A Year Marked by Disaster
Amidst the variety of experiences of disaster, sacred arts and ritual emerge as ways to acknowledge, remember, heal, and hope.
How do music, the arts, ritual, and worship affect the way we experience disasters? How do they help us make sense of death, loss, and anguish? In a year that has been marked by disaster for so many people across the globe, these questions are as important as ever. This issue of The Yale ISM Review invites readers to explore these questions in several different contexts: from COVID-19 to migration, from racial oppression to climate change. Amidst the variety of experiences of disaster, sacred arts and ritual emerge in these articles as ways to acknowledge, remember, heal, and hope.
On The Cover
Winslow Homer (1836-1910) is one of America’s greatest watercolorists. This well-known painting titled “After the Hurricane, Bahamas” was painted in 1899 and was inspired by Homer’s travels around the Caribbean. A self-taught artist, Homer had a keen sense of the expressive possibilities of color. The contrast of light and dark in this piece displays a storm recently passed but still threatening, with the bright sun illuminating the destruction left in its wake.
In this Issue
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- Disasters and Worship Today
Bold Humility: Dismantling White Supremacy Culture in White-Dominant Churches
The sense of community so important for religious congregations is rooted in the experience of response and reciprocity.
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- Disasters and Worship Today
Building Communities of Song in Online Spaces
Choral director and music educator Robin Freeman examines what this has meant for group singing in congregations.
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- Depicting the Liminal: Art, Migration, and Occupation
Eye of Witness, Hand of Faith: The Art of Asylum and New Retablos at the Border
Valarie Lee James’s photo essay shows us the inexorable relationship between hope and fear.
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- Depicting the Liminal: Art, Migration, and Occupation
Faces of Disaster
Margaret Olin, a scholar of art and visual culture, writes about the portraits that populate the outdoor walls of Dheisheh, a Palestinian refugee camp
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- Disaster and After
Jewish Liturgical Responses to the Roman Destruction of the Temple
Until its destruction, the Jerusalem Temple stood at the heart of Jewish religious life, centralizing worship, law, and communal identity.
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- Disasters and Worship Today
Music as Embodied Memory in a Time of Crisis
Antonio Alonso discusses in his article, on the memories those songs contain.
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- Disaster and After
Notes on Grief
As LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant writes, rituals “live deep within us, waiting to be unlocked.”
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- Disasters and Worship Today
Preaching During the Twin Pandemics of COVID-19 and Racism: A Conversation with Lisa Thompson and Andrew Wymer
The sense of community so important for religious congregations is rooted in the experience of response and reciprocity.
