Nova likes to stop and smell the flowers every once in a while. Photo by Taylor Tompkins, my food and dog photographer for life
Welcome back to Jacob’s Letter, a free pop culture newsletter full of puns and dog photos. This issue is very light on the puns and dog photos, and heavy on bigger news: Rachel Held Evans died this week, and like many others who were impacted by her work, the news came as a shock to me. I’ve done my best below to explain what her words meant to me and countless others.
If you want movie and pop culture news, that’s still here, too, further on down.
With the death of Rachel Held Evans, we lost a prophet
Photograph by Robin Rayne / ZUMA
Rachel Held Evans, the progressive Christian writer who never stopped questioning the role of evangelical culture in America and whose message of radical inclusivity in the church opened the door for hundreds, if not thousands, of new voices of people of color, LGBTQ folks, ex-vangelicals and other sidelined Christians, died Saturday, May 4, in Nashville, Tenn. She was 37 years old. She is survived by her husband Dan and their two young children.
Evans, or more commonly known as RHE, was hospitalized April 14 for flu complications. During treatment, she started having seizures and was put into a medically induced coma to help alleviate the symptoms. After going to three different hospitals, she started experiencing “sudden and extreme changes in her vitals,” according to health updates from her husband Dan. “The team at the hospital discovered extensive swelling of her brain and took emergency action to stabilize her. The team worked until Friday afternoon to the best of their ability to save her. This swelling event caused severe damage and ultimately was not survivable.”
Some doctors think she may have had encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain.
The tributes and outpouring of grief were immediate following her death. The hashtag #BecauseOfRHE started trending on Twitter, showcasing her influence into every corner of Christianity.
This was RHE’s mission — radical inclusion, always another seat at the table. Christian author Jen Hatmaker wrote in a TIME Magazine tribute this week that
“A better ally didn’t exist. She was Rachel Held Evans, prophet and preacher, author and friend, generous beyond all comprehension.”
I first experienced RHE’s writings in college, when I stumbled on a book called “Evolving In Monkey Town,” (later re-published as “Faith Unraveled”) about her hometown of Dayton, Tenn. and that town’s legacy of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial.
Both sides of my family are from Dayton. Every time I tell someone this, the follow-up question is always, “Where’s that?” and I explain its proximity to Chattanooga (only about 40 miles to the north!) and explain what the Scopes Monkey Trial was (short version: the ACLU paid for a high school biology teacher to challenge the Butler Act, which made it illegal to teach evolution in Tennessee public schools, and a media circus erupted. The trial remains the biggest event in the town’s history).
“Evolving” is part memoir, part interview session on RHE’s evangelical life growing up in Dayton, where she moved when she was 13 after her dad took a job at Bryan College (named for William Jennings Bryan, who defended creationism during the Scopes Monkey Trial), the small Christian school in town. Reading it, I saw many of my same questions about faith and my family’s hometown reflected back at me, with no judgments.
“Rachel was ‘for’ Dayton,” Sarah Bessey and Jeff Chu wrote in a tribute to RHE this week in the Washington Post.
“Outsiders might have asked how a progressive daughter of a conservative town could feel so at home, but to Rachel, the question answered itself: She may have disagreed with them sometimes, but Dayton’s people were her people. She honored them, wanted the best for them and insistently stayed among them.”
Indeed, in looking back at the many underlined passages in my copy of “Evolving,” this one jumps out:
“Whether we like it or not, love is available to all people everywhere to be interpreted differently, screwed up differently, and manifested differently. Love is bigger than faith, and it’s bigger than works, for it inhabits and transcends both.”
I read “Evolving” at the right time in my life, when I was exploring faith options that I didn’t grow up with. I converted to Catholicism from Southern Baptist, and although RHE stayed Protestant, her book “Searching For Sunday” was a comforting reassurance that it was OK to not have everything figured out, and it would be OK to carve a space out for yourself in your faith. My faith identity now is somewhere in between Baptist and Catholic — someone who is as at home with standing, kneeling and confessing as I am with singing “Are You Washed In the Blood” and practicing “sword drills.” I’m still figuring it out (aren’t we all, to some degree?), and that’s OK.
I say all of this not to make someone else’s death about me, but to illustrate how I’m but one of the many people who didn’t know RHE who were impacted by her words and her faith. If that message — It’s OK to question — was important for me to hear, how much better it must have been to hear for those Christians who are gay, or who felt disenfranchised because of their gender, or the color of their skin, or their political beliefs.
And now, when people ask me where my family is from, and the follow-up is, “Where’s that?” I’ll explain that it’s where Rachel Held Evans was from.
A GoFundMe has been set up for Rachel’s family to help pay for funeral costs, hospital bills and other living expenses. If you would like to donate, click here.
News also broke this week that Rachel’s last book, “Inspired,” won’t be her last. HarperOne will release her final book, “Wholehearted Faith,” in October.
RIP to John Singleton and Peter Mayhew
In more sad news, the film industry lost two giants over the last few weeks. Director Joh Singleton died Sunday, April 28 in Los Angeles. He was 51 years old. His family took him off of life support after he suffered a stroke in early April. He is survived by his parents, an ex-wife and seven children.
Most famous for his 1991 writing and directorial debut “Boyz n the Hood,” Singleton’s whole career was geared toward black representation in Hollywood. Aside from “Hood” and other important cultural landmarks like “Poetic Justice” and “Rosewood,” his genre film instincts were also firmly intact. “2 Fast 2 Furious” is one of the worst “Fast & Furious” entires, but it’s also looks like it was one of the most fun to make and looks like it has its own identity; the gritty revenge flick “Four Brothers” is essentially a Western set in Detroit. He made films his way on his own terms. May he rest in peace.
Then, Peter Mayhew, AKA Chewbacca from “Star Wars,” died from a heart attack Tuesday, April 30 in Boyd, Texas. He was 74 years old. He is survived by a wife and three children.
Long done with playing everyone’s favorite Wookiee after knee surgery necessitated the use of a wheelchair and later a walker, Mayhew still embodied the heart of Chewie for “Star Wars” fan worldwide at the time of his death. I had the privilege of meeting him in Decatur, Texas at a benefit dinner in 2015, and he was just as I had hoped: stately and gracious. May you now get all those medals you so deserve, Chewie. Rest In Peace.
More: Here’s my friend and former colleague Richard Greene on Mayhew’s Texas legacy
Summertime, and making remakes is easy
Now that “Avengers: Endgame” is out and has made approximately a kajillion dollars (more on that below), Summer Movie Season is upon us. I broke down every big movie being released from now until the beginning of September right here at jakeharrisblog.com. Check it out, and let me know what movie you’re most excited for!
Oh, snap: ‘Endgame’ just decimated box office records
In addition to restoring life on Earth to how it was Pre-Snapture, the Avengers have set a lot of box office records. In the mere two weeks since “Avengers: Endgame” went into wide release, it’s already the top domestic ($652,935,585) and global release of 2019 ($1,650,300,000), according to Box Office Mojo. That’s a lot of shawarma and cheeseburgers. Actually, that’s more than the GDP of all of South Korea, according to the CIA World Factbook.
It hit the $2 billion worldwide mark faster than any film in history. “Titanic” and “Avatar” director James Cameron even tweeted his congrats to Marvel on Wednesday after “Endgame” sank “Titanic”’s box office record:
However, “Avatar” still holds the total worldwide box office gross record, at $2,787,965,087, according to Box Office Mojo. For more fascinating inside-baseball box office info on this, click here.
Trailer Park
“The Farewell”
A family discovers that its matriarch has cancer and only has a little time left. Instead of telling her, they keep her in the dark and schedule a wedding so the whole family can gather before she dies. Awkwafina looks like she’s going to steal the whole film in her first dramatic role. I cried through this whole trailer. I hope this does great at the box office.
“Spider-Man: Far from Home”
THE MULTIVERSE! MYSTERIO! NICK FURY SAYING “BITCH, PLEASE”! Technically, Phase 3 of the MCU ends here. “Homecoming” was a delight, and I’m enjoying how for two years in a row, this franchise has done a huge, overwrought hero opera followed by a smaller-scale story.
“IT: Chapter Two”
The Loser’s Club returns to Derry 27 years later to defeat Dat Boi Pennywise. I loved the first film and its preference for coming-of-age material over jump scares. This scene featuring Jessica Chastain as adult Bev is so, so creepy, and hopefully the rest of the adult cast is up to the challenge. If anything, after seeing Bill Hader flex his dramatic chops in “Skeleton Twins” and “Barry,” I’m confident he can do well here. Plus, the tension in this scene is so well-done.
Movie review: Paranoir
“Under The Silver Lake” had a hard time getting distributed and released, and after seeing it, I understand why. It’s a languid 1970s noir with a paranoid 2018 spirit, with touches of “Inherent Vice,” “Mulholland Drive” and “The Big Lebowski” thrown in. How do you market that? No wonder the trailer just features jokes from Andrew Garfield and Topher Grace.
David Robert Mitchell (“It Follows”) directs Garfield in this tale of Nice Guy Slacker meets Girl, Girl mysteriously disappears, Nice Guy Slacker takes it upon himself to become her White Knight and find her. Slacker’s journey takes him all over L.A. as he tries to piece together all of the clues and secret codes that may or may not exist in everyday life, from billboards to magazines to secret messages in music.
Garfield’s performance here is one of his best, lazy one second and then hyper-aware the next, and always vacillating between likable and downright awful. Watching him slip into paranoia is a sight to see.
I’m going to need another viewing or two to fully understand what this movie is going for, because it doesn’t want to be understood. I think that’s the point. It seems like Mitchell, after seeing the levels of Reddit theorizing that came in the wake of “It Follows,” deliberately crafted a movie where the type of Reddit Bro who could connect that movie with, like, the Cuban Missile Crisis or something, is the protagonist. In the end, the answers don’t matter, because the bigger question this is asking is as old as time itself: Why do we need to find meaning in every little thing?
So basically, I loved it. Wonder what a double feature with this and “Bad Times at the El Royale” would look like…
My rating: 5 Nintendo Power magazines out of 5
Letter of Recommendation
Movie: “Someone Great” on Netflix is good, not great, but it is a perfectly casual hangout movie if you just need some comfort food. I remain in awe of its use of needle drops in the soundtrack, which almost approaches Scorsese levels of “tastefully on the nose.”
TV: New Netflix sketch comedy show “I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson” is an absurd collection of sketches with topics on everything from car focus groups to Instagram captions to “What if the Ghost of Christmas Future came from way in the future?” At around 15 minutes for each of its six episodes, it’s easily bingeable and had me laughing out loud on the plane last weekend.
Video Game: “Cuphead” for the Switch is challenging, frustrating and a routine exercise in me losing my patience at a video game. It’s also a lot of fun.
Friday News Dump
A list of online stuff I really liked this week:
If you have to tell someone you’re smart, you’re probably dumb, and if you feel the need to tell someone you’re “country,” you’re probably not. Country music critic Grady Smith breaks down this worrisome, stupid trend in modern country music by looking at Toby Keith’s latest, “That’s Country, Bro” (via Grady Smith)
Cyberbullying articles usually end up feeling like fearmongering written by people who don’t actually spend time online (remember Momo?) but this examination into the class divide on Fortnite is real, and really sad (via Patricia Herandez at Polygon)
Taylor carries a backpack to work most days. It’s practical and easier on the shoulders. This is apparently a new trend for women in the workplace, where backpacks are rapidly replacing purses. This piece goes into why (via Olga Khazan at The Atlantic)
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See you next week,
Jake