A New Newsletter from Ekstasis
True Myth for a Hypermodern Age
I have high hopes for the literary work and community of Ekstasis and am thrilled by its growth and resonance. But the reality is, often the only people who care about a literary journal are those who are published there or hope to be one day, as pointed out by Katherine Barrett.
This Ecstatic Newsletter aims to bring the heart and atmosphere of Ekstasis into a more approachable and palatable format for writers and readers who aren’t normally drawn to a 2,500-word essay. Though the wave of Substack may have already crested, we're going to surf it anyway. Thank you for joining!
Zohar Atkins recently mused on Twitter:
I tend to hope that there are writers and artists characterized by overwhelming joy; I think we’ve published a few great examples in Ekstasis! Often these are writers that don’t seek recognition—we have to go find them and create spaces that are designed to host their ponderous ecstasy. The poet Mischa Willett speaks to the unmistakable dearth we sense around and in us, but pins down the worship that will go on nonetheless:
Everything is going away, and what rushes in to replace what was once the world is action for its own sake. But despite all the hammering, the heart endures, as the tongue still praises despite the teeth.— Mischa Willett “The Elegy Beta”
The phrase “true myth for a hypermodern age” came to me as I listened to a talk on the Danube River, halfway between a sermon and an art history lecture. Dr. Tim Dalrymple offered a moving reflection to prepare a group as we were about to witness the spectacle of the Oberammergau Passion Play. The production is a stunning theatrical feat with rare religious energy, put on every 10 years by a small town that was spared from the plague in the 1600s. As a result, they made a pledge to God that they would thank him with a decennial performance.
As Tim took us through historical representations of the Passion of the Christ, he layered the visual mediums, aesthetic ethos, and cultural contexts of the familiar story, one on top of the other, in a stack of color palettes and political circumstances. It was slow and careful, but I could feel something being built up in me, something that I’m not used to feeling in regard to the stories so central to our faith. I was confronted with the inviting complexity and various dimensions of the story of salvation on this weird planet among very different people and places. This narrative at the heart of our faith can seem too familiar at times, letting us off the hook of taking its strangeness seriously. In discovering the never-ending, forever-rich implications all around us, in the continuous unfolding of that same true myth, we will feature work that crackles with a kingdom-focused electricity. No matter where we go in our writing, we grasp at the Good Ending of a story that wasn’t afraid of even the darkest, bleakest despair. We will feature work that engages with the past, encounters the present, and explores the future with an ecstatic verve.
In his recent essay on AI-generated images, L.M. Sacasas quotes Annie Dorsen as she captures the intertwining (and sometimes stultifying) quality of the arts that I got a taste of during the Danube talk:
“When industrial technology is applied to aesthetics, ‘conditioning,’ as Stiegler writes, ‘substitutes for experience.’ That’s bad not just because of the dulling sameness of a world of infinite but meaningless variety (in shades of teal and orange). It’s bad because a person who lives in the malaise of symbolic misery is, like political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s lonely subject who has forgotten how to think, incapable of forming an inner life. Loneliness, Arendt writes, feels like ‘not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.’ Art should be a bulwark against that loneliness, nourishing and cultivating our connections to each other and to ourselves—both for those who experience it and those who make it.” — Annie Dorsen
In that vein, we hope to nourish the sense that “something deep is going on here,” and pique the curiosity of people who hold to the Christian faith but don’t fit into the media categories that are currently established in the contemporary Christian landscape. We don’t base our vision solely on the foundation of Tolkien & Lewis, and we are not satisfied with the simple call to create that doesn’t take curiosity and craft seriously. We aim to foster an aesthetic trajectory that takes the best of the New York publishing industry, the Los Angeles art scene, and the worldwide church that plays in 10,000 places. This includes the visions within the commercial advertising studio, the improv night club, the humanitarian non-profit, and the plush chair where a creative soul thinks beyond the megachurch plaster.
The Ecstatic Newsletter wants to connect those who feel the hammering of their heart and the worship on their tongues; to layer the stories of history, theology, pop culture, technology, and ecclesiology in a way that offers a sense of true myth for a hypermodern age.