Ekstasis, Curated
Our recent favorites in culture, art & faith
Welcome to the first edition of Ekstasis Curated. We have collected some of our favorites in culture, art, and faith this month, as well as resources to spark conversations and fuel your imagination—all bookended by a moment of ekstasis. In this November edition, enjoy links galore on topics including awe, the writing life, technology, and the election.
The Cafe: Where contemporary culture and faith mingle.
✨ Re-Enchanting... The life we have with Joshua Luke Smith
Are you paying attention while you wait at the laundry mat or sit on the metro? Poet and songwriter Joshua Luke Smith makes a pretty good case for why you should be. Tune into this interview and also his podcast, This is the main event, to be convinced of the beneficial wonder of being alive to your surroundings, tuning into suffering, and updates from the global church.
“To be a writer is to be a witness. All good writing is paying attention… Frederick Buechner says if you want to write well, pay attention to your life. You’ll find then that you’re thinking less about writing and more falling in love with your existence. So when it’s time to put pen to page, it just spills out.”
🗳️ I have a good story for you with Yi Ning Chiu
How did election chat go for you? Yi Ning relishes in a different kind of political talk—not a disembedded intellectual exercise—but a kind that remains beholden to our communities, which she beautifully connects to the incarnation of Christ.
“A few days after this meeting, however, I was trying to identify why it had felt so remarkable to me, and realized that it had provided something that has become hard to find in our political climate: a conversation about what we should believe and what we should do, inextricably tied to who we were responsible to care for.”
👾 Freya India on How to Free the Anxious Generation with Yascha Mounk
Becoming a voice of blazing honesty for her generation, Freya India has unearthed the pains that Gen Z carries as they traverse the isolated corners of the online world. Her posts on GIRLS read like Dostoevsky talking about pop culture trends and can’t help but fill you with informed empathy for a generation yearning for connection and stability.
“And so when you provide them with these online communities, online friends, it might seem like a great thing. But, unfortunately, they compare that to the real world, which is full of friction, of rejection, and the social anxiety that comes from that. The online world seems much more compelling. I think we underestimated the extent to which people would choose that over reality.”
The Bookshop: Hot off the shelf.
🖋️ Writing is torture and it's all I want to do with James K.A. Smith
A few quick tips for any of you who might be working on your own book. Jamie’s writing process is more like an energetic burst after a long marinating in ideas. What are your writing rhythms like?
“Thinking is writing; reading is writing; diagramming is writing; writing is writing. In one sense, I ‘write’ a book in about six months. In another sense, I’ve been ‘writing’ this book for 5 or 6 years… The Jamie banging at his keyboard is surfing on the Jamie who was reading, note-taking, sketching, and musing for years beforehand.”
🌗 Reclaiming Quiet on Election Day? with Sarah Clarkson
A book on the practice of quiet and the US election day might just be foils. Read this post to see how Sarah encounters such an irony. Oh, and also read her book, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention.
“And in that moment I understood quite clearly that I needed to shape Election/Launch day by the very patterns of attention, wonder, limit, and trust that I write about in the book. I am in all things, launch days and salvation, cradled by God’s kindness and provision. And that’s the whole point of living in quiet.”
👻 Make Christianity Spooky Again with Brad East
Rod Dreher’s new book, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age is making a splash around the internet and podsphere, in his usual controversial fashion. Brad’s review for Christianity Today is helpful commentary to encounter Rod’s book, which charts what the weirdness of ‘re-enchantment’, or tapping back into the spiritual realm, may look like for Christians.
“If Dreher is indeed a prophet of the Zeitgeist—whether heralding its advance or proclaiming its doom—then a new book from him is worth pausing to consider. And this one happens to be about angels, demons, exorcists, aliens, UFOs, visions, dreams, miracles, witchcraft, and the internet.”
The Pub: Your watering hole for big ideas.
🍷 Lifeblood and Hemlock Cup: On Plato, and poetry, and question-asking with Olivia Marstall
Consider this substack as a kind of poetic ‘reaction vid’ to reading Plato. Olivia finds her own questions wrapped up in his writing—calling forth a deep affection for the wisdom she finds there. This post just may tempt you to crack open a copy of Plato’s Euthyphro or The Republic.
“But when Socrates says, ‘it is the greatest good for man to discuss virtue every day,’ some spirit within me sings a resonant yes. I think Plato meant it this way, that we feel the struggle for the good in every conversation he records. Some have asserted that Plato hated poetry. In fact, Plato swallowed poetry, he drank it like the wine of mystic rites.
🤝🏾 How to Lose an Election (Well) with Zealots at the Gate Podcast
Before the election, two scholars recorded a really good conversation about the art of reckoning with differing opinions and the ethics of losing. One an evangelical Christian and one a Muslim, these friends pull on the beauties of their religious traditions to think about how politics forces us to surrender something outside of our control.
“And so to cultivate a pilgrim’s mentality and to understand that my sense of security, my sense of meaning and purpose is not going to be from this politician or this cable news network or whatever else, but it needs to be found in God.”
👩🏽🍼 Can Making Art Make You a Better Mother? with Jess Sweeney at Plough
How does motherhood affect the life of the intellect and creativity? This question seems to be buzzing lately, as people are tired of the narrative that motherhood abruptly ends these activities. Is it the case that maybe, just maybe, the embodied nature of mom life can actually enrich art and academia in certain ways?
“So much of these early years of motherhood are a series of repetitions. I often feel outside of myself, watching these cycles pass. Other times I feel too inside of myself, but a self that I do not recognize. I find that there isn’t a familiarity in the repeating; it is a kind of unselfing… That repetition is also art, the work of applying a brush stroke again and again.”
The Sanctuary: Church chat with a side of wonder.
🌱 Planting seeds of a renewed culture with The Pursuit of Good Stuff
This piece has a devotional and invitational quality to it. But it packs a punch as well, calling you into the adventure of shaping culture through the labor of creativity.
“In her brilliant essay on beauty, my friend Brigid Beney wrote that ‘Christian understandings of beauty also hold space for the not perfect and pleasing, such as death and suffering. The creative process of making… can aid churches to support those struggling with a broken world.’ God keeps choosing the use the works of faithful human-making to speak to and connect with his people.”
🏞️ Finding the Good Life Through Everyday Awe with Griffin Gooch
Thank you, Griffin, for this creative eruption around the concept of awe, offering us psychological frameworks, quotes from important thinkers, and your own personal experience. Stay tuned to the end of the post, where he puts forward three ways to integrate awe into our collective spiritual practices—via contemplation, architecture, and ‘awe walks’.
“Awe is the sense of being in the presence of something vast, powerful, or beautiful that transcends our understanding of reality. It’s almost like Immanuel Kant’s idea of ‘the sublime’ — a mixture of joyous wonder and shock that overshadows our day-to-day anxieties.”
🎨 Visual Commentary in Scripture (VCS) with King’s College London
This is truly a majestic project. Use this as a resource to bring to life the Bible passages you’re reading, which have been paired with works of art throughout history. For example, try Matthew 8 where Jesus is Calming the Storm, or Hebrews 9 to meditate on a A Sanctuary Not Made with Hands. Below, Ben Quash explains how it works:
“The VCS combines three academic disciplines: theology, art history, and biblical scholarship. While the project’s main commitment is to theology, it is responsibly informed by the latter two disciplines. Each section of the VCS is a virtual exhibition comprising a biblical passage, three art works, and their associated commentaries.”
A few more quick links for you:
🍁 Can beauty save the world? on
🕯️ A Monk's Bedtime Prayers: The Gift of Compline on The Green Door
🌟 To Be Thus Carried on Lanterns in the Dark: A Year of Poetry
❄️ The New York Times profiles author Susanna Clarke after newly released book The Wood at Midwinter
🌽 Nebraskan Mystery by Molly McCully Brown, the new Editor-in-Chief at Image Journal
🌍 Cosmic Connections: Resonating with the World with Charles Taylor & Miroslav Volf on the For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture
🏰 The Existential Angst of Faith by Duo Dickinson at Mockingbird
🪆 The Problem of Christ in The Master and Margarita by Alexander Raikin with Plough
A Moment of Ekstasis 💫
Pause, breath, and take this in. Ekstasis was born out of a desire to help us be brought outside of ourselves in an experience of awe, wonder, and worship.
“In November, the earth is growing quiet. It is making its bed, a winter bed for flowers and small creatures. The bed is white and silent, and much life can hide beneath its blankets.” – Cynthia Rylant
I had the pleasure of being part of Sarah Clarkson's launch team and felt that election day was a symbolically perfect day for "Reclaiming Quiet" to hit the shelves. Wonderful also to see Freya India, Griffin Gooch, and Olivia Marstall included in your lineup! Will be sure to add your curated lists to my regular reading:)
To Be Thus Carried—such a good piece 👏🏼