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Originally published by The BTS Center here.  Myrtle Beach, SC, was a segregated town in the early 1900s. In town was Charlie’s Place: a Black-owned club for Black people in a town where African Americans were not allowed in the ocean for fear of tainting it for the Whites.  Charlie’s Place: Music, Mystery, & Civil Rights In a podcast by the same name, Charlie’s Place, we learn that it also welcomed White people. Host Rhym Ruissé names how art in the form of music “was showing the truth, showing how ridiculous and evil those barriers were.” Years ago, I thought about applying to an art school to study ceramics. I decided not to out of fear of my parents’ reaction and because I had not won my high school’s ceramics prize. I let others and my projections onto others stop me. I don’t believe this happens with true artists. Be it in obscurity or in front of Art Basel and Grammy audiences, artists seem moved to create sound, textures, textiles, images, and compositions with a compulsion to create and speak that cannot be so quickly stopped. I went on to study literature, sociology, and divinity. In literature, I relished the written word, the process of comparing and contrasting themes in fiction, encountering how peoples from different times and geographies understood death and freedom. In sociology, I found language for the world I witnessed: the institutional oppression of queer people through law; the interpersonal oppression of women and children through sexual violence; the power of professions to categorize and claim authority over whole populations. And in divinity, I met the artist’s companions: prophets. I grew up pretty heavily churched, but I would not say the role of prophecy or the work of prophets was ever explained. I just knew prophets were important, and I was supposed to believe Jesus was the best one, and that people who happened to be born in cultures that did not gather around Jesus were outside of holy favor. The prophets I met in seminary, though, often said the same about those who upheld that exclusionary judgment. I also learned that prophets do not necessarily prophesy like a seer or fortune teller. Rather, the dreams of prophets and the truth they tell about our current condition can chart a way out of the no-way of oppression. And they are compelled to do so; they are (except for Jonah the runaway) unrelenting and unflinching voice boxes for the pain of creation and Creator. We may love when a prophet like Amos proclaims justice like a river and righteousness like a never-failing stream; but do we listen when his words are not for our comfort but for our direction?  Salvator Mundi, Leonardo da Vinci Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi may have been the highest selling painting to date, but does the subject’s message inspire others to spend the same $450,300,000 on the ones the world-healer adored? With both art and prophets we have to make a choice: to look and to listen or to turn away and decry. Art and prophets also point to the choices we have.  Kara Walker, photograph: Ari Marcopoulos Kara Walker Black American multimedia visual artist, professor In black and white, Walker tells the truth about Black and White. The first time I saw her silhouette installations, I was pinned in place. Part of my response was to the medium. I grew up in a house with a silhouette of my sister’s profile on the wall—an old-fashioned, homey piece. But the bulk of my emotional movement and physical stillness was in response to the content. Through nearly or fully life-sized outlines, with clarity, sarcasm, humor, and horror, Walker depicts American chattel slavery and the debasement of people of African origin and roots. Consider:
Parts remind me of Francisco de Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son and the myth it illustrates: individuals (or a nation) consuming their own children out of the fear of losing power. Today as White people express shock at how depraved a government can be, how quickly the rule of law and social norms have collapsed, Walker’s work illustrates how Black and African American people have always know this to be the rule, not the exception. Just as in the Hebrew Bible book of Isaiah, when the people wonder how God could let God’s own city fall, the prophet turns their attention back to themselves: The effect is your own cause. And a survivable future will not likely come from the hearts and hands of those who have done the harm.  Cannupa Hanska Luger, photograph by Shayla Blatchford (Diné), 2025 Cannupa Hanska Luger Lakota, Enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold, multimedia visual artist and writer One of Luger’s major ongoing projects is called Future Ancestral Technologies. In it, Luger often uses stereotypes of Indigenous people, as well as myth, science fiction, old technologies, and the trash of capitalism to create beings (and billboards) that proclaim, “We Survive You.” This is not art made for me or for the White Western billionaire class to collect and store as investment, for ego. Luger’s art is for survivors of machines of hate and disregard: a perspective that cannot be found among the owner class but that speaks the language of the owned into a new reality. Consider: People who have already survived ecological devastation, cultural decimation, and the highest rates of poverty in this colonial state know something about survival that I cannot. Fortunately, blessedly, any of us with eyes to see and ears to hear, as Jesus liked to say, can learn from artists and prophets. Back to Jonah, the runaway. Jonah’s story is not only about surviving being swallowed by a big fish. It’s also about his initial refusal to prophecy (prophets are not a kind apart but regular people who choose to participate) and the big fit he pitches when God so easily accepted those heathen Ninevites into the holy fold. Jonah did not want to hear or see either. I often feel I cannot bear to hear or see the realities of climate change. I know that the real threat to oceans, what lives in them, and those who make a living from them is White Western capitalism, not Black people at South Carolina beaches. Racism and my role in it, as well as homophobia and poverty, have been where I learn and work. But the death of Lonesome George, the last of the giant Pinta Island tortoises, and the pending collapse of our food system have felt like more than my body can hold. Maybe you can relate. Through encounters with the more-than-human world, invitations from trees and bees, I now track what climate change has wrought on my little part of southeast Illinois. I now sit weekly in companionship with others who are navigating climate grief. And I invite you to do the same with me, Rev. Ash Temin, and the notions of prophetic tasks and imagination as formulated by Walter Brueggemann and with poetry collected by Ada Limón. Next week, we will begin to play with the art of poets and the work of prophets. We will also receive from their imaginations possible futures. And as we hear the ugly truth of what our species has done to our one-and-only planet, we will bring into dialogue what prophets and poets have asked people to do through every age: grieve, hope, be neighborly, walk into newness no matter how unfamiliar or scary. I resisted a call to artistry a long time ago, but I have always known the power of the arts to bring us together to move, to mourn, to meditate. So, I do not want to be like Jonah, all angry that things do not work out the way that makes me comfortable and affirms my specialness. I want to be like the Magdalene, who went to the places of deepest loss and pain but returned with a future complicated but not yet dead. How about you?  Poetry + The Prophetic Voice: A Book Study
5 Tuesdays • May 5 – June 9, 2026 4:00 – 5:30pm ET • Zoom • $55 Price includes registration for a virtual event with poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, comic artist Madeleine Jubilee Saito, and musician Aly Halpert. Scholarships are also available if finances are a barrier to your participation. Learn more or register here.
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