing you have to have your eyes open to in pastoral ministry. All the brokenness that comes afterward.”

Watlington in Santa Monica understands that rebuilding could be too emotionally taxing for some who have lost their homes; he knows that in the weeks and months ahead, he’ll inevitably be helping people move away to start over.

Joshua Jamison, who pastors Jubilee Church in Paradise alongside his wife, Melissa Jamison, remembers volunteers helping survivors sift through the ashes of their homes, sometimes finding a piece of jewelry or some memento.

“Most of the time, people didn’t find much of anything, but … the time people would spend sifting through the ashes was just so powerful,” he said. (Returning to the rubble may pose a health risk, he said, but he thinks people can be safe with protective equipment.)

No two disasters are the same, but Paradise, which used to have a population of around 26,000, was about the same size as Pacific Palisades, California. Most churches in Paradise burned down overnight in the Camp Fire in 2018.

Many of them have rebuilt; some only just opened their new buildings last year. One congregation that lost its building, Ridge Lifeline Church, now meets in a bowling alley that survived. After the fire, the town’s population fell to a low of 4,000 before rebounding to around 10,000.

“If you had told me we were going to start a church in Paradise again, I would have laughed and said, ‘No, it’s gone,’” said Lee of Ridge Presbyterian. But the church did begin again, slowly.

“It’s alive, and I don’t know how that happened,” said Lee.

Recovery comes haltingly. For a time, Ridge Presbyterian had no children showing up to Sunday school; now the recovering church has about 10 or 15 elementary schoolers. Lee said people in his community are worried about a big increase in home insurance that might force them to move even after rebuilding.

“But God is at work,” he said he would say to people recovering in Los Angeles. “Trust that, even though it seems very scattered and not linear.”

In the LA area, the current fires have destroyed or severely damaged at least a dozen churches.

In the Palisades, that includes Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church, Pacific Palisades Community United Methodist Church, Corpus Christi Church (a Catholic parish), and two rectories of St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church.

In Altadena and nearby Pasadena, the fire destroyed Lifeline Fellowship Christian Center, St. Mark’s Episcopal, Altadena United Methodist Church, Altadena Church of the Nazarene, Atladena Community Church, and Pasadena Church of Christ. Hillside Tabernacle City of Faith (Church of God in Christ) in Altadena also sustained serious damage.

“If I haven’t gotten back to you today, please forgive me,” Hillside Tabernacle pastor G. LaKeith Kenebrew wrote on Facebook. He said his own house and his in-laws’ house had “burned to nothing” and added that “between checking on members, trying to keep the church from completely burning down and realizing that our city looks like a scene out of an apocalyptic movie … either I could not answer or my phone was dead.”

Calvary Church in Pacific Palisades said its sanctuary was severely damaged, but the pastor Justin Anderson called it a “miracle” that the rest of the campus, including a gym that the congregation could worship in, was unharmed. Dozens of families in the church lost homes, according to Anderson, who just started pastoring the church this week.

Paradise survivors said other undamaged churches might need to welcome displaced people. In 2018, Chico Church of Christ in nearby Chico, California, took in the Paradise Church of Christ congregation when its building burned.

With nowhere to go, people from Paradise had brought their pets to church with them, said Chico Church of Christ office manager Christie Presswood.

Over time, Chico’s status as a landing ground for so many displaced people changed the town, too, she remembered. She advises churches in that position to “be as understanding as you can be, because they’re going through a lot of trauma.”

“Seeing the news reports I’m seeing now in LA, it brings it all back,” Presswood said.

In this initial stage of recovery, Jamison recommends giving survivors cash, gift cards, or gas cards. He knows church people like to deliver food and clothing, but he said funds are better so people can get what they need.

The Paradise pastor also urged churches to plug into existing disaster-aid infrastructure, like a local assistance center that coordinates aid in California after fires. Being part of that process prepared his church to respond to subsequent disasters in the area, and Jamison now leads the Oroville Hope Center, which distributes resources to people in need.

Distributing water also became an important task of the local Christian community. For two years, the Hope Center distributed water to people in Paradise. Contaminants from the fire in the water system meant people weren’t ready to drink Paradise water for a while.

The recovery process has been slow and sometimes sad.

“It was depressing, looking out there and seeing charred buildings and burnt trees,” said Walker, who pastors First Baptist Church of Paradise.

For three years, he and his family didn’t have a settled home, but they have one now. Looking back, he said he sees how God “gently” cared for him and his congregation after he felt so much anger about the fire.

First Baptist had about 75 people attending before the fire. The number dropped afterward, and there were times when leadership thought the church would have to close. But in the last couple of years, attendance has grown with new people, and now 100 come on a Sunday.

For Los Angeles residents in destroyed communities, Walker said life will never be the same.

“But it’s going to be good. It will be a different good,” he said. “There will be joy again, but allow yourself time to go through the process of mourning. … Don’t feel like God is judging your response. I don’t think he is. I think he knows our hearts; he knows what we can handle. He wants us to just bring it to him.”

The LA fires are still raging, so local pastors aren’t quite thinking about recovery yet. They are praying for winds to die down and for firefighting resources to arrive to contain the blazes.

“We need a gentle miracle,” Watlington said.

Maybe some of that miracle could come from rebuilt churches in Paradise. According to Walker, a young firefighter who was baptized at First Baptist in Paradise a couple of weeks ago was just sent down to fight the inferno in Los Angeles.

- More from Emily Belz

Inkwell

Ambient Light

Drew Jackson

Photography by Alen Palander

Two New York girls riding down a Georgia highway
for the first time in memory. They know they have roots here
but have they thought of their grandmother, buried
six feet in this red clay? Have they thought of how
she now nourishes these dogwoods and magnolias
the way she nourished me on Grand Magnolia Dr.?
It is nighttime as we drive and they cannot see
how this earth is different from the dark soil of North.
Maybe tomorrow when the morning star rises.
But tonight they do not care about what is beneath
their feet because they have been caught up
into the heavens. Look at the stars one shouts!

We can’t see them like this back home
says the other. Amazed and with a tinge of sadness.
Then they share with us front seaters
that the moon is now in its waxing gibbous phase.
As if we know what that means. As if
we know anything at all. I want to give them
more than ambient city light. For them
to joust with Orion and join their sister shine to Pleiades.
Jump up out the backseat and take a ride
on Ursa Major. My loves, I want to give you the stars.
To give you what you’ll need to live
beneath these falling stars.

Drew Jackson is a poet, speaker, and public theologian. He is author of God Speaks Through Wombs: Poems on God’s Unexpected Coming and Touch the Earth: Poems on The Way.

- More from Drew Jackson

News

Brazil’s Fight Over the Soul of a Snack

Franco Iacomini

For decades, acarajé has been considered an offering to Afro-Brazilian religious deities. What happens when evangelicals start producing and selling it?

A woman prepares a dish of acarajé.

Silvia Izquierdo, AP Images / Edits by CT

It’s summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and many tourists have arrived in northeastern Brazil, eager to wander the cobblestone streets of Salvador, the vibrant capital of the state of Bahia, renowned for its Afro-Brazilian culture. Many will grab a bite at one of plentiful colorful stalls selling local culinary specialties like acarajé.

Or maybe, if you will, a “Jesus fritter.”

A black-eyed-pea snack seasoned with onions and deep-fried in palm oil, in recent years the specialty has become a source of tension between two increasingly outspoken and growing communities: evangelical Christians and Afro-Brazilian religion practitioners and their defenders. Long a source of pride for a marginalized community, the dish’s preparation and sales are regulated by the state. Evangelicals’ discomfort over its use in traditional spiritual practices has clashed with those who see these concerns as disrespectful and racist.

“It is not just a delicacy,” said Luiz Nascimento, academic director at the Seminário Teológico Batista do Nordeste (Northeast Baptist Theological Seminary) at Feira de Santana. “Acarajé has a history related to religious practice that gives it another dimension.”

Acarajé arrived in Brazil via the Brazilian slave trade, which began in 1540 and lasted for more than three centuries. Brazil only abolished slavery in 1888, the final country in the Americas to do so, and for years the industry was a pillar of the nation’s economy.

Enslaved Africans brought a dish across the Atlantic called acara jé or “fireball to eat” in Yoruba, likely a reference to the snack’s reddish color. Many also continued to worship their local deities, known as orisha, which later syncretized with Catholic saints and developed into a handful of religious communities in parts of Brazil, Cuba, and Haiti.

Practitioners of Candomblé, the largest of these groups, frequently use food to connect with orisha, said Patrício Carneiro Araújo, an anthropologist at the Universidade da Integração Internacional da Lusofonia Afro-Brasileira, and certain foods are linked to specific entities and offered to them. Acarajé is primarily associated with Yansã, a warrior orisha and patroness of winds and fire, who is married to Xangô, the orisha of justice.

Though acarajé had a sacred significance, enslaved Brazilians also sold it during the few hours of the day they could work for themselves, and the profits frequently funded the freedom of enslaved individuals or their family members. Later, terreiros, the houses of worship for Afro-Brazilian religions, began to fund their religious work by selling acarajé.

Today, at least 3,500 people work in the acarajé industry in Salvador, smashing black-eyed peas and frying up the batter according to recipes passed down for generations. Aracajé manufacturers hand off their work to baianas do acarajé, female sellers who must follow state mandates that regulate the type of food they can sell with the acarajé and the attire they can wear. Their uniform includes necklaces known as guias, with beads made from seeds or crystals and with a color that connects to the orisha the baiana worships.

The direct relationship between acarajé and Afro-Brazilian religions has shifted as the religious and demographic landscape in Brazil transformed in the last 50 years, despite the Northeast consistently having the smallest evangelical population of Brazil’s five regions.

Edits by CT / Source Image: Manu Dias, GOVBA, Flickr

Acarajé being fried.

In 1970, evangelicals made up 3 percent of the area’s population. By 2000, they accounted for 10 percent, and by 2010, 16 percent. (The most recent census, conducted in 2022, will publish its findings later this year.)

Many Brazilian evangelicals are Black, composing a community that has continued to suffer prejudice and racism more than a century after the abolishment of slavery. Poorer than the average Brazilian, many embraced Pentecostal teachings in the latter half of the 20th century, where they found solace and hope amid challenging circumstances. According to the 2010 census, there are 14 million Black evangelicals in the country, compared to the 300,000 Black Brazilians who follow Afro-Brazilian religions.

“If you visit Salvador today and want to eat acarajé,” Araújo said, “there’s a high chance it was prepared by an evangelical man or woman.”

When some baianas do acarajé (nearly all of whom are Black women) converted to evangelicalism, many felt uneasy selling a product tied to orisha worship. In the early 2010s, some sellers even attempted to rename the dish the bolinho de Jesus, or the “Jesus fritter.” Some pastors preached against acarajé on social media, calling it sinful.

Afroreligious scholars saw the situation differently.

Denying the religious character of the dish or trying to “convert” it is a form of racism, said anthropologist and babalorixá (Candomblé priest) Pai Rodney de Oxóssi. “Slavery ended, but things didn’t change for Black people in Brazil for a long time,” Araújo said. “Racism survives in daily actitudes, and even in religion and food.”

Nascimento observed a disparity in who is being criticized.

“If you visit a Chinese or Japanese restaurant, you’re unlikely to worry about the owner’s religion or what goes on in the kitchen,” he said. “Why, then, does this concern arise with African-origin food?”

“There’s religious intolerance toward terreiro foods,” wrote Aline Chermoula, a scholar of African ancestral cuisine.

In response to the attitudes of some Christians towards acarajé, local legislators in some Bahia cities have created strict rules about how to cook and sell traditional products, effectively banning rebranded acarajé. Currently, Bahia state officially recognizes the dish’s cultural heritage, and Brazil similarly honors the baianas’ attire at the national level, a stipulation that prevents people from making custom changes, like swapping out a white dress for a red one.

As a teenager, Luiz Henrique Caracas, who pastors an Assembly of God church in Ilhéus, a city in southern Bahia, heard a pastor using 1 Corinthians 10:21 as a rationale to avoid acarajé: “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too.” According to Caracas, the pastor was looking for a place to eat after returning from a trip, and the only spot he found was an acarajé stand. The pastor then prayed out loud in front of the vendor, rebuking the demons and consecrating the food to Jesus before eating it.

The story astonished Caracas, who grew up eating acarajé prepared by his father. To his many patrons, José Luiz dos Santos Silva was known as Irmão Luiz do Abará (abará is made with the same ingredients as acarajé, but steamed instead of fried).

Irmão Luiz do Abará grew up in a Catholic family sympathetic to Afro-Brazilian traditions before he embraced evangelical Christianity in the late 1980s. Now in fragile health, he rarely sells his products today. But for years, his church invited him to prepare acarajé and abará at its events.

The dish was so familiar to Caracas, the son, that he would never have imagined that some brothers and sisters of faith had restrictions on it. “For me, eating acarajé has always been as natural as eating any other dish,” said Caracas, who directs the Eclésia Pentecostal Theology School in Ilhéus and counts an acarajé vendor as one of his students.

Few news-making confrontations have occurred in recent years, though Candomblé practitioners continue to be bothered by evangelicals in the acarajé industry, many of whom proudly broadcast their identity by naming their stalls “El Shaddai” or “Acarajé Gospel.”

For Nascimento, all dilemmas he faces today about eating acarajé or supporting a particular vendor come down to health. His cholesterol levels have led to dietary restrictions that exclude fried foods such as acarajé.

When he could, Nasciment ate it frequently, thanking God for it every time. He quoted 1 Corinthians 10:30: “If I take part in the meal with thankfulness, why am I denounced because of something I thank God for?”

- More from Franco Iacomini

Church Life

In Hong Kong, One Pastor Ministers to a Gen Z Protester in Prison

Hannah Keziah Agustin

Amid high rates of depression and anxiety among young people, Christian leaders boost efforts to address mental health challenges.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash

In the last two years, KK Ip, who pastors an evangelical, multicultural church in Hong Kong, has traveled to a prison located on the border between China and Hong Kong several times.

Every visit takes more than 3 hours. Much of it is commuting time, but once he arrives at the prison, he often waits for 45 minutes before the prison guards escort him to a meeting room.

There, Ip meets with a young woman who was arrested in 2019 for protesting against Hong Kong’s now-scrapped extradition bill. Although she was not involved in any violent acts, the government sentenced her to nearly four years in prison in 2023.

During their half-hour-long interactions, Ip chats with her about her thoughts and the conditions inside the prison. Over time, he sensed her despondency and anxiety over the uncertainty of the prosecution process and its potential outcomes.

“Planning for the future seemed pointless” to the young woman, Ip said.

Before her trial began, Ip prayed with her for guidance in her future career. And as trust began to develop between them, she became more “grounded and hopeful for the future,” he said. She will be released from prison next year.

The Gen Zer, whose name is withheld for security reasons, is not a believer. But Ip has found ways to convey God’s love and grace to her through these in-person visits and also through writing letters to her regularly (he once sent a postcard while vacationing in Greece), sharing insights and encouragement.

“Christ’s sacrifice [has] liberated us from the imprisonment of sins, and I believe in extending that love and support to the youth in our city,” Ip said. “I want her to know that there are people willing to walk with her no matter how far away [they are].”

Ip is not alone in his conviction to care for Hong Kong’s depressed and anxious Gen Zers, who are experiencing a tumultuous political, economic, and social climate. Other pastors and ministry leaders in the city are taking steps to address these mental health issues in creative ways, from creating handy tools to build emotional literacy to opening up spaces for conversations about these challenges inside and outside the church.

In the six years since the 2019 pro-democracy protests, Hong Kongers have dealt with some of the strictest COVID-19 measures in the world: Its borders were shut in 2020, and visitors had to enter mandatory hotel quarantines. Then, the authorities implemented a tough national security law in June 2020.

While more than 123,800 locals have immigrated to Britain and thousands have received permanent residence in Canada, an influx of people from the mainland has moved in. Since December 2022, around 55,000 people from China have moved to Hong Kong on “top talent” visas.

These rapidly evolving changes in Hong Kong society have taken a toll on Gen Zers’ mental health. Almost half of 18-to-24-year-olds in the city reported having moderate to severe depression with symptoms of anxiety and insomnia, according to a survey last year by the Mental Health Association.

Nearly half of youth aged 12 to 24 said they consider themselves failures, based on a Hong Kong Christian Service survey last year. But only a third of Gen Zers will seek professional help for their mental health problems, a poll by the Chinese YMCA of Hong Kong found.

As Hong Kong churches grapple with dwindling congregations and threats to their religious freedom, Gen Z Christians are also experiencing greater levels of depression and anxiety. Stories of young believers struggling with their mental health are common, said Fox Lo, associate general secretary of the Fellowship of Evangelical Students (FES).

One university student who wanted to further her studies had to drop out of school because her experience of depression and anxiety hindered her from finishing her papers, Lo said.

“Some people say there is no PTSD in Hong Kong because there is no post-trauma,” he added. “The trauma continues every day.”

Lo and others at FES believe the Bible can address the trauma that many young Hong Kongers are experiencing, especially in showing that God cares about humanity’s complicated range of emotions.

When the protests erupted in Hong Kong in 2019, Lee Chiu Mei was in college. Many of his classmates joined the protests outside his school.

“The news information was too overwhelming every day, and I had no time to process my feelings,” Lee, 24, said. Church was not an ideal space to discuss the fiery political issues and divisions sweeping the city, as he did not feel comfortable articulating his personal views there.

After observing that young people like Lee had difficulties expressing how they felt about Hong Kong’s political climate in 2019, Lo hit on the idea to creatively convey the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 as a comforting message for Gen Z believers. Along with other student leaders at FES, he created a deck of cards depicting these Bible verses to help young people share vulnerably about their emotions.

One card, for instance, depicts a heart being poured out onto clasped hands with this verse printed behind it: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:3). Another card showcases a person in tears slumped over a rock, while the other side declares, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Matt. 5:4).

While the protests were taking place, Lee met with a small group of Christian students at his school, all of whom he was meeting for the first time. He selected a card from the deck before him, gazing at the illustration on it. He described how he felt looking at the image, read the accompanying Beatitude, and imagined how Jesus would respond to his current circumstance. The other students also shared their reflections.

The cards helped Lee and his peers share their worries with each other—something they normally would not do, as they feared arrest for speaking critically of the government.

“I finally felt that I had the space to express these feelings and that I had someone to accompany me to face the trauma caused by society, to pray for each other, and to leave everything to God,” Lee said.

The second version of the cards, which features the Psalms, was published in 2023 for use in college ministry events during the pandemic and continues to be used today.

There are no illustrations on the cards, but there are words describing emotions, like “angry,” alongside verses like Psalm 35:17: “How long, Lord, will you look on?” On another card, the word shameful accompanies Psalm 40:11: “Do not withhold your mercy from me, Lord; may your love and faithfulness always protect me.”

When students don’t know which card to choose, FES’s leaders ask them to select cards they find interesting. Doing so allows them to explore more nuanced emotions under the general feeling of sadness they may be carrying, said Lo.

Instead of intellectualizing their emotions, looking at the cards and identifying words or images that speak to them offers Gen Z believers the space to express how they feel, pushing against the norm in most Hong Kong churches.

“Churches are afraid that if [people share] too much about their struggles or depressive feelings, it would discourage people not to pursue faith and not go to church,” said Barry Cheung, FES’s general secretary.

Another Christian ministry, Breakthrough Hong Kong, is encouraging Gen Z to bring conversations about depression and anxiety to the public square.

The group’s Emo Error Gym (emo is short for emotions) began as a two-day interactive display in a shopping mall in Tsuen Wan last year. A question on a large board asked people to respond to the question “What’s your emo level?” Young Hong Kongers wrote their responses on pieces of paper shaped like leaves, which were hung up on a brown cardboard tree for passersby to look at.

“I couldn’t socialize with others normally because of depression, and my friends don’t even know about it,” one person wrote. Another person wrote, “I do not like the way I am right now.”

“When other people read these notes, they know they are not alone,” said Wilson Lam, Breakthrough’s associate general secretary.

Breakthrough uses this display to connect Gen Z Hong Kongers to its ministry, which focuses on reaching youth for Christ through digital media, books, and social-support services like counseling. This March and April, the exhibit will be held at five universities in Hong Kong.

Allowing Gen Zers to acknowledge the anxiety and depression they are facing helps guide them toward a more holistic understanding of health and personhood, said Lam.

“In school and society, young people focus on doing,” which often leads to burnout and feelings of isolation, said Lam. “From a Christian perspective, the ‘being’ is more important than the ‘doing.’”

One church, meanwhile, hopes to bring these conversations inside its walls and to become a safer space for Gen Z to have conversations about depression and anxiety.

The Methodist International Church of Hong Kong is in the process of converting a floor in its church building into a center for young people. Slated to open later this year in the Wan Chai neighborhood, the space will be open to Gen Zers who want to socialize, study, and have conversations on any topics they choose.

Gen Zers “need an opportunity to talk openly in settings where there is no stigma attached to talking about one’s sadness, hurt, anger or confusion,” said Lance Lee (no relation to Lee Chiu Mei), a psychologist and pastor at the church.

Through the center, the church also aims to offer support groups, pastoral counsel, and a full range of coaching, counseling, and Christian psychotherapy services.

Doing so is part of a church’s calling and “a root to evangelism, to witness, to the expansion of the kingdom even for people who believe God or religion is irrelevant,” Lee asserted. “People need space where they can bring all of who they are and be met by a Jesus who knows me, loves me, and wants to embrace me deeper.”

For Lee, creating room for conversations around depression and anxiety within the church is not the end goal. Rather, he believes that doing this will give Gen Zers “hope, inspiration, and excitement that the God who is with us in this really has a way for us to be happy in Hong Kong five to ten years from now.”

Ip, the pastor, continues to minister to the young woman in prison. Sometimes their conversations are trivial; other times they have broached religion. “To imitate Christ, we must take up the cross and care for and love those who feel hurt or wronged,” he said.

Additional reporting by Jessie Chiang and Isabel Ong

- More from Hannah Keziah Agustin

Ideas

When Reading the Psalms, Don’t Skip the Superscriptions

Andrew Wilson

Columnist; Contributor

They’re part of the Bible’s original text, and frequently essential to understanding it.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

Some passages of Scripture get ghosted. Occasionally, you see this happen when you ask someone to read a particular chapter aloud. The words are all right there on the page. But the person reading them literally acts as if some are simply invisible.

I am not talking about the portions that we generally avoid reading aloud. There are plenty of those: long lists of names, numbers, offerings, or building projects where the words are unpronounceable, the story is obscure, and the repetition is intense (looking at you, Numbers 7). I have argued before that there is gold to be found in lists and building projects too. Instead, I am talking about something stranger: the way that many (if not most) Christians treat some of God’s inspired words as if they do not exist.

I am referring, in particular, to the superscriptions in the Psalms. I have noticed it frequently in my church: If, for example, someone is given Psalm 51 to read, the reading typically begins with the first verse—in this case, “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love.” Which means it omits what the passage says immediately beforehand: “For the director of music. A psalm of David. When the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba.” Most people hardly realize they have missed anything. If you mention it afterward, they might be puzzled, as though someone had suggested reading the contents page or the index.

No doubt much of the problem stems from the ways Bibles are formatted. Because our Bibles tend to include so many introductions, headings, subtitles, chapters, and verse numbers (let alone cross-references and study notes), additions to the text of Scripture often account for more words than the text itself. It is hardly surprising that people assume original titles like “To the choirmaster” and “Of David” belong in the same category as editorial insertions like “The Call of Abram” or “The Birth of Jesus.” But they don’t. They are part of the Hebrew text, and frequently essential to understanding it.

Psalm 51 is a good example. This beautiful prayer of repentance reads completely differently when we know what David has done to earn Nathan’s rebuke and how his sin has been exposed. Plenty of psalms start similarly, by providing a narrative location for the song that follows. Knowing that a poem is “a Psalm of David. When he fled from his son Absalom” (3:1) adds spiritual and emotional heft to the words “But you, Lord, are a shield around me, my glory, the One who lifts my head high” (3:3)—not least because Absalom has lifted his own head, and indeed will meet his doom as his head is lifted in a tree (2 Sam. 18:9).

In the first verse of Psalm 57, David states, “I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings until the disaster has passed.” His prayer makes new layers of sense when we know it comes from inside a cave while Saul is trying to kill him. Even the simple phrase “in God I trust” (56:4) sounds very different on the lips of a political prisoner—according to the psalm’s superscription, David composed it as a Philistine captive—than it does on a dollar bill.

Some psalms, like these, begin with comparatively long and detailed superscriptions. But the short and subtle ones can be equally revealing. Many believers know the lines “Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain” (127:1), and we freely apply them to our commercial or charitable initiatives. The resonances are quite different, however, when we start as the psalm does: “A song of ascents. Of Solomon.” The application quickly changes when the author is Solomon and the “house” is the temple. The “labor” becomes less metaphorical when we realize they took seven years and prepared God’s dwelling for centuries.

A few songs later comes an even more familiar line: “How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity!” (133:1). Again, though, look what happens when you read the superscription first: “A song of ascents. Of David.” Except, perhaps, for Cain and Abel, no brothers in Scripture dwelt in unity less than David’s sons. Amnon raped his sister; Absalom killed his brother and arranged a coup to overthrow his father; Adonijah attempted a coup as well, before being killed on the orders of his brother Solomon (who then killed numerous other people). Suddenly the opening line of the psalm sounds less like a platitude—a comforting reflection at the start of a prayer meeting, say—and more like the desperate longing of a father who has seen endless conflict among his own children. In the Psalms, as in all Scripture, knowing the “who” and “why” can alter the “what.”

So if anyone asks you to read a psalm, start with the superscription. You will be glad you did.

Andrew Wilson is teaching pastor at King’s Church London and author of Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West.

Spirited Life: Spirited Life is a collision between biblical reflection and charismatic practice, aiming to make people happier in God.

- More from Andrew Wilson

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