Page 869 – Christianity Today (2024)

Terence Davies is a legend. In his four-decade career, Davies—who was raised in Liverpool in a devout working-class Roman Catholic family, the youngest of ten—has created a body of work like no one else, one that examines memory, family, and place through often startling beauty.

Davies abandoned religion as a teenager, and often grapples with his complicated relationship to the church, tragedy, and sexuality in his movies; he is outright critical of religion.

But his films (including Of Time and the City, The Long Day Closes, and Distant Voices, Still Lives) exude a spiritual sensibility and palpable longing that’s nearly unmatched in contemporary cinema. His camera’s careful attention to small things, like the light streaming through a window or a flickering candle, imbues everyday life with something like holiness.

There’s often large gaps between Davies’s films, due to funding. But this year, he has two out at once. Sunset Song, out in theaters this weekend, is an adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel about a young Scottish woman, Chris Guthrie. Chris’s life is marked by both great tragedy and beauty, and critics (including this one) are hailing it as a masterpiece. A Quiet Passion, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year and is still awaiting a U.S. release date, traces the life of Emily Dickinson and her struggles with her faith and her art. (Read our report from the film’s premiere.)

Davies, who speaks warmly and almost musically, spoke with me for forty-five minutes about truth-telling in cinema, shooting light and potatoes, religion, spirituality, and the rich inner life of Emily Dickinson. (He also quoted poetry.) What follows was edited for length and clarity.

Christianity Today: In both Sunset Song and A Quiet Passion, the female protagonists have overtly authoritarian, almost sad*stic religious figures hovering over them at the beginning—the father on the one hand in the schoolmarm on the other. Did that similarity strike you at all when you started making the films?

Terence Davies: No. I think I was unconscious. Influences that are unconscious are much more interesting . . . I really did identify with [Dickinson] and I longed for her to be happy. She's yearning for something that will never come. It's heartbreaking, that. She admits, she says, "I've become embittered." That's what happened. What do you do when you actually become the very thing that you dread? Really, when push comes to shove, she's not turned bitter, really.

There's something greater at work there. She's embittered for that moment, but there's something much stronger, and much more spiritual, and much more admirable about her. She cares for other people. She does care about the truth and that.

Did you see that same sensibility in Chris Guthrie as well?

Yes. She's only 14 when [Sunset Song] begins and she's only 21 when it ends. The joy of just being alive, and her friend saying, "Only fools love being alive," which is an extraordinary thing to say. The love of being in the moment, of every moment seeming like a kind of extra thing. Of course, that doesn't exactly doesn't last. It eventually is killed by life. Hopefully you can retain something of that ecstasy as you get older and older. I love the quiet love between her and her brother. It's so quiet. It's so touching. I love that. I just love that.

You often shoot the interiors of houses, staircases, light, simple furnishings, plates of food. What’s so interesting about this to you?

I'm obsessed with staircases and people standing at windows. Obviously there something wrong with me. I do love to see a subject standing at a window with light falling on them. I just find it ravishing. I could look at it forever.

. . . Even if you're in a working class environment, there's no reason why that environment shouldn't look beautiful for its own sake. I don't mean just pretty pictures. That, I don't like. . . . Something on the wall, or bread on the side of a table, it's just edible. I love that.

T

his real close attention to the stuff of the place is so important to your work. Is there something behind that for you?

I don't know what is. I can't really explain it. I just know when it's right. I don't know why. There's one shot in Sunset Song, where she pushes a plate of potatoes. . . . They're so simple. But that's what it should be. It's about texture. If the texture's right, you actually feel something ineffable, and it's unconscious.

The film I always quote is a wonderful film made in the the late 40s called It Always Rains on Sunday, set in the east end of London just after the war. The wallpaper in the hall, it is suffocating. Big flowers. You can't breathe, but my God, what it gives you! Subconsciously you actually look at it, you may not be aware of it, but you look at it. Lots of little things that . . . A tin bath on the wall, a pane that's missing and there's some black on . . . those things make it alive, it's got to be alive.

Jane Kenyon wrote a poem about this, called “Dutch Interiors”—it starts with thousands of years of paintings of Christ’s passion, and then shifts to quiet Dutch interior paintings, and she writes, “Now tell me that the Holy Ghost / does not reside in the play of light / on cutlery!”

Do you think a filmmaker can teach an audience how to watch a film? Or does the audience have to bring something to it?

No. You can't do that. You can't say what an audience will like, you can't say what laugh at . . . What you have to do is say, "This is what I saw," and the audience completely act by interpreting what they see. Either for good, or, "I didn't like it, I thought it was too slow, too boring." You can't get inside of them—you just have to hope that they will like it and respond to it.

You have to respond, to cinema, I think, like you respond to music. It's got to be instantaneous and you've got to believe the lie. You've got to believe that because you want to believe it. When things don't work, you think, "I don't believe the lie." As I've said before, it's best to go home, because you sit there thinking, “Another 98 minutes and they still haven't died."

If you were to characterize what it is you really want your viewer to see in a film, what is that?

[long pause] To believe that I've tried to tell the truth.

That may be a boring truth, because I am not everybody's cup of tea, I'm an acquired taste. If it's true, I think any audience responds to truth in whatever area. I just think they do. As I've said before, I made my film with my heart. All I ask is that someone watches it with theirs, and if they don't like it, then they must say it. There's no point in not saying so. That can be very, very hurtful. Very hurtful and disappointing . . .

I was brought up to believe that honesty was the best policy, until a few years ago, someone said something that jolted me: “Sometimes it's better to be kind than to be honest.” Sometimes it is. You've got to think of the other person and know, "I can't say that, I just can't." Or "I can't do that."

I am concerned still, about behaving honorably, because I was brought up to do that. Very often, even if you'd done something wrong you admitted it. When I left school in 1960, it was just a ordinary secondary school. You got a character from the headmaster, and I've still got it at home. In 1961, he said, "This boy is scrupulously honest." I was so proud. I've kept it all these years. Here, Mr. Bush is long dead and that wall is gone, but I do think that it's important to behave honorably.

So if you’re trying to temper truth with kindness, how do you approach your characters? Especially the unlikeable ones.

In a way you have to love them, and you have to try and see why they're like that. Obviously, if someone was unpleasant, that makes it just that much more difficult . . . You have to try and not judge them. It's very difficult, when someone is horrible, when a character is horrible, because you just want to strangle him, but you can't.

You just have to try and be true.

Do you think Emily Dickinson is religious in A Quiet Passion?

I don't think she's religious, I think she's spiritual . . . That's why she swings between the two extremes. Is there a God? Is there not? And what do we do if there isn't? That is so moving because I think this part her, part of me, that wants to believe, "Well yes it's all true. If you do this, this, and this, then you die and you go to God." If you imagine her, sitting on a cloud for eternity, strumming some magical tone on a harmonium . . . Give me hell then. They'll have a much better time down there, and they'll have co*cktails as well.

Chris is very spiritual as well in that sense, but her devotion is focused toward the place where she lives.

Yes.

She's in Heaven already.

She says she felt she was the land. She is suffering within, and she's about forgiveness. She represents forgiveness of all suffering. That's what's so magnificent about the ending of that book. You can't read the last two or three pages without weeping. They're heartbreaking . . . At the end, it’s about forgiving.

And Dickinson stays home. Her world seems to get smaller on purpose as her life goes on.

You don't have to go all over the world to have an exciting life. The family is the repository of all that is wonderful and terrible. Even in Greek drama, it's basically about family. That's all it's about. She could have not gone anywhere and it doesn't matter. What went on within her, now that's wonderful.

When you're trying to dig into a character whose vastness is inside, how do you bring an audience into that experience?

I don't think of it as vastness. I think of it as richness. Their lives are rich.

There's a composer, now dead, called Michael Tippett. I never liked the music, but he always said, "What you must not do, is starve your inner life." Your inner life has got to be rich.

Her inner life is abundantly rich . . . Why is it rich? Small things give pleasure. When you don't go anywhere, small things give you real pleasure. Mother coming downstairs and she thinks, "Oh she's come down, isn't that lovely?" A tiny thing like that. But it's very big in her life.

Alissa Wilkinson is Christianity Today’s critic at large and an assistant professor of English and humanities at The King’s College in New York City. She is co-author, with Robert Joustra, of How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith, and Politics at the End of the World (Eerdmans, May 2016). She tweets @alissamarie.

John Stuart Mill first coined the word dystopia in a speech to Parliament in the 1880s. But it would only come to be a unique literary genre in the 20th century—a largely pessimistic version of the future, as if Dante had written the Inferno and stopped.

Works like George Orwell’s 1984, H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange all express a profound sense of discomfort with narratives of hope—whether religious, Enlightenment, or otherwise secular. There’s good evidence that this was reflected in the films of the mid–20th century—particularly intriguing (though usually overstated) is the presence of alien-invasion narratives as Cold War anxieties increased.

And that brings us to today’s apocalyptic stories. They rarely refer to God, or gods, or shared beliefs—except as a way to tell a better story, without the weighty religious meaning they once held.

In apocalypse, the suffering and pain we encounter in this life finally gains meaning.

The promise of traditional tales of apocalypse, writes Elizabeth Rosen in Apocalyptic Transformation, “is unequivocal: God has a plan, the disruption is part of it, and in the end all will be made right. Thus is suffering made meaningful and hope restored to those who are traumatized or bewildered by historic events.” Apocalypse isn’t unmitigated catastrophe—not exactly. You could even call it optimistic.

In apocalypse, the suffering and pain we encounter in this life finally gains meaning. How many of us, in fact, yearn for apocalypse—for Revelation—to make the deep pain and difficulties of our lives meaningful and finished?

Traditional Christian liturgy even regularly calls forth apocalypse: Come, Lord Jesus, it pleads. Come quickly. Nowhere is this more marked than in funeral and burial liturgies, where faiths of all kinds taste the promise that the seemingly senseless tragedy of death is not the end. Revelation, that apocalypse, awaits.

It’s Not All Bad

But we tend to think of apocalypse not as comfort or as consummation, but as senseless brutality and punishing anger. Rosen explains,

Where the underlying message of the original narrative was optimistic, anticipating God’s intervening hand to make things right, the altered version has more in common with the jeremiad, a lamentation over the degeneracy of the world, and when God intervenes in this newer version of the story, it is not to restore order to a disordered world and reward the faithful, but rather to express a literally all-consuming, punishing anger.

She calls this the neo-apocalyptic. This sort of literature, she argues, is fundamentally pessimistic; “it functions largely as cautionary tale, positing means of extinction and predicting the gloomy probabilities of such ends. If these tales exhibit judgment, it is of the sort that assumes that no one deserves saving and that everyone should be punished.”

Like apocalypse, tales of neo-apocalypse involve the collapse of the social order, punishing human sin and error. Like apocalypse, neo-apocalypse is pessimistic about humanity’s capacity to rehabilitate itself.

But unlike apocalypse, neo-apocalypse doesn’t restrain that pessimism. There’s no Deus ex machina, no hope for the renovation of humankind: “This degeneracy is so complete that the Ending can only be so, too. There is nothing beyond this Ending, no hope of a New Heaven on Earth, precisely because there is nothing worth saving,” writes Rosen.

This strain of literature is what inspired Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, a still pivotal study in the field of literary criticism. “Deconstructors,” he says, “write no gospels.”

In a 2009 article in New York Magazine, Hugo Lindgren called neo-apocalyptic literature “pessimism p*rn,” a “soft spot for hard times.” So while apocalypse is old, this neo-apocalypse is something new and fascinating, with its twin characteristics: it is anthropocentrically pessimistic (and lacking any hope of restoration), and it is largely out of sync with our actual, as-yet-not-obliterated reality. Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, published in 1960, which imagines human history as simply a cycle of repeated self-annihilation by the discovery of atomic power, can be forgiven for forecasting nuclear holocaust because of the era in which it was published. But somehow that didn’t happen. Statistically speaking, the world is actually safer today than it has ever been before.

Neo-apocalyptic pessimism about the future is the ultimate act of deconstruction. But while it deconstructs our ways of understanding the world, it creates its own grand narrative.

Yet we’re still fixated, predicting total collapse—which may speak to the romance of disruption, as Mary Manjikian puts it in Apocalypse and Post-Politics: The Romance of the End. Seeking entertainment in the apocalypse is a luxury for wealthy, developed societies that don’t have to encounter the consequences of systemic collapse and root violence on a daily basis. Max Brooks, the author of the bestselling World War Z (which inspired a 2013 film of the same name), explores something comparable: in his story, even at the height of the zombie apocalypse, a “reality television show” airs featuring the reactions of wealthy and secure subjects witnessing their fellow citizens struggling to survive the onslaught. (And don’t forget the wealthy Capitol citizens, glued to the TV for spectacle and enjoyment during the days leading up to the Hunger Games.)

Here’s the paradoxical irony: neo-apocalyptic pessimism about the future, a consummately postmodern form, is the ultimate act of deconstruction. But while it deconstructs our ways of understanding the world, it creates its own grand narrative. Not just a grand narrative: maybe the grand narrative, one that judges everyone as miserable wretches unworthy of salvation. Rosen writes in her epilogue that “in the very act of deconstructing apocalypse, postmodern artists are being constructive.”

Grand narratives (or metanarratives) are the big stories that validate and give meaning to life events—they tell us what to care about, where we came from, where we’re headed, and why. The social theorist Jean-François Lyotard famously said that a defining feature of postmodernism is “incredulity toward metanarratives”; in other words, postmodern people tend to view with suspicion any big story that tells them what we’re doing here on earth and that makes claims upon their individual choices. And while something like Christianity is itself a metanarrative, there’s also a very real sense in which all metanarratives—political ideologies, economic systems, philosophies—take on a religious significance for those who believe in them.

In some sense, one might say that metanarratives are inherently religious: they tell us what is ultimately important in life.

All Apocalypses Are Religious (Even the Secular Ones)

So that brings up an important question: Can a “secular apocalypse” really exist? That is, if today’s neo-apocalyptic deconstruction is also a grand narrative, one that tells us that the meaning of everything is that everything is meaningless and we’re all gonna die, then—taking that broader definition of religion—isn’t this also a deeply religious (or at least contentiously metaphysical) anthropology?

Today’s “secular” apocalypse is just as religious as any ancient, medieval, or even early modern incarnation.

Of course it is. Today’s “secular” apocalypse is just as religious as any ancient, medieval, or even early modern incarnation. At this point we could straightforwardly show how religious imagery keeps getting smuggled into so-called neo-apocalyptic culture. But we not only want to show the religious character of these pathologies of our neo-apocalyptic worlds; we also want to explore how they crop up in our particularly “secular age”—and to show why, as the theologian and ethicist Oliver O’Donovan has so expressively put it, our modern moral order cannot survive such “metaphysical scalping.”

In our book How to Survive the Apocalypse, we break with Rosen and others: what they call neo-apocalypse, we call dystopia, or dystopian apocalypse. That’s because we’re exploring not only actual apocalyptic worlds (like Battlestar Galactica) but also postapocalyptic ones (like The Hunger Games), and even dystopian dramas that lack actual material catastrophe (Her or Breaking Bad), but follow the contours of their cousins.

So some of the artifacts of popular culture we explore as apocalyptic or dystopian aren’t about the “end of the world,” exactly. They’re more about the end of our world. They’re stories that have the distinct sense embedded in them that this social order can’t last—that we are, in fact, near the end of something. What holds them together is that they manifest in some way the pathological forms of the “malaise of modernity,” which is the cultural catalyst, at root, of Alasdair MacIntyre’s famously dour ethical prognostication from After Virtue.

Sometimes it looks like things blowing up—a material apocalypse. Sometimes it is an impending political ruin or seismic cultural shift (like House of Cards or Mad Men). Sometimes it is an emotional and existential collapse. But taken together, we get a frightening picture of what we, as a culture, think looms on the horizon: a destruction of our own making, with no hope for renewal.

But it need not be so. And interestingly enough, our pop culture helps show us why.

Excerpt adapted from How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith, and Politics at the End of the World, by Robert Joustra and Alissa Wilkinson (Wm. B. Eerdmans, May 9). Reprinted by permission of the publisher; all rights reserved.

Banana Republic Images / Shutterstock

In December we shut the doorsquickly behind us one by one and gatheraround words of life spoken againstthe cold and dark outsidethe frosted windows, against the coldand dark within, while candles burnsteady as a constellation. But now,

The doors and windows are thrownopen to blinding June sunlight; a motorcycle slowlyrips the street from end to end, cuts throughthe dull hum of the electric window fansas we mumble the liturgy. Once a sparrowflew in through the door and drew slow, flutteringcircles over our heads as we worshipped. We justkept at it; what else could we do?

And this breeze that breaches the windowsis no friend to fire, flutters the flames right, then left,carving crazy wax sculptures as we stare.It’s the world got in, tossing banners and draperies,an unseen hoard of bearded invadersfingering our stuff, not finding much to value,

While those in the back pews with picnic plansplot their escape should it all drag on too long.And if the sermon just stopped—“Okay now, enough of that today”—who could be shocked, while this warm windblows the lazy summer through our Sabbath?

And hasn’t this same breeze blownthrough my own days, made me a little sorryfor my sins, want to love my family, learnto barbeque, sit on the back porch and plan a holidaywhile bees wander through the lillies? Is thisthe apostles’ mighty wind, blown steady and mildover the millennia, like a remnant of a Florida hurricanenow watering grassy lawns across Ohio?

Or do I live for the moment (as I hope) at the gentleedges of a storm that somewhere even this moment is stillraging, purging, renewingthe face of the earth?

Late last month, Slate published an article by Jennifer Miller investigating Mercy Multiplied, a Christian recovery ministry accused of hurting some of the young women it sought to help. Tracing the stories of more than a dozen former residents, Miller depicted a program that preached one thing but practiced another.

In an email to CT, Mercy Multiplied, which operates facilities in Tennessee, California, Missouri, and Louisiana, said that “Counselors are not required to be licensed in the locations where we have homes. However, Mercy is not opposed to licensure and over the years counselors have been licensed or have pursued licensure while working for us.” In their Louisiana home, counselors are licensed by the state, and all counselors are required to posses “advanced spiritual maturity and working knowledge of the Bible.” According to Mercy, counselors do not practice medicine, or even therapy, but instead follow a set format meant to aid the young women in the program in their recovery.

The claims in the Slate article underscore the various definitions of “Christian counseling,” even among Christians: Does the term include practices like exorcism and healing prayer? Is it primarily medical treatment in a faith-friendly setting? Since a growing number of ministries are taking mental health more seriously, there are more medically sound options for Christians in need of treatment. Still, patients may not know what to expect from a given program.

Mercy Multiplied reportedly crossed boundaries by accepting mentally ill clients when they weren’t licensed to do so. Miller wrote that

…Mercy staff’s lack of formal clinical training puts mentally ill or traumatized clients at greater psychological risk, even pushing them deeper into depression and addiction. Some say that under the guidance of their counselors, several Mercy residents falsely accused their families of horrific abuse.

These women—who suffered depression, addiction, self-harm, eating disorders, and abuse—said there was pressure to act and look healed when they weren’t fully recovered.

Upon request, Mercy Multiplied spokeswoman Christy Singleton told CT that the organization tries to be as upfront as possible about the nature of their program, and that their intake process requires a physician to sign off that residents are “medically stable” (which means they are not undergoing detox, suicidal ideation, or other conditions that require more attentive care). Singleton also said residents who aren’t happy with the program are free to leave at any time; around a quarter choose to do so. According to Mercy’s website, over 3,000 women have come through their programs since 1983.

She stated that Mercy never used controversial practices like reparative therapy or recovered memory therapy, in which patients are led through exercises to help them recall suppressed memories. “We don’t brainwash; we don’t coerce,” she said, though some Mercy patients may have experienced that at other programs. “There’s definitely a crazy branch of the Christian tree, and the rest of us have to answer because of the crazy branch.”

In an interview with Laura Turner, Miller, a journalist and professor at Columbia University, talks about what she saw when she visited a Mercy house, why these women came forward to talk with her, and how people can responsibly tell a story with “compassion for the human beings at the core.”

You have been working on this piece for three years. How did you get started?

The impetus for this piece actually came to me from a young woman named Lisa Kerr, who had a blog called “My Cult Life” detailing her experience with a harmful discipleship program. She reached out to me one day and said, “I’ve been contacted by some women who found my blog and they are all from this program called Mercy Ministries.” [It is now called Mercy Multiplied.] The women had found Kerr’s blog and reached out to her because her experience resonated with them. So I reached out to them, and one door kind of led to the next, and then I started wending my way into this world.

You point out in the story that Mercy founder Nancy Alcorn would sometimes preach things that Mercy didn’t officially believe—for instance, she talked to a group of Christians about demons and exorcism, but Mercy said they don’t practice exorcisms. What’s the difference between Alcorn’s statements and Mercy’s practices?

Christy Singleton had specifically said to me, “We do not believe that there are real demons. We believe that when we talk about demonic oppression we’re talking about the lies that women tell themselves.” She was very straightforward about saying that. Then I looked into some of the things that Nancy has said, such as in the video we posted with the story. [The video shows Alcorn saying that Mercy “deals with areas of demonic oppression… secular psychiatrists want to medicate things like that, but Jesus did not say to medicate a demon.”] That corroborates what a number of the women who I spoke with told me about the way in which the demonic is treated at Mercy.

There’s an interesting discrepancy or irony here, because on the one hand the Mercy program is extremely formulaic. There’s the seven-step program, and all women are going through this program basically no matter why they arrived at Mercy. But on the other hand, Christy told me some things girls said happened absolutely don’t happen—that women always get their medication when they ask for it, and they don’t believe in the demonic literally, and you would never mandate the laying of hands on someone, a woman would never be threatened with expulsion if she didn’t go along with these things. All of this made me wonder, what kind of oversight is actually happening?

Mercy seems to occupy a hole in the US mental health system. It makes me think of other organizations that have done and continue to do reparation therapy around hom*osexuality, that they operate in a similar space where they’re not regulated. They’re not taking federal or state funding, but they can do vast amounts of harm, even though there are plenty of people who say they’ve done good.

Reparation therapy is happening at Mercy. I know that that’s not what they put out there, but I talked to a young woman who was at their home in Louisiana who went to Mercy because she was suffering from depression. In their application materials, they ask about your sexual orientation, and she’s gay. She wrote that down. She was honest about it, and then she said that when she got there her counselors told her that the reason that she was depressed was because she was a lesbian. Opening herself up to that sexual orientation, they said, she had allowed sin to come into her life, and so she wasn’t going to be healed unless she became straight. They’re also very strict when women are seen as becoming too friendly with each other. They actively separate them and try to keep them apart.

In terms of the regulatory piece of this, part of what’s strange is that it seems like Mercy has gone out of their way to get licensed in some instances but not in others. So initially when I started reporting the story, their website said that they were licensed in all of the states where they operate. I started looking around and I could not find any record of them being licensed in either Louisiana or Missouri.

They’re licensed by Social Services in California. There is a whole class of homes that are called adult residential facilities. Every state has a different name for them. Essentially, these are homes for people who have some degree of disability such that they cannot fully care for themselves. But the homes are not medical facilities, so they cannot take people who are severely ill, either physically or mentally.

The way Mercy presents itself and the language it’s using to talk about the type of counseling it offers is not accurate. In fact, given the way that it’s talking about itself you would expect it to be licensed by the state Department of Mental Health or the state Department of Health, not the Department of Social Services. This causes a lot of confusion, and I think Christy said to me when I met with her, “The only counseling that we’re doing is Christian counseling, and everyone is well aware of that.” Except for everyone is not well aware of that.

Christian organizations like Mercy exist in this unregulated liminal space where they are acting as the go-between from church to governmental or medical intervention. So they’re not a church weekly support group meeting, and they’re not a mental health institution that’s licensed by the state Department of Health.

“Christian counseling” does not have one specific definition. It can mean anything from biblically based intervention all the way to the practice of weaving in a Christian-based spiritual component to secular mental health counseling. What Mercy’s doing is one form of many forms of “Christian counseling.” Mercy does not require its counselors to be licensed in the state where they operate. So if a counselor does something that you’re not okay with, you have no recourse against that person. You can’t appeal to a licensing board.

Women, especially in Christian communities, can hear over and over again that their role is to be led by someone in their life. Do you think Christian women were particularly vulnerable to the kinds of abuses you chronicled at Mercy more than they would be if they were a secular man? Are their choices really their own?

For a lot of the women who come into the program, [this structure] actually might be familiar to them, in a certain sense. What’s interesting about it is that the program seems to emphasize autonomy by talking about how important choices are; that choices bring change. Part of what makes it really tough for the women who kept stalling at the various steps is you have to make the choice to move ahead in your healing. And so if you are not making that choice, it’s basically on you. You are falling short. So on the one hand, it’s seemingly putting a lot of autonomy in the hands of the patient, because it’s their own choice.

But on the other hand, you’re constrained because there’s only one choice to make. According to the Mercy model, you either make it or you don’t, and if you don’t, essentially you have decided to fail. I think that in our culture there’s a lot evidence women have trouble speaking up. I know that part of the trouble that some of my sources ran into was when they did try to speak out against [Mercy], the counselor was always completely opposed to that. I think it’s quite possible that cultural element from within the facets of Christianity that women find themselves kind of trapped in that space.

Speaking of the language of choice, I remember the fifth step in the seven-step process the girls went through was, “You choose to forgive your abuser.” That was so interesting to me because if it’s a seven-step process and you don’t do step five then you can’t make it to the end. But choosing to forgive someone is a highly personal thing that can take a lot of time.

Yeah. I think that is exactly right. There are definitely some women who leave the program early because they get stuck at one of the steps. But it seems like more often than not there’s so much pressure on them to move through the program in a timely manner. And there is a lot of outright manipulation. When you apply to Mercy you’re put on a waiting list, and it can take many months for a bed to open. So many women, once they get into the home, are constantly reminded by staff that there are all these women on the waiting list who would give anything to be in their position right now. According to some of my sources, the staff would even go so far as to say things such as, “Women could die while they’re on the waiting list. You need to appreciate where you are and what you’re doing, and you need to work really hard to make this work for you.” That kind of manipulation is really abusive.

As a journalist and a person who’s written extensively about faith, how do you responsibly cover a story like this that’s so complicated?

These women are the reason that I wanted to tell this story. That said, they are not the only ones who have been involved in this program. This stuff is really, really complicated, and for some women, a program like this can be really helpful. For instance, Mercy has everybody do a series of exercises in which they say things like, “Jen is good in Christ. Jen is pure in Christ.” I ran that by the psychologist I interviewed from Harvard, and he said that is a Christian-oriented form of behavioral therapy that you might see amended in a secular context.

At the same time, it’s important to be really unapologetic about discussing the transgressions that happen when a program is overreaching. That’s really what this is about—Mercy is really overreaching in terms of what they claim to be able to do. And I think that they know, and this is part of the problem, that that’s very attractive to a lot of women who have no other outlet.

I think as a journalist with any type of story of this kind of complexity and seriousness, you’ve got to tell both sides while showing compassion for the human beings at the core.

Flickr / Roger Mommaerts

“The Liturgical Year in Cinema” is an ongoing series, a personal exploration of the thematic connections between the Christian calendar and films. Sunday, May 15, is the celebration of Pentecost, the commemoration of the coming of the Holy Spirit and the beginning of the Christian church.

“Utterly amazed, they asked: ‘Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language? Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!’ Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, ‘What does this mean?’” (Acts 2:7-12)

By my count, at least 17 different people groups were present for Pentecost, the miraculous birth of the church as the Holy Spirit showed up in wind and fire. Like a reverse Tower of Babel phenomenon, the racial and linguistic barriers were broken down and cultural rifts restored.

No one reading this article witnessed Pentecost—a day where strangers with little in common than their current location are suddenly connected by something beyond them. Indeed, as a layperson, the idea is often difficult for me to grasp. But from a film critic’s perspective, I’ve seen this spirit of Pentecost infused in recent acclaimed films. “Hyperlink cinema,” as coined by film critic Alissa Quart in 2005, features a multiplicity of characters through various narrative threads all coming together into an intertwined on-screen tapestry. The stories may initially appear separate or disjointed, but as the film progresses we begin to see the interconnected nature of the characters, united by some unseen force or shared event. Robert Altman could be considered the precursor to these films with Nashville or Short Cuts, followed by Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction), Rodrigo Garcia (Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her, Nine Lives), Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia), and Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel).

Hyperlink cinema offers a unique filmic Pentecost in its narrative structure—these movies hint at an invisible interconnected reality made possible by the presence of the Spirit. At the moment of Pentecost as recorded in the book of Acts, a huge crowd of Jews from all over the empire hear Peter preach the good news of Jesus, and the church is birthed. Suddenly, complete strangers and former enemies are drawn together as a united front, a miraculous movement transformed by the presence of the Spirit. Hyperlink films also suggest such a connection—we are closer to one another than we may imagine. All it takes is a life-transforming encounter, and everything could change.

More than 25 characters’ lives intersect in Paul Haggis’ Oscar-winning film Crash, a film which has gained notoriety over the past decade as arguably the worst Best Picture Winner. (Detractors point to its erroneous conclusions about racism or its lack of character development; personally, I find myself partial to Michael Peña’s father/daughter scenes.)

Putting aside my personal sympathies for Crash, the movie’s depiction of police officers and their relationship (or lack thereof) with the community speaks to issues which persist today. We continue to live with ongoing tensions between law enforcement and the black community, implicit racial assumptions, and the resulting violence from racial bias. In one controversial storyline, Matt Dillon portrays a racist Los Angeles police officer who gropes Thandie Newton’s character at a “traffic stop.” When he later finds himself pulling Newton out of her wrecked vehicle, he places his hands around her waist again, this time to pull her out of her burning car.

While Newton, Dillon, and the rest of Crash’s characters may not be fully fleshed out, we recognize them as constructs of real-life stories about racial divide. While Crash lacks nuance in its attempted evisceration of systemic racism, I admire the film’s brazen attempts at offering a modern-day glimpse into a post-Babel world, where language and racial barriers continue to keep us at a distance.

Iñárritu’s Birdman is another Best Picture-winning hyperlink film, where its weaving camera captures the characters’ personal struggles as they come together for Riggan Thompson’s theatrical comeback attempt. Every character in Birdman is attempting to gain recognition, to be seen and heard and valued in the hyper-competitive theater and art world. For all its emoting, pontificating, and formal conceits, it’s difficult to discern Birdman’s message. But like Crash, Birdman’s message lies in the form’s reflection of something deeper and intuitive: the invisible connectedness we feel in our globalized, tech-saturated world. These films serve as an obscured reflection of a spiritual connection and significance we each long for.

In both films, the camera hovers like the spirit over the waters, at times framing the scene from above in an overhead shot, a God-like point of view. The structure of hyperlink films offers us a perspective of the divine—we are made privy to the unseen connections that bind us, the grand metanarrative God is authoring in history. The Spirit feels present in these films as disparate and disjointed character arcs suddenly come together.

Although the films’ characters’ awareness of the Spirit is debatable and neither film seems overtly interested in religion or spirituality, both are ambitious attempts to communicate what the filmmakers believe are Really Important Things. They are ventures at restoring what was lost in Babel (the Genesis 11 story, not the Iñárritu film) without the need for bringing the spiritual or supernatural into the picture.

Ironically, in their exploration of connection, the films also acknowledge that something has been lost. They understand that despite our globalized society, the disconnections and barriers feel more present and suggest that through technology, media, and urbanization, we are paradoxically more connected and disconnected than ever before. “In L.A., nobody touches you,” Don Cheadle’s character muses in Crash. “We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.” He’s referring to the metal and glass of cars and skyscrapers; we could add laptops and iPhone screens.

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy, released from 1993–1994, may be one of the strongest filmic examples of the Pentecost spirit in the interwoven narratives of three films. While the films may not fall into the strictest definitions of hyperlink cinema, I believe their thematic connections of liberty, equality, and fraternity—the meaning behind the blue, white, and red of the French flag, respectively—serve as an invisible presence linking the films together. Blue centers on a woman grieving the loss of her husband, a composer who left his work unfinished. White is a dark comedy about a failed marriage and the husband’s elaborate journey towards retribution. Red tells the story about a young woman befriending a curmudgeonly judge, and her neighbor, a young man on his way to becoming a judge himself. “All three films are about people who have some sort of intuition or sensibility, who have gut feelings,” writes their Polish director Kieślowski, in Kieślowski on Kieślowski. “Very often everything that’s most important takes place behind the scenes, you don’t see it.… Either you feel it, or you don’t.”

Each film in Three Colors could stand as a separate stories—characters from one film only briefly share scenes in the other films—but collectively, the films become more alive through their interconnection. The protagonist in each film views a wizened woman struggling to push a bottle into a recycle container, a momentary pause in each narrative for reflection and awareness of surroundings. Only in the final moments of Three Colors: Red are we made privy to the connection between these three films as their worlds collide in a moment of swift transformation. I won’t spoil this moment, only to say that there is a before and after of the trilogy through the finale of Red, where all previous narratives are given new meaning and consequence.

If you are reading this article, and you are a person who has responded to the gospel of Jesus in faith, then you and I, dear reader, are closer than you might think. We are in our own hyperlink story. We are connected through the Holy Spirit, brought into a mystical union we call the Body of Christ. There is no “Six Degrees of Separation” in the kingdom of God—there’s only one degree, the link of Christ between us. One body. One Spirit. One God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all (Ephesians 4:5–6). And some day, perhaps at the end of time and the beginning of eternity, we may be able to see the Author of this hyperlink narrative face-to-face, and all of the connections and moments, the intertwining characters and brief coincidental encounters, the shared instances and missed opportunities—all will be revealed. Until then, we continue to live on this side of Pentecost, doing our best to walk in step with the Spirit, growing in awareness of the connections that bind us into one story.

Joel Mayward is a pastor, writer, youth worker, and film critic living in Portland, Oregon. He is author of three books, including Jesus Goes to the Movies: The Youth Ministry Film Guide. You can find Joel’s writings on film and spirituality at Cinemayward.com. Follow Joel on Twitter.

Editor's Note: This is the second installment of Michael R. Stevens' annual baseball extravaganza. Part 1, posted on Monday, reviewed three recent books that fans shouldn't miss—including an account of the infamous "pine tar game" of 1983 between the Kansas City Royals and the New York Yankees.

My not-so-strategic delays with this spring training/opening day review have taken us almost six weeks into the season, a fair but fragile sampling. A number of things are certainly clear by this point: the Cubs are for real, maybe even better, and that despite the loss of Kyle Schwarber's Gehrig-like presence with the ACL tear. Bryce Harper is finally living up to his hype—wait a minute, he's still one of the youngest players in the league! Chris Sale can pitch, and his stuff is nasty enough to at least provoke a glance over the shoulder at Gibson's 1.12 ERA mark. A Chi-Town series with irresistible force meeting unhittable object? Wait, not so fast, Stevens! Will the Sox outrun the Royals in the AL Central? Will Baltimore run away with the AL East, buoyed by Manny Machado's charismatic swagger? Will the Mariners keep it up out west, sustaining their surprising start? Should the Cubs and Nats already start sharpening swords for a clash in the NLCS? And why can't I care about the NL West—wait, I just got a D'Backs ballcap at a garage sale for free—is it an augury?!

How to sort out all these imponderables? I can answer that with a single number: 1983. Yes, the pine tar incident is our talisman to understand where this present season is heading, and so I have dredged up the opening-day rosters from that fabled (or not-so-fabled) season now 33 years past, to use as palimpsest for predicting.

Let's start in the NL East, where the Nationals began in torrid fashion, with Bryce Harper offering an apocalyptic week of homeruns (including pinch hit shots) to buoy up the boys, though they've staggered a bit lately. I've always liked Dusty Baker as a skipper, so the Nats should stay solid, and the one-two punch of Max Scherzer (joining the 20 Strikeouts in Nine Innings Club) and Stephen Strasburg is formidable, but their solid #3 starter, Jordan Zimmerman, is now excelling on the Tigers, and the pressure of expectations can impinge. Still, when I look back at 1983, hope springs in lively fashion from the north country, as the Nationals' antecedent, the Montreal Expos, fielded a powerful lineup of perennial stars, with Gary Carter catching, Al Oliver playing the one-bag, and an outfield of prowess: Tim Raines, Andre Dawson, and the later icon of Japanese baseball, Warren Cromartie. All but Cromartie played in the '83 All-Star game, and ace Steve Rogers pitched in it—the die is cast, the Nationals are formidable and Montreal is not forgotten (rumor has it that, along with Mexico City, the jewel of Quebec is at the top of MLB's list for expansion). The Mets are solid again this season after a surprise World Series run, with a stirring rotation that includes Matt Harvey and Noah Syndergaard, and the savage bat of Yoenis Cespesdes. Once again, '83 looms large—we already know that Gary Carter, cog of the '86 world champs, was still with the Expos, but it's also clear that Daryl Strawberry hadn't yet been called up, since the big sluggers were the quixotic Dave Kingman and the fading George Foster. Sure, Tom Seaver started on opening day, but his battery mate was Ron Hodges, who had 12 extra base hits in 110 games. As it turns out, Seaver had a respectable 3.55 ERA, and still went 9-14. Sorry to my brothers-in-law on Long Island, but the Mets fade this year by August. The Phillies of 2016 are confounding expectations so far despite being a band of relative unknowns anchored by the now veteran Ryan Howard. On the mound, Vincent Velasquez and Aaron Nota have shined—could they be the John Denny and Steve Carlton one-two punch from '83? But something's disconcerting here—together Denny and Carlton totaled 25 losses, and the opening day lineup appears a bit like the re-heated Big Red Machine, with Tony Perez, Joe Morgan, and Pete Rose all on the other side of the hill. I don't like the implications—I say the '83 effect has the Phillies stumbling in August. The Miami Marlins are hanging in there, though their sparkplug Dee Gordon is now suspended for PED's (was someone mentioning how much the game has changed?), and they didn't exist even in antecedent form pre-1995, so we need to let them go. Forgive me, beloved Don Mattingly, but what are you doing with the tropical color-scheme on your uni? The Atlanta Braves are off to a nightmarish start (they just won their second game at home in 18 tries), their current roster seems filled with players on their second or third or fourth time around (A.J. Pierzynski, Kelly Johnson, Nick Markakis)—and 1983 has an aging Chris Chambliss at first base and the bearded wonder Glenn Hubbard at second, a thin line of appeal. The great but dull MVP Dale Murphy did go .302/36/121 (what the heck, he also scored 131 runs and stole 30 bases!), but it won't be enough—this team will lose 95 games.

The NL Central did not exist in 1983, but all its teams did, and the Cubs were rising then as now. This is an example of a double whammy—Leon Durham, Ryne Sandberg, the productive bat of Bill Buckner (pre-trauma), the productive glove of Larry Bowa, Jody Davis behind the plate—wait, was this a super-productive lineup? Well, 2016 is, featuring not only Anthony Rizzo and Kris Bryant and Javier Baez but also newly acquired Ben Zobrist, not to mention role-players like Tommy La Stella (credit Joe Maddon for getting reps for everyone on the roster). Jake Arrieta has reached Bob Gibson's stratosphere: the no-hit stuff, the 6-0 record, the outlandish ERA, the supreme confidence. Despite questions about 1983 (an aging Fergie Jenkins was the opening day starter), and dark memories of 1984, the Cubs will be a factor to the very end. Meantime, the Pirates hover, hoping the Cubs will slow down.Their star Andrew McCutcheon not yet heated up, but other guys are wielding hot bats, and they have a lot of young pitching, led by Gerrit Cole and Juan Nicasio. There is much to like here (watch out for former Tiger lefty Kyle Lobstein working out of the bullpen), but a glance at the '83 Opening Day lineup sends a shiver, as this was clearly an interregnum between Willie Stargell's 'We are Family,' and the early '90's Barry Bonds-led teams. I see corner infielders Jason Thompson and Dale Berra at an underwhelming glance, and Lee Mazzilli in center doesn't change the prognosis for 2016: third place, hovering at 83 wins. Right now the Cardinals are only above .500 by a tick, but that means nothing—this team rises from the ashes on a regular basis to play in the World Series, and though the personnel changes, the ethos does not. By the way, could we have another Smokey Joe Wood or Rick Ankiel on our hands with Adam Wainwright? If his surgically repaired arm doesn't hold, the upper-deck mammoth shot he hit a couple of weeks ago indicates he could move into a power-hitter role and platoon in right. This team has other sources of pop, and with young guns like Michael Wacha complementing Wainwright, why the sluggish start? Weren't the '83 Cardinals a force to be reckoned with, defending World Champs? George Hendrick, twenty years ahead of his time in wearing his baseball pants all the way down to the shoe-top, was a force that year, going .318/18/97, with the hirsute Ken Oberkfell and the crazy-legged Willie McGee both hitting at a decent clip and scoring runs ahead of him. So where does the bad vibe come from? Aha! I note that the Opening Day first baseman was the non-pareil field general Keith Hernandez, and that the mustachioed one hit .297 with 42 extra base hits—but he was traded to the Mets mid-season, and took his mighty presence away. I think that will haunt the St. Louisians one last time this year—they'll fade in late September. The Brewers were in the AL back in '83 and had just played in their only World Series ever. Were I using the 1982 season as a measuring stick, this might all be different, but they're already more than 10 games back, and though Ryan Braun has returned to form, hitting .380 with seven HR's, and formidable first baseman Chris Carter is enjoying a power surge, there is a bit of anemia, a sagging will in Milwaukee, that will make for an arduous summer. The Cincinnati Reds have lost a considerable slugger in Todd Frazier (more on this later), and starting pitching is as tempestuous as Tim Melville's surname, but it's really the '83 lineup to blame—what was Johnny Bench doing at third base, and what hope springs from Ray Oester starting at second? Sure, Mario Soto went 17-13 with a 2.70 ERA (one shudders at the lack of run-support), but he also gave up 28 home runs. The last puffs of the Big Red Machine, causing the 2016 edition of the team to stall as well.

The NL West is wrapped in mediocrity this season (or competitive parity, perhaps?); at the moment, everyone in the division is at or below the .500 mark. The Dodgers seem the team to beat, with Clayton Kershaw off to another outlandlishly good season, complemented by Kenta Maeda. Is there a 1983 connection to boost this rotation into the post-season? Through the fog I see a connection emerging, an erstwhile but not insignificant nostalgia—the Dodgers current pitching coach, Rick Honeycutt, won the American League ERA crown in '83, junkballing his way to a 14-8 record with a 2.42 ERA (on only 56 strikeouts in 175 innings!)—that stalwart of bad Mariners and Rangers teams will now help the Dodgers compete for the NL West crown. Should we bring up Steve Sax? No, let's move on to San Francisco, where the Giants are neck-and-neck with their arch-rivals. Their rotation looks like an A-list of potentiality—the Series veteran Madison Bumgarner, Johnny Cueto, Jake Peavy, Jeff Samardzija—but they've struggled, and no wonder. The Opening Day starter in '83 was Dave Krukow—enough said. But wait, Atlee Hammaker won the NL ERA crown that year with a strong 2.25! Yet he finished 10-9, dogged by an inconsistent offense (though Jeffrey Leonard was fearsome and Darrell Evans serviceable). This year, Brandon Belt, Buster Posey, and Angel Pagan have all been cooking, but somehow Johnny LeMaster as starting shortstop in '83 gives me pause. It won't be the Giants 'every other year' World Series title this year. I want to think it could be the Rockies year, because of the outrageous fun of the Trevor Story arrival, as accidental starting shortstop, with 6 HR's in his first four games. There's a lot more to like on the mile-high team, starting with Nolan Arenado and Carlos Gonzalez, and the Rockies have a fine young arm in Tyler Chatwood. Still, with no 1983 back story to go on, I'm worried about the long-term chances. Manager Walt Weiss came a bit too late to bolster the 1983 creds—I think the Rockies fade to 90 losses. The Diamondbacks are also plagued by a lack of history—batting instructors Mark Grace and Dave Magadan don't quite reach back to 1983—but also by a lack of production from their stars thus far. Zach Greinke, nearly unhittable last year, gave up two of Trevor Story's early HR's in the desert, and has struggled since. All-Star first baseman Paul Goldschmidt is well below his usual level of performance, which is dangerous. Maybe a .500 season, but not much more, I'd say. The Padres are struggling at five games below .500, but they're fresh off a day/night doubleheader sweep of the Cubs (the first time the Cubs have lost two consecutive games this season). On the mound, Drew Pomeranz is a bright spot, and there's plenty of theoretical punch in the lineup. Can 1983 help? If it were 1984, a World Series year for the Padres, I'd have hope, but '83 was still centered around Gary Templeton's glove and bat at SS (think Ozzie Smith trade … ), and though catcher Terry Kennedy came up with a respectable .284/17/98 for the squad, and Dave Dravecky battled to 14-10, I'm not feeling a strong gravitational pull for this year's team—the will finish in the cellar.

Now, to the American League, and the additional X-factor which I must add to the mix, namely, who were the starting DH's on Opening Day of 1983, the tenth anniversary of the DH, and at this time (and maybe always) the place for aging sluggers to extend their arms and their careers? In the AL East, the Orioles are off to a strong start, clearly fueled by the vapors of their 1983 World Championship—a youthful (was he ever really young?) Cal Ripken went .318/27/102 that year, while his fellow Hall of Famer Eddie Murray went .306/33/111. Whatever Rich Dauer and Gary Roenicke contributed was gravy at that point. Mike Boddicker and Scotty McGregor finished in the top five in ERA and won 16 and 18 games, respectively. Okay, there is a strong edge from the past, but what about the 2016 Birds? Manny Machado is hitting .350 with 7 HR's and stellar defense at third, and Mark Trumbo has come over from the Angels, switched to RF, and is currently .337/8/22—and this with sluggers Adam Jones and Chris Davis not heated up yet. If Chris Tillman emerges as a bona-fide ace, this is a team to reckon with. That being said, the Red Sox are right alongside, with old guys like Dustin Pedroia and David Ortiz doing damage, and up-and-comers like Xander Bogaerts contributing as well. Former Tiger young-gun Rick Porcello has come into his own, while David Price, also late of the Tigers (and Rays and Blue Jays), has been inconsistent, suffering a couple of shellackings. The Bosox should compete with the Orioles, especially when I weigh in 1983 DH's Carl Yazstremski vs. Ken Singleton—I'll go with the Hall of Famer, and predict that the Red Sox will overtake Orioles in the last week. Last year's division champs, the Blue Jays, appear on the road to struggle, despite the powerful presence of Josh Donaldson with his MVP numbers in the middle of the order and an outfield of Jose Bautista, Kevin Pillar, and Michael Saunders, all solid offensive producers. Could the 1983 outfield of Terry Collins, Lloyd Moseby, and Jesse Barfield buoy this up? What about Dave Stieb's stalwart 17-12 campaign? Maybe. But the tipping point of Butch Johnson as the 1983 DH? Despite the formidable mustache, I don't think it's enough. Tampa wasn't around in '83, and they appear to be fading this year as well—sign of the times, another former Tigers lefty, Drew Smyly, had a 2.60 ERA after his first 5 starts but a win-loss record of 1-3. No pop. And the Yankees look worse. Even their invulnerable bullpen for 100+mph arms has been roughed up (though now Aroldis Chapman is back from his suspension), and the aging knees of A-Rod, Carlos Beltran, and Mark Texeira can be heard creaking throughout the Bronx. Starlin Castro has emerged as a top-of-the-order hitter and fleet second baseman, but darkness has begun to descend. Can 1983 help, despite the fiasco of the pine tar game and the implosion of the Steinbrenner-Martin 're-re-re-re-marriage'? Don Baylor was the opening day DH, so that's something—and Ken Griffey, Sr., and a peaking Dave Winfield were in the lineup on Opening Day—but Don Mattingly wasn't yet in the everyday mix, which has augury written all over it—it hurts to say it, but the Yankees feel George Brett's wrath once more, and cellar-dwell.

The AL Central has been my milieu for the past two decades, and here the 1983 vibe is heavy, though 2016 has absolutely belonged to the White Sox thus far. Were it not for Jake Arrieta across town, Chris Sale would seem superhuman, and Jose Quintana is off to a great start. Melky Cabrera, Brett Lawrie, and Adam Eaton are slapping it around, but Jose Abreu and Todd Frazier got off to slow starts—though Frazier just drove in a bushel of runs and may be heating up with the weather. Can 1983 help them? Tony LaRussa was at the helm in those days of yore, with Jim Leyland by his side, in the umpteenth hideous uniform style in a row. The offense was pretty ugly back then too—Carlton Fisk basically led the team in everything, going .289/26/86, with 85 runs—but their pitchers were horses, with Lamar Hoyt going 24-10, and Dotson and Bannister combining for 38 more wins and 450 more innings to match Hoyt's 260. Pitching then and pitching now—a solid combination. But is there a single lowering cloud in the sky? Greg 'Bull' Luzinski as Opening Day DH in '83 … hmmmm. The Tigers are muddling along, three games below .500 and seven behind the Sox. Even upbeat and unparalleled radio play-by-play man Dan Dickerson, whose voice in my car or kitchen is part of our familial summer fabric, has let slip tattered phrases of despair on the performance of Mike Pelfrey, the off-season acquisition to shore up the rotation. But the arrival of Jordan Zimmerman from the Nationals has been revelatory, as he has been superb, balancing out the inconsistency of Justin Verlander and Anibal Sanchez. In an odd twist of fate, Miguel Cabrera has struggled with sliders and strikeouts and making good contact, while 3B Nick Castellanos, who used to flail at sliders, has become Cabrera-like. (Will the foul ball my son retrieved from the bat of the 18-year-old Castellanos during his season here with the Low A West Michigan Whitecaps someday be a cog in our family financial plan?!) Victor Martinez and Ian Kinsler are both experiencing veteran rejuvenation at the plate, and a glance back at 1983, the year before their World Championship, shows a Tigers team ready to bolster from the past. Whitaker and Trammell, purveyors of a million DP's together over the years, finished third and fourth in the batting race, at .320 and .319, while Lance Parrish and Larry Herndon provided some pop (Herndon was a strong .302/20/92 that year). Entering his peak moment, Jack Morris was 20-13, struck out 232, and shouldered a hair under 300 innings—a horse. But I have a concern, and his name is John Wockenfuss, DH on Opening Day of '83. Even if the 2016 bullpen stays strong, this blow from the past might be enough to take down the Tigers. I hope not, but I worry. Strangely, I'm not worried about Kansas City, World Champs but for the moment a mediocre team with pitching problems and, other than Eric Hosmer, sketchiness at the plate. Still, maybe I should worry. The 1983 factor, the 'ya gotta believe redux' factor in Kansas City, suggests that the ship will right itself. Willie Mays Aikens, Frank White, U.L. Washington, and George Brett—a solid infield, with Brett going .310/25/93, even with the pine tar HR stripped away, while the DH factor was strong, with Hal McRae hitting .311. The Royals will rise again. The Cleveland Indians will not rise, though they should—that rotation, with Carrasco, Kluber, and Salazar, is formidable, and the young DP combination of Francisco Lindor and Jason Kipnis can flat our field and flat out hit. But '83 revises me (to misquote Li Young-Lee)—Ron Hassey, Bake McBride, Manny Trillo—I'm not feeling it. Wait, Julio Franco opened the season at shortstop—isn't he still playing somewhere?! I like Rick Sutcliffe as the ace, but he ended up peaking for the Cubs. Toss in the DH factor, and you get a strong Christian force in MLB ranks in Andre Thornton—but is his big swing and high K total enough to carry the 2016 team. Not quite. The Twins are in deep, deep trouble, 17 games under .500 after an abysmal start. And no wonder—Kirby Puckett. The sparkplug of their '87 and '91 title runs had not yet been called up on Opening Day, and though several of the champion cogs were in place—Hrbek, Gaetti, Brunansky—the fact that Randy Bush was the starting DH bodes ill. Maybe Byron Buxton will get called back up to fulfill the destiny set for him as the next Puckett—but right now he's on a minor league bus, and the Twins will continue to struggle.

And hence we arrive in the AL West, with a great surprise in store, perhaps the ultimate surprise that 1983 holds (or would it be "held," or "will have held"—complexities of verb tense). This year's surprise is that the Mariners are leading the pack, though Robinson Cano's sweet swing is no surprise. With Nelson Cruz, the ageless free-agent, crushing 450 foot shots behind Cano in the lineup, the Mariners have discovered how to score. They already know how to pitch, with King Felix Hernandez and Taijuan Walker leading the way. There's bad news for the Pacific Northwest, though—1983 is not your friend. In a year when your twin pitching duo of Young and Beattie finished in the top 20 in ERA but were a collective 21-30, and when your best hitter might have been Al Cowens, things look slim. The DH factor is a non-factor—it was Richie Zisk (did anyone else of my age demographic seem to get three Richie Zisk cards in every pack?!). Seattle will fade in the long summer. The Rangers, well, I already stole their '83 magic by designating Rick Honeycutt's stats for assignment elsewhere, though they can keep Charlie Hough's 15-13 record with the league's fourth best ERA at 3.18. The issue of run support obviously surfaces, a point punctuated by Danny Darwin going 8-13 and Mike Smithson 10-14 that year, though both had ERA's under 4. The bats were 'led' by Buddy Bell and Larry Parrish—I think Jim Sundberg might have batted up in the order. The DH on Opening Day was one Hostetler—lost to history! This year they have a young RF, Nomar Mazara, hitting well, and the stellar Adrian Beltre joins Elvis Andrus around .300, but where's the power (Prince Fielder, I'm calling to you!)? Top-of-the-rotation excellence from A.J. Griffin and Derek Holland should keep them around, but not quite on top. And the reason for this is the LA Angels. This is my dark horse pick out of the West, though they are seven games below .500 right now. Why, you may ask? Is it the astronomical talent of Mike Trout or the Hall of Fame punch of Albert Pujols hitting behind him? Yes and Yes. The new table-setters in Yunel Escobar and Kole Calhoun? Double yes. The gritty rotation with Garret Richards anchoring? Yes. But it's really about '83. The California Angels didn't win it all that year, but they stacked the All-Star roster with no less than six personages (few of whom I primarily identify with the Angels, by the way): Bob Boone (defense first, clearly, since he hit .256 that year), Doug DeCinces, Rod Carew (a pedestrian, for him, .339 season), Fred Lynn, Brian Downing (re-inventing the open batting stance), Bruce Kison as the Opening Day pitcher and relative ace. And the DH on this squad? Mr. October, Reggie Jackson, a tad diminished, but still vicious on balls down and in. I like the 2016 Angels to finish the task their forebears could not—hurtling into the postseason as a juggernaut. Wait, I still have to deal with Oakland and Houston, two teams on the wrong side of .500. The Athletics are in a down phase; their best pitcher is Rich Hill, a thirtysomething journeyman who's barely pitched in the last 5 seasons, and their best hitter is Jed Lowrie. A glance at '83 shows a team in pre-'Bash Brothers' mode, with Davey Lopes, Carney Lansford, and Dave 'Hindu' Henderson as the lead-dogs. DH—big bopper Jeff Burroughs. Once hit four home runs in a game. But not a factor in this calculus. The A's take a plunge this year. But why has Houston flopped so far this year, after rising from squalor to the postseason last year, the darlings of developing young talent and putting it all together the 'right way'? Well, one thing is their swing-for-the-fences mentality. No one on the team is in the top 20 in the AL in batting average, and their best young players, George Springer and Carlos Correa (both five-tool phenoms), are struggling to make contact. Plus, the pitching, a strong suit last season, has slid a bit—Dallas Keuchel is a legitimate ace, but will Doug Fister work out, or the almost but not yet Collin McHugh? But let's be frank—the real problem is found when we cross the years and the leagues and locate the 1983 Houston Astros in the NL West. At first, the journey yields great promise—Jose Cruz was third in the NL in batting, with a stellar .318/14/92 line, and two notches down, the counterintuitive presence of Ray Knight (he was the Astro's first baseman?!) hitting .304 with 36 doubles seems to swell the possibilities. Don't forget Dickie Thon, before the brutal beaning that damaged his vision, hitting .284, scoring 81 runs and stealing 34 bases. There's a lot of energy here, so why can't Astros resurge in 2016? I will attribute my angst to the switch of leagues—with no DH, no matter how obscure, to infuse energy from afar, the wheels come off. Even a saving throw of Terry Puhl, with his perennial league-leading pinch hits, can't salvage the season for Houston.

So what do we have here? The postseason will begin in the AL with the hateful and confusing one-game wildcard between Baltimore and Detroit, and before Cal Ripken can be summoned to show his hoary, tonsured head to the crowd to summon the old championship magic, the Tigers will dispatch the Orioles, moving out west to take on the shocking Angels. Meantime, the two Sox will battle, with the Red Sox riding David Ortiz's wizened playoff wizardry to a seventh-game showdown with the White Sox in a frenzied Southside Chicago. Look for one of the three Tigers castaways—Alex Avila, Avisail Garcia, or most likely Austin Jackson—to play a crucial role in felling Boston. The White Sox have the vibe, and the pilgrim-collared uniforms of '83 might re-appear (but not the short pants, please!). The Angels will batter the Tigers faster than you can spell 'DeCinces,' as Detroit continues its long-term struggles in Southern California, and then the icy winds will descend on Chicago, as the Angels shiver and slip through sleet, slashing at Sale's sliders (Gerard Manley Hopkins finally makes it to the ballpark!). The White Sox will scratch and claw in the bad weather, then erupt on the Angels home field, but mighty Pujols and the leaping Trout will hold serve, and back at what was once Comiskey, in a Game Seven played in autumnal chill, with Bobby Grich present in the crowd, the Angels will earn the right to play for the World's Championship, with Jered Weaver matching Chris Sale pitch by gangly pitch, for ten innings, until Pujols quiets the crowd with a slider deposited deep in left-center. '83.

In the NL, the Cardinals surge, and no matter what I said before, they make the wildcard and clash with the Pittsburgh (Lee Mazilli, I've decided you did make the difference!)—the Cardinals emerge swinging bats and punches, ready for the rival Cubs, while the Nationals and the Dodgers cross the country to cross swords. The Cubs will be ready, emotionally and baseball-wise, to take down their longtime foe, as Arrieta provides a Bob Gibson-esque lesson in sustained postseason dominance, and Kyle Schwarber miraculously returns ahead of schedule from his ACL tear for one limping, Kirk Gibson-esque late home run. Wrigley will be electric, and twice Chicago will host games in the north and south sides on the same night—a vigor for the windy city not felt in the baseball world since a century ago. The Nationals will ride the Francophonic winds of Montreal mystique straight through the hearts of the Dodger fans, with an NLDS sweep that leaves an old refrain migrating west from Brooklyn to L.A.: 'Wait until next year'—and wait until $250 million on the payroll! Gio Gonzalez, Strasburg, Roark, Scherzer—this rotation is formidable and will be at its strongest when the Cubs come to town. Strength on strength, mano a mano, a Strasburg heater cutting in on Rizzo's hands, Arrieta 3-2 on Bryce Harper, an NLCS for the ages, with ghosts and echoes and tintinnabulations resounding through D.C. and the Northside. Back and forth, until Arrieta and Scherzer meet in Game Seven, in Wrigley, the World Series a few hours away. Steve Bartman in exile, the curse of the billy goat exorcised, the futility of the both sets of Washington Senators now rescinding, and then Jayson Werth twists all 6'5" into a fastball and the Cubs dreams must wait another year. The El-Series, the ChiTown Twinbill, the Cubs-White Sox miracle series, will have to wait for another year.

Washington vs. Anaheim—not phrasing to stir the hearts of the baseball faithful—but many of us should fault our younger selves, or our parents' generation, for stocking the ranks of the 1983 All-Star Game with Angels and Expos. I say the World Series is a denouement. Dusty Baker and Mike Scioscia shake off the nostalgic dust of Dodgers glory, of teammate bonding, and stare each other down from the dugout steps. Bryce Harper and Mike Trout, neither yet eligible to serve in the House of Representatives or, according to T. S. Eliot, to pursue the title of poet (in both cases, one must be 25 years old), will shine like blazing young stars. Speaking of blazing, Strasburg will bring all his vast heat to bear. Nationals in five. Two complete games for Strasburg. Bob Gibson in the stands, smiling. Tim McCarver on the radio, reminiscing. Chicago baseball fans, not watching, not listening, not caring. Until next season.

Michael R. Stevens is professor of English at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Copyright © 2016 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

You’re probably going to hear more of rapper Lecrae thanks to his new deal with Columbia Records.

After a decade of success with Reach Records, the Christian hip-hop outlet he founded, the Grammy- and Dove-winning artist scored his first deal with a major label, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) reports.

At Columbia, the biggest label under Sony Music, Lecrae joins some of the most popular names in music: Beyoncé, Adele, Pharrell Williams, and One Direction.

A “rapper who happens to be Christian,” Lecrae has already enjoyed mainstream success—collaborating with hit artists, topping the Billboard charts, and appearing on The Tonight Show. But the Columbia deal takes things to another level.

“That will bring on things like radio airplay, larger tours, more featured placement on digital retailers and large playlists on services like Spotify and Apple Music,” said Chad Horton, co-owner of the Christian hip-hop site Rapzilla. “It will get him more into the mainstream areas that he has been trying to break into the last few years.”

With the new deal, Lecrae will continue to make music “in conjunction” with Reach, the AJC wrote.

“Ultimately, I think it is both a branding and financial move for not only him but the entire Reach Records label roster,” said Horton. The label includes popular artists such as Trip Lee, Tedashii, and Andy Mineo.

While successful Christian rock bands (including Switchfoot, POD, and Jars of Clay) make deals with major labels, it hasn’t happened as often in Christian hip-hop. “It's rare but not unheard of,” said Jason Bellini, who blogs about the genre as Sketch the Journalist.

BB Jay, a Christian rapper compared to Notorious B.I.G. (also known as Biggie Smalls), signed with Jive in the late ‘90s; and Mali Music, an R&B artist, is currently signed with RCA. Several others have deals with spiritual or gospel divisions of major labels, said Bellini.

Fans are bracing for backlash accusing Lecrae, arguably the most prominent Christian hip-hop artist in history, of “selling out” by teaming up with a secular label. “Signing to Columbia Records, in my opinion, is the biggest move in Lecrae’s career—bigger than winning the Grammys…. This opens up for him to reach more, to reach the masses,” stated one defending fan on YouTube.

In his latest mixtape—Church Clothes 3, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard rap charts in January—Lecrae addressed the “sellout” claims in a song called “Sidelines”:

Biz busy on the boards
I hear 'em cheering from the sidelines
Wait, hold up, I think they hatin'
People told me take my time, right?
Nah, they tired of waitin'
They say "Crae, you sold your soul, man"
For real? Who bought it?
"Let the Spirit take control, man"
I don't go nowhere without him

The news of the record deal with Columbia came hours after Lecrae announced that his new book, Un-Ashamed, made The New York Times bestseller list.

Lecrae appeared on the cover of CT in 2013, and Gleanings tracked the success of his 2014 release, Anomaly, which rose to No. 1, earned him his first Grammy nomination in the rap category, and changed how Billboard ranks Christian music.

If your children grew up in the church, there is a good chance they knew the youth choir song “I’m Adopted.” The lyrics echo a promise found in Ephesians 1:5 and repeated throughout the Scriptures: “God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ.”

For my family, however, the title of that song rings doubly true.

I am one of many Christian women who have experienced the pain of divorce. My first husband grappled with alcoholism and left me when I was pregnant with our youngest daughter. The result was a season of life spent as a single parent, working the morning shift as a nurse at our local hospital and the night shift as a mother of three.

In the time that followed, I met the man who would become my husband: Dave Black. What began as a friendship (and a recurring babysitting role) grew into a romance. When he asked me to marry him, I knew that I had found the godly partner and role-model for my children that was missing from my first relationship.

Every blended family must decide how to navigate the challenges of their new life together in a way that works for them, but Dave and I felt strongly that we needed to draw a circle around our family by having him legally adopt my children as his own.

My three kids took his last name and, to this day, there has never been any doubt that he is their dad. What Dave and my children lack in shared genes, they more than make up for in shared love—the kind that can only exist between a parent and their child.

When we got the letter officially declaring us a family, I was reminded of Scripture’s teaching that we are adopted into the family of God.

Many adoptive parents’ journeys culminate in a courtroom moment, but Dave’s came in the form of a notice in the mail from the Department of Children’s Services. When we got the letter officially declaring us a family, I was reminded of Scripture’s teaching that we are adopted into the family of God. I was also reminded of the children who are still waiting on an earthly adoption of their own.

My kids faced some challenging years before Dave entered our lives, but their experience cannot truly compare to that of the more than 415,000 children in the foster care system today.

May is National Foster Care Month; a time that I hope will encourage the church to engage afresh and anew with the cause of adoption, remembering our gospel calling to “look after orphans and widows in their distress” (James 1:27).

Of course, not every family is called to adopt, but we can all intercede on behalf of these children.

For some, that may mean offering a gift of time or resources to a faith-based adoption organization. My family’s journey, for example, drew our hearts to the work of Decisions, Choices & Options, a nonprofit organization in the Nashville area that visits local schools to promote adoption for students who may be facing an unplanned pregnancy and might otherwise consider life-ending choices for their unborn baby.

In my current role as a member of Congress, I believe this calling to look after widows and orphans means using the platform that I have been given to ensure that adoption is attainable for every family who has room in their hearts—regardless of the room in their budget.

I am convinced that nothing could have stopped Dave from adopting my children. But the truth is, we were also fortunate that the costs our young family incurred were minimal. I wonder how long we would have been waiting for that letter in the mail had we needed to raise thousands of dollars just to call ourselves a family?

Of course, not every family is called to adopt, but we can all intercede on behalf of these children.

When God unites a parent and child together through the miracle of adoption, we cannot let barriers stand in the way. That is why I introduced the Adoption Tax Credit Refundability Act.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that a foster care adoption can cost up to $2,500, while adoptions through a private agency can cost upwards of $40,000. Those costs are staggering to just about anyone, but when you consider that almost half of all children adopted from foster care live in households with incomes of less than 200 percent of the poverty line (around $48,500/year for a family of 4), the financial toll becomes overwhelming.

We cannot change the high cost of adoption overnight, but we can ensure that our tax laws provide some help to offset that expense.

Currently, the adoption tax credit is not fully refundable. That means it offers no benefit to a family making less than $35,000 a year because they simply will not have enough income to generate sufficient tax liability. We all know that no family chooses to adopt for a tax credit, but I have personally met families who tell me in anguish that adoption is just beyond their financial reach and that this credit would bridge the difference—if only they were able to actually use it.

The Adoption Tax Credit Refundability Act would change the law to ensure that every adoptive family benefits from this vital tool.

We cannot change the high cost of adoption overnight, but we can ensure that our tax laws provide some help to offset that expense.

This legislation is as non-political as they come in Washington. I am grateful for the support it has received by champions for adoption like Mary Beth and Steven Curtis Chapman’s “ShowHope” and from members of Congress across the ideological spectrum. The bill’s cosponsors range from some of the most progressive Democrats to the most conservative Republicans—proof that, even today, some things still transcend partisan politics, family being first among them.

Not a lot of parents can say that their happiest moments came in the form of a written notice from Children’s Services, but mine sure did. The instant that “Dave” officially became “Dad” is a gift that I will hold in my memory for the rest of my life. I want more parents and children to be able to experience that same joy, and I have to believe that God, in his perfect love, desires this too.

During National Foster Care Month, and throughout the year, may we in the church rise up to lead this cause, knowing that as we do, we are modeling what Christ did for each of us by inviting us into the most glorious adoption of all.

Congresswoman Diane Black represents Tennessee’s 6th District and is a co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth.

There’s no milk in the fridge at Sandra Brown’s home in the Roseland neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Not much food in the cabinet, aside from Ramen noodles. Were it not for the kindness of Sandra’s great-grandmother, who owns the house, Sandra and her family—her husband, baby daughter, grandmother, step-grandfather, and an uncle—would be living on streets. The Browns, like more than a million American families, live on less than $2 in cash a day.

“Many Americans have spent more than that before they get to work or school in the morning,” write sociologist Kathryn Edin and her co-author, H. Luke Shaefer, in $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America. “Yet in 2011, more than 4 percent of all households with children in the world’s wealthiest nation were living in a poverty so deep that most Americans don’t believe it exists in this country.”

Edin, professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, first studied the lives of poor families while volunteering at the now-demolished Cabrini-Green housing project as a student at Chicago’s North Park University. She went on to earn a PhD from Northwestern and has spent her career detailing the effects of poverty on family life. $2.00 a Day follows the lives of families who have been left behind by the welfare reform of the 1990s. These are families “caught in an endless cycle of jobs that don’t pay nearly enough and periods of living on virtually no income.” She spoke with former CT senior news editor Bob Smietana last fall.

Why do so many people live on two dollars or less each day?

I wrote my first book on how single mothers make ends meet. I toured the country for six years, interviewing hundreds of single mothers about their budgets. This was right before the Clinton-era welfare reform, and people on welfare generally had about 500 bucks a month.

That wasn’t enough to survive, of course. So you basically had to work under the table to make up the difference. But the importance of that story is in spending so many years asking poor people about their budgets, you get this mental calculator going in the back of your head.

I came to Baltimore in 2010 to lead a research team working with young people who had been born in high-rise public housing, but had moved on to better neighborhoods through a variety of interventions—demolition, voucher programs, and so on. That summer, I came into contact with a lot of really disadvantaged people, more disadvantaged even than the working poor I had been hanging out with.

Once I met Ashley, I became actively interested in whether there was a whole new class of poor people that have arisen as an unintended consequence of welfare reform.

And I ran into this mother, Ashley, who still lived in one of the units that had not been demolished. Walking into her home, you knew something was wrong. She just looked depressed. She was visibly unkempt. She had a two-week-old baby, and she was not supporting the baby’s head properly as she rocked her. Which is really scary. No food in the house, and, more worryingly, no formula. And it turned out that she had absolutely no cash coming in, nor did anyone else in the household. They had a housing subsidy. She hadn’t yet enrolled in food stamps. There was just nothing, nothing in the house.

I knew enough about welfare reform to know the rolls had gone down dramatically, but no one really knew why. The assumption was that welfare reform had been a success, and people were working. The numbers didn’t quite add up. So I kind of had this in the back of my mind all along. And once I met Ashley, I became actively interested in whether there was a whole new class of poor people that have arisen as an unintended consequence of welfare reform.

Is welfare reform the problem?

The welfare reform is a mixed story. It’s not all bad. We did see people go to work, and they got a big enough tax credit that they were no longer poor. But it seemed at least possible that there were groups of people still living off what remained of the safety net, programs like Medicaid and food stamps and the housing subsidy. I imagined this group would be pretty well-supported by social programs, but just lacking cash.

But when we looked at the best government data source available, which is the Survey of Income and Program Participation, we saw a very different reality: a 130 percent rise since 1996 in the number of households living on less than $2 a person per day.

What’s distinctive about this group is not that they’re hopelessly unemployable and need to be taken care of. Among those we met in Chicago and Cleveland, the Mississippi Delta and Appalachia, everyone saw themselves as a worker, and virtually everybody had recent work experience. They wanted to give back to society and pay taxes. But they were hanging on to the ragged edge of a very, very badly degraded labor market, and their lives were complicated. When you mix complex lives with a badly degraded labor market, you get a lot of lost jobs. And then there was housing instability, which both deepens and prolongs spells of two-dollar-a-day poverty.

Are the people that you study cut off from institutions like churches?

Yes. It’s very striking. They’re incredibly disconnected from institutions. Only one of our respondents, Paul, goes to church, in this case a fundamentalist sect. This church has just been really fantastic. He tells a story of getting these envelopes on Sunday mornings filled with cash. And I have to say, I didn’t know if I believed him. So I started going to church with him, and I decided I would go until I saw at least two of these envelopes. And sure enough, I did.

It’s very striking. They’re incredibly disconnected from institutions. Only one of our respondents, Paul, goes to church.

I also got to know the brothers he talks about, the ones who will lend him a car, or let him get water from the spigots outside their houses when his water gets shut off. The congregation has supporting this extended family for around eight years now, dating back to when Paul was a young person without a job after his sort of trade disappeared. (He was a repairman at a big department store.) They gave him employment for years doing odd jobs on their construction crews. Without that connection, I don’t know if Paul would have survived. As it is, he’s on the edge. He sends me an email with Bible verses every day. So I always know how he’s feeling.

What is it like for somebody like Paul, living with this little money?

You are completely consumed with the work of survival. With Jennifer, who I met in Chicago, I remember walking with her family in the neighborhood around the shelter. She was literally combing the sidewalk for any sort of pamphlet, be cause she’s extremely adept at finding free stuff they give out in Chicago. She had just taken her kids to see Shakespeare in the Park. She’d gone to a local hospital for a dental fair and gotten her kids free checkups. She figured out every charity that offered school supplies. She found school uniforms through another giveaway.

She used to pick up tin cans and sell them, but that only pays about a dollar an hour. Now she takes surveys online, with the money going to a PayPal account. If you know these surveys, they pay maybe $1.50 or $2 per survey. And she makes just enough cash to get her kids the socks and underwear they need.

She’s in this desperate scramble to find work, pounding the pavement with her badly decayed gums and her broken Medicaid glasses, getting rejection after rejection. It took her 11 months to find a job, the first job we saw her in. And, of course, it was horrible job cleaning foreclosed homes in the Chicago winter. It made her so sick she had to quit.

How do these people manage to be so ingenious and resilient?

There is a lot of ingenuity. Some people have this indomitable spirit, as if nothing can keep them down. But others get visibly worn down. Like Ray from Cleveland: If you go to her neighborhood, there’s a corner store just a couple of blocks from her house. The owner was friend of her father before the father passed away. And he’s got a picture of Ray at 16. You see this gorgeous girl. This is just a few years after her dad had died, and her mother had run off to Tennessee with her lover. She was raising herself in this house with her pit bull, Sweetie.

When we met her at 21, she had already lost all her teeth, because she hadn’t had any dental care since she was 12. She covers her mouth with her hand when she smiles. Now, at 24, she is really, really beaten down. She looks like she’s 35. Her mouth is sunken in around the missing teeth. Her features are sort of constricted. She’s on over a dozen daily medications, probably related to the chronic stress of living under extreme poverty.

I think there is a point when this beats you down to a degree that you might not get out.

What do people eat when they have so little money?

We could have called the book America Runs on Ramen. We saw so much Ramen and so many Ramen recipes. But a diet like that is devoid of vitamins and minerals that are crucial for kids’ physical and mental development.

Almost all of them are essentially homeless, unless they have a housing subsidy of some kind. (About 20 to 25 percent of this extreme poor do.) Otherwise, you’ve doubled up, or you’re in a homeless shelter, or you’re living on the street.

Take Madonna from Chicago…[she] goes into McDonald’s, gets a cup of coffee, and adds enough cream and sugar to make a meal.

So it becomes this chicken-and-egg game. They live precariously, and they eat badly. Kraft macaroni and cheese and Ramen noodles are the two most common staples. I’ve also noticed for a long time how the poor drink coffee. Take Madonna from Chicago: seven creamers and nine sugars. If you go to homeless shelters, you see the same pattern: tons of cream and sugar. This is a meal. Madonna goes into McDonald’s, gets a cup of coffee, and adds enough cream and sugar to make a meal. Almost all these fast food restaurants keep the cream behind the counter, probably to prevent people from drinking their breakfast.

Having witnessed so much suffering, what keeps you going?

You start to feel lucky all the time. At Harvard for eight years, I was around the elite, and I would feel disadvantaged. But if you hang out with the extreme poor, you feel lucky. And “luck” really is the right word, because these bad things can happen to people. You begin to see that. There’s an aspect of “There but for the grace of God go I.”

I don’t know if it’s a coping mechanism or a spirituality, but the poor have a very strong sense of gratitude, like being grateful that you’re living to see another day, or recognizing how much worse things could be. This is a large part of their speech and their stories. They really are very spiritual, although they may not be churched. And they see God intervening in vivid ways. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism. And I guess you could argue that it’s negative to draw the line so low. But it’s really a striking feature of life among the poor.

I also would say that giving a voice to people is very powerful. We read portions of the book to every respondent we could find. In the case of Tabitha, I was worried about how she’d take it, because her story is very personal and really painful. But she said, “I’ve always wanted to write the story of my life. This is a dream come true.” There’s real value in the idea that your invisible suffering can be made visible, and your private pain made public, in a way that doesn’t bring shame.

How has your faith influenced the way you think about issues of poverty?

I came of age in a really good time, I think, for young Christians. Books by Tony Campolo and Ron Sider, along with Catholic writers like Henri Nouwen, were the stuff of my young adulthood.

I kind of thought this concern for the poor was normal. This is what you’re supposed to do, because it’s all over Scripture. And what’s amazed me is how Christian culture has moved away from that. In the academy, it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t conceive of a Christian as a bigoted person who hates the poor.

The real way forward is recognizing that what people want most of all is dignity and inclusion. And that can only happen if their lives look like the lives of other Americans. In the American context, to be a worker is to be a citizen.

It’s not just a question of individual charity. It’s really a question of policy. In the old days, you essentially had to trade in your citizenship card to get welfare, and in some ways you still do. And that’s why people don’t go on the rolls. They’re not willing to bear the stigma. They want to be part of the mainstream. They really want to be a part of the rest of us. That’s what we need to aim for.

Americans value work. Welfare recipients value work. Well, let’s expand work opportunity. Let’s think about this in ways that everybody can get on board with. I believe we can find more ways to help the poor without shaming them, ways that help restore their dignity. If we can give them a sense that the little they are able to work earns them a safety net of a kind, that helps in hard times. But it can be perceived as earned. Americans are willing to spend a lot of money on the poor if those policies are in line with their values.

We really do need a safety net. But the real way forward is recognizing that what people want most of all is dignity and inclusion. And that can only happen if their lives look like the lives of other Americans. In the American context, to be a worker is to be a citizen.

More than 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson commissioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to find the source of the Missouri River, and from there to discover a relatively easy water route west to the Pacific. Such a waterway, they discovered, doesn't exist.

But they did succeed in mapping the Northwest and, 15 months after they began pushing themselves upstream from St. Louis, they found, near today's Montana-Idaho border, the source of the mighty Missouri.

Lewis's journal records that on August 12, 1805, a member of the expedition, Private Hugh McNeal, "exultingly stood with a foot on each side of this little rivulet and thanked his god that he had lived to bestride the mighty and heretofore deemed endless Missouri."

The Missouri at its source looks a lot different than the powerful current that flows into the Mississippi River.

Likewise, the role of the pastor has broadened significantly from its origins in the hills of Galilee. Several major tributaries have contributed to the currents of contemporary ministry, but it's the same river.

The pastor's biblical beginnings

The term "pastor" comes from the Latin word for "shepherd," the metaphor used in both Old and New Testaments for one responsible for God's people. The primary shepherd/pastor is the Lord himself (Psalm 23), but the Bible also recognizes human undershepherds—some good, some not so good.

In his day Ezekiel condemned these undershepherds for looking after themselves and neglecting the flock. "You have not strengthened the weak … or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost" (34:4).

The New Testament instructs elders to be good shepherds. "Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock," writes Paul. "Savage wolves will come in among you. … So be on your guard!" (Acts 20:28-31).

Peter tells elders to willingly be "examples to the flock. And when the Great Shepherd appears, you will receive a crown of glory" (1 Peter 5:3-4).

Thus the Bible presents pastoring primarily as protecting and feeding the flock of God and being an example to them of a living faith. Over the centuries, these functions developed into specific and distinct roles.

Preacher

The Reformation recovered the emphasis on the pastor as the "teacher of God's Word." Preaching had long been neglected in the church; it had given way to sometimes thoughtless service at the altar. The Reformers placed preaching in the central place of worship as the primary way to feed the flock of God.

And preaching and teaching has ever since been a primary role of a pastor.

Curer of souls

In the 1600s, the Puritans enhanced the concept of pastor, by stressing the role as "physician of the soul." A pastor must know the flock—and discover each person's spiritual condition, healthy or unhealthy, primarily by asking questions (How is it with your soul? Are you resisting evil? How are you serving God?).

And if the pastor discovered a fundamental ill, the pastor’s role was to prescribe some remedy to restore spiritual health and vitality.

As theologian (and contemporary Puritan) J.I. Packer describes it: "There is such a thing as spiritual depression. Relationships or a marriage can collapse. Children can disappoint you. The business can go bankrupt. Grief or trauma produce states of mind and emotion that call for spiritual counsel. Because we're to live to the glory of God, all our moods have to be brought into relation to God, his love, his work, and the ongoing process of sanctification.

"The sanctifying of troubles is a prominent New Testament theme. Troubles are to be expected, but God can sanctify them. The pastor, in the Puritan understanding, is there to be God's agent, God's lightning rod, the transforming link between the distress of the Christian and the love and power of God."

Arranger of relationships

For a group of Christians to become “the body of Christ” doesn’t happen automatically. A flock left to its own devices will disintegrate. A distinguishing characteristic of the Methodist awakening in the 1700s was organizing people into groups in order to "maintain the glow" that the Lord had ignited in their hearts.

Thus, every Methodist conference (regional group) would be subdivided into "classes"—12 persons with a leader. Like home groups today, they would meet once a week between Sundays to pray together, discuss Scripture, share their experiences, and encourage each other.

So in Methodist circles pastors became overseers of small groups for the purpose of nurturing believers. And ever since, and well beyond Methodism, this task of arranging relationships for the spiritual health of the flock continues to be part of the pastoral role, so that a group of Christians can indeed become the body of Christ.

Manager

In the twentieth century, new tributaries entered the broadening stream of pastoral expectations.

With individualism and isolation increasing, the need for community became stronger than ever. Pastors assumed a greater role in maintaining the organizational life of the congregation, or put more crassly, "running a church"—recruiting, motivating, administering programs.

Put positively, this merely extends the role of "organizer of nurturing relationships" who tends to the health of the community.

The downside is that a pastor may feel more like a manager of church business than a shepherd of souls, but some amount of managing is inescapable when shepherding today’s flock.

Missionary

Surrounded by a decreasingly Christian society in the 21st Century, the need to evangelize the world at the church's doorstep is unavoidable. "Missionary to our own neighborhood" has been added to the pastor's role. Pastors today feel the burden for those not yet in the flock.

No pastor can be content to simply supervise those currently in the fold.

Jesus, of course, affirmed the shepherd who leaves the 99 to seek out the one that is lost (Luke 15:4-7). No pastor can be content to simply supervise those currently in the fold.

Today every pastor is aware of the need for evangelism and outreach and, more recently, working for justice and compassion in the name of Christ.

Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, said, “Pastors have always faced high demands, but [in the last two generations] the level of expectations has rapidly risen. The internet has given easy access to the country’s best preachers—and local pastors are often expected to compete. Pastors are expected to be masters of leadership, counseling, communication, management, finances, biblical truth, theological expertise, and current social issues. In a country with polarized politics, pastors struggle over which side to take or try to keep neutral—and, no option seems acceptable to all parishioners.”

So the task of protecting and feeding the flock has widened, as has exemplifying a living faith.

CTpastors.com tried to encapsulate today’s widening role by identifying six categories into which fit all its articles on pastoring:

LEADIf you’re a pastor, your job as shepherd means you lead. That means defining the realities your group is facing, knowing what resources you have, determining what direction to go, and helping the group know what steps to take. Because a pastor leads.

PREACHPerhaps the most visible part of pastoring is the upfront teaching and preaching. Perhaps the most invisible part is how those words are used by God’s Spirit to transform those listening. Bringing a timely and truthful message demands preparation, knowing the Scripture, knowing the audience, and knowing how to connect the one with the other.

PRAYBeing a pastor isn’t just what you do, it’s who you are. In spiritual leadership, that means tending your own internal life: your relationship with God, the health of your soul, emotions, attitudes, ambitions, and temptations. It’s consciously living in the presence of God, with prayer the primary means of doing that. Being a pastor means bringing truth and grace and transformation to the human soul, starting with your own.

DISCIPLEJesus told his followers, “Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them … and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” The prime function of the church, which a pastor oversees, is to introduce and initiate and instruct the entire congregation into the life of allegiance to Christ. And usually, since that life is “more caught than taught,” that means the pastor is the living example of a living faith.

REACHFaithfulness in ministry isn’t just keeping the doors of the church open, hoping that people will walk in. It means finding ways to take the good news to wherever people are, whether they are in another neighborhood, another subculture, another language group, or another country. A pastor’s role includes extending ministry to those who need it most.

MANAGEIt’s no coincidence that the root word of “administration” is “ministry.” Taking care of people means caring for the health of the congregation, taking care of the systems, the facilities, the finances, and laws that affect them, and keeping the flock safe, legal (if possible), and financially sound.

Within these six categories, there are 52 subtopics in CTpastors.com that further define the myriad elements of a “pastor’s role.”

At times we are tempted to reduce the pastoral role to a simple, uncluttered role. But it’s a multifaceted responsibility, accomplished only by the power of the Holy Spirit. As Private McNeal discovered, standing astride the narrow rivulet can be exhilarating, but he was also more than eager to ride the broader current all the way home.