2021 Favorites
Dear readers,
Happy New Year!
Thanks again for subscribing to this free newsletter about art’s relationship to the growth of empathy. I will be sending you a newsletter every other Tuesday morning—so look out for it then!
This week, I can’t resist joining just about everyone else in sharing a list of some of my favorites from 2021. This list is based on works of art that I first encountered in 2021.
Stick with me to the end of this newsletter to find a very special treat from Dr. Joe Kickasola, Baylor University professor of film and my future co-host of The Empathetic Imagination podcast!
Books:
Every spring, I ask several large classes of students to read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Although I never read the novel in high school or even college, I LOVE teaching it. It is so chock full of perceptive theological questions that I have often joked with my classes that I would love to write a Christian devotional book relating the novel’s insights to scripture. Frankenstein asks us to consider how much and what kind of knowledge is dangerous. Along with this, the horror at the heart of the novel is not the stuff of B-movie horror films made to shock and titillate viewers. Instead, it is theological horror, the horror of a human being recognizing his own tragic hubris when trying to discern and master the knowledge that only belongs to God.
Two more recent novels that brought up many of the same questions that captivated my heart, mind, and imagination like Shelley’s classic are Oryx and Crake (2003) by Margaret Atwood and Transcendent Kingdom (2020) by Yaa Gyasi. Atwood’s dystopian science fiction novel is a testament for the importance of engaging the humanities. It is bleak and bizarre, again echoing the tone of Shelley’s masterpiece (which is often considered the first work of science fiction). Like dystopian fiction, science fiction tends to place human beings in desperate situations that force them into asking the most crucial theological and philosophical questions. In Oryx and Crake, the narrator, Snowman, is one of the last surviving human beings and traversing a bleak, post-capitalist wasteland searching for companions. His former friend and perverse mentor, Crake, is largely responsible for the current state of the world, the devastating result of a mind largely driven by data and progress rather than goodness, beauty, and truth.
Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom is set, not in the future, but in contemporary academia. Although not a science fiction or dystopian story, the novel raises the very questions that often lead to these speculative scenarios in fiction. Gifty is the daughter of Ghanian immigrants, all survivors of intense, harrowing family tragedy. Although growing up in a fundamentalist church in the Bible Belt, Gifty has abandoned her faith and replaced it with science, neuroscience to be exact. As a grad student at Stanford University, Gifty begins to doubt her doubt in her childhood faith. Science is comforting in its exactness, but it cannot answer the spiritual, human questions at the heart of her family tragedy.
Although I read mostly fiction, I also want to mention the best nonfiction book I have read the past year, Reading While Black by Esau McCaulley. I learned so much from this book that I assigned it for my African American Literature & Culture class and structured my syllabus around it! McCaulley asks us to step back and think about the ways we read, talk about, and interpret scripture while also considering how our reading is influenced by our culture. He argues that all biblical exegesis is contextualized by culture and life experience, and that the African American experience of reading and interpreting scripture is largely ignored and/or misunderstood in American seminaries and white evangelical churches. Reading While Black seems to be written mostly for Black readers, but I recommend that white Christians read it in order to come face to face with our biases and the gaps in our theological education. McCaulley tackles difficult topics such as police brutality, slavery in the Bible, and much more. One of the sections that has most stuck with me is the author’s observation that white evangelical churches primarily begin and often focus mostly on the NT epistles while the Black churches historically start with and continually focuses on the Exodus, seeing God as a liberator. These very different starting points reflect a great deal about the place from which we read scripture.
Television
One of my favorite television discoveries of 2021 was the awkward, heartwarming, and deliciously cozy British comedy series Mum. After a few episodes, I almost gave up because of the pain of embarrassment I felt while watching the interactions between the characters. This sitcom focuses on Cathy, a recently widowed “mum” who lives with her adult son, Jason, and his innocently, endearingly, and laughably rude girlfriend, Kelly. Although a comedy, the series is also a perceptive, touching portrayal of the painful mystery of grief. I think that the Brits combine cringeworthy comedy with pathos perhaps better than anyone, as evidenced here. Cathy and her family grew on me in very unexpected ways. Although brilliantly comic, the characters are not caricatures; they are fully human.
More than complex plot or clever dialogue, what usually draws me most into any work of art, television included, is the fully portrayed humanity of a character. This is a large focus of my forthcoming book, Imagining Our Neighbors as Ourselves: How Art Shapes Empathy.
The following paragraphs looking at two other 2021 favorites, Better Call Saul and The Chosen, are excerpts from my forthcoming book:
In Breaking Bad, Saul is known for his garish suits, equally garish commercials, and purely pragmatic approach to making as much money as possible. The show’s central characters, high school chemistry teacher/ meth cook Walter White and his former student/current dealer sidekick, Jesse Pinkman, reach out to Goodman when they need a lawyer that knows their business and intentions. At one point, Jesse explains to his (then) naïve former teacher: “You don’t need a criminal lawyer; you need a CRIMINAL lawyer.”[i] And Saul Goodman is that man, his last name as ironic as we expect it to be. Saul is a shell of a man, as slimy and self-interested as they come. He seems irredeemable.
Even the actor playing Saul Goodman, Bob Odenkirk, was hesitant when he heard the series proposal because, “I don’t like Saul.” But watching Better Call Saul, the prequel to Breaking Bad, is both convicting and sad, not two responses that one expects when watching the life story of such a reprehensible character. The show reminds viewers, once again, of the complexity of the human condition and the tragic plight of all human beings when they ignore the imago Dei in themselves and others. We learn early on that Saul Goodman is not the main character’s real name (surprise, surprise). The series’ sadsack anti-hero is a man named James McGill, “Jimmy.” He has been a fast-talking conman/ scam artist most of his life, so much so that he picked up the nickname “Slippin’ Jimmy.” Jimmy/Saul’s glory and wretchedness are often concurrently on display, battling it out for claim to his identity.
The last episode in Season 1 of the crowd funded series The Chosen is also about the loss and reclamation of identity. In this episode, we see Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well, a very unexpected–and culturally frowned upon–sort of encounter.
By telling her the story of her life, Jesus shows that he both knows and loves her, regardless of what she has done. Her story is sacred when he gives words to it because he is the source of all stories. At this moment, her countenance brightens; she believes that Jesus is the promised Messiah when he says,” I, the one speaking to you—I am he”.
As she rejoices, Jesus’ eyes fill with tears as he feels the joy that she is feeling. In a conversation between The Chosen show creator, Dallas Jenkins, and Jonathan Roumie, the actor who plays Jesus, the two talked about this unscripted moment. Roumie teared up each time they filmed the scene because “She opened herself up to the infinite, eternal love” within Christ and “to be filled with this spirit of joy is infectious.” He also saw a picture of all humanity in her figure: “The Messiah has converted her heart and taken away all this pain…transforming the circumstances of her life—what God wants for all of us.” Roumie believes that Christ himself would have cried in that moment, tears of deep empathetic love for a woman whose pain has turned to gladness.
**Side note: I know that many are skeptical of watching a series about Jesus because SO MUCH shallow, manipulative contemporary “Christian” art has been made. This series does not fit the description. It emphasizes the glorious humanity of Christ unlike anything else I have seen. It will move you. Watch it!
Films:
Rather than write about the best films I watched this year (Minari would take the #1 spot), I want to give this space over to Dr. Joe Kickasola. The interview that he conducted with director, Fran Kranz, and star, Ann Dowd, of the 2021 film Mass deeply moved me, even though I had not even seen the film before watching. I strongly encourage you to watch this short interview whether you have seen the film or not. You can find it HERE. Joe and I will be talking about Mass on our forthcoming podcast, so stay tuned!
Thank you for reading! Please feel free to comment and let me know your favorite “new” works of art from the past year.
Mary