Reality, but also hope

My summer travels continue: last weekend I was in northern Wisconsin for a family wedding. The ceremony was wonderfully quirky, including both a “Christmas in July” component and nods to both football and pro wrestling. I was assigned the audio detail, so I enjoyed this fun celebration while frantically pressing play and controlling the volume, one eye on the festivities and one on a highlighted script. 

A wedding—and the decision to get married that it celebrates—strikes me as both somber and joyous, grounded in (at times very difficult) reality yet soaring on wings of aspiration. Our journey of faith can be similar, and this mixture of realism and imagination is present in some of the Century’s recent articles. Or perhaps I should say ultrarealism, a term from distance running that Martha Tatarnic applies to the church. Brian Bantum reckons with his own consumerism in light of creation’s groaning in Romans 8. Kathryn Reklis writes about Asteroid City and the way Wes Anderson’s films use unrealistic aesthetics to create very real feelings.

No new video this week due to summer travels, but here is one of my favorites, a reading of a poem from Josh Dugat about the risk of taking flight.

Email me: What is one of your most memorable celebrations?

Jon Mathieu
[email protected]

Getting ultrareal about the church

“It is so easy in our Christian leadership to become consumed with questions of assuring the church’s survival, but the critical question is, ‘Why bother with any of this at all?’”

All in with Wes Anderson

“His visual style is so recognizable that the phrase ‘like a Wes Anderson movie’ can be used to describe memes, clothing choices, buildings, interior design, or even accidental moments of life when the precise, idiosyncratic, unique, or precious coalesce.”

Living by kinship, not consumption

“In our day we may not have a Caesar, but we do live in a world where the things we consume are oftentimes a means to escape, to feel, to numb, to claim some semblance of agency, to assert control or signal prestige.”

by Brian Bantum

In the Lectionary for July 30 (Ordinary 17A)

The kingdom of heaven inspires devotion, commitment, and downright unreasonableness.

A preventable oil spill in Kansas

“Instead of making any repairs, TC Energy reburied the pipeline and had inspectors retrofit their tools to work around the warping.”

by the editors

Luke Powery preaches through and beyond racism

“If you are a White pastor who wants to catch up on the current discussion about the racialized church and the way our pulpit rhetoric has been influenced by White supremacy, Becoming Human offers an accessible, efficient way to do that.”

review by Will Willimon