ARC Emerging Leaders 2020 Fellowship

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We are now accepting applications for the 2020 ARCEL Fellowship.

This program is focused on those who are exploring a deepening call to serve in a way that brings together spiritual and creative practices. Creativity, imagination, and the arts have a vital role to play in our faith, and ARC is proud to build on the long list of ARC Fellows from the past by making a particular commitment to support rising leaders in this work.

What is the ARCEL Fellowship?

The Emerging ARC Leaders Fellowship is a program designed to accomplish four things:

  1. Identify, annually, six rising young leaders whose sense of calling lives at the intersection of creative practice, spirituality, and work that builds up communities. These leaders will be drawn from gap-year young adults, undergraduates, graduate students, working artists, and early career clergy.

  2. Provide these leaders with exposure to tools, models, and relationships that can help them to thrive in their individual contexts and communities where they may feel disconnected and relatively unsupported in terms of their work to braid together creative and spiritual practices.

  3. Encourage these leaders as they wrestle with their sense of call, introducing them to each other and to networks of other leaders who are at the edge of innovation and discovery about the ways in which the arts and religion can be twinned to produce transformative opportunities for reflection and change.

  4. Make Space for the fellows to reflect and discern how their own unique skills can best be used to promote the flourishing of all creation.

Note: This is less of a training program and more of an opportunity for reflection, re-orientation, and consideration of what leadership might look like for you in your work. While Fellows will almost certainly pick up some skills and develop new ways of discussing their work, inspiration, and service, this Fellowship is more about helping you to clarify, sharpen, and reinforce your own sense of personal trajectory.

Applications or questions should be sent to ARCEL@ArtsReligionCulture.org. All application materials must be submitted by May 31, 2020 and all decisions will be announced no later than by June 10, 2020.

More information about the program is available here.

Chronicles 5.8.20: The Companion

This post is part of ARC’s Chronicles of Change and Hope series. This is a curated project for sharing stories, songs, prayers, poems, images, or insights that capture a moment of connection or new life. It is a place to share small acts of resistance or transformation you want others to know about. Rights remain with the contributors. To contribute to Chronicles, read more here.

Today’s contribution of text and image comes to us from Berit Engen, a fine-arts weaver. Born in Norway, 1955, she currently lives and works in Oak Park, IL. She shares that in the spring of 2007 she asked herself, “How can I contribute to Judaism by using my talents and skills?” The following Rosh Hashanah, she started project, “WEFT and D'RASH – Weaving a Thousand Jewish Tapesries.” She now now combines her love of her Norwegian heritage with her love of Judaism. More about Berit and her work is available here. Talking about this contribution, Berit says:

I felt like contributing with these three tapestries as they, and the lines from the psalms which I chose to weave, express both despair and relief. They treasure God’s Creation, but the Creation is not always pretty; a challenge that is difficult to deal with. Now, in springtime, there are blossoms and beauty everywhere I look, and then there is the invisible attacker on life, the virus. Where do I turn?

The Companion

The Book of Psalms (I call it “The Companion”) moves me as it grew out of the human experience to help us confront the tests of life. A book of largely personal prayers, it gives each of us, regardless of our verbal skills, an opportunity to speak and cry to God in beautifully crafted language. Right now, that is what I need. As for my tapestries inspired by the psalms, I like to use them as commentaries to current events, and I hope they can give some comfort in these dire times.

“In the shelter of Your wings I joyously sing” (Psalm 63:8)
Tapestry woven with linen yarn / 7″ x 6″ / 2009

“My God, for You I search [. . .] in a land waste and parched with no water” (Psalm 63:2)
Tapestry woven with linen yarn / 7″ x 6″ / 2009

“From a narrow strait I called for God” (Psalm 118:5)
Tapestry woven with linen yarn / 7″ x 5.5″ / 2009

Insights: Max Yeshaye Brumberg-Kraus

Insights is an interview show featuring members of the ARC community. This week our guest is Max Yeshaye Brumberg-Kraus, an ARC member, a 2019 ARC Emerging Leaders Fellow, poet, playwright, and performing artist.

Brumberg-Kraus (they/them or he/him) lives in Saint Paul, MN. They are the co-founder of the House of Larva Drag Co-operative, performing as drag persona Çicada L’Amour, producing both small acts and full-length queer performances since 2014. He has performed at the Guthrie Theatre, Pangea World Theatre, 20% Theatre, In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, and the Rochester Arts Center. From 2017 through 2018 Brumberg-Kraus was a fellow with Pangea’s Arts Organizing Institute. As a scholar, Brumberg-Kraus's area in queer temporality, queer and feminist theology, cosmology, mythopoetics, ancient tragedy, midrash, embodiment, and reception theory.

 
 

Insights: Julie Wan

Insights is an interview show featuring members of the ARC community. This week (4.30.2020) our guest is Julie Wan, an ARC member, writer, and community builder.

Julie writes essays, memoir, travelogue, food stories, and other forms of literary nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Arts and Letters, The Washington Post Magazine, and on public radio's The Splendid Table, among others. She is the nonfiction editor of The EcoTheo Review and a co-founder of Vita Poetica, which connects artists of faith in the DC area and cultivates spiritual development through the arts. She lives in Maryland with her husband and two children.

 
 

Chronicles 4.21.20: Micro Operas Celebrating Spring

Micro Operas Celebrating Spring

This post is part of ARC’s Chronicles of Change and Hope series. This is a curated project for sharing stories, songs, prayers, poems, images, or insights that capture a moment of connection or new life. It is a place to share small acts of resistance or transformation you want others to know about. To contribute to Chronicles, read more here.

Today’s contribution comes to us from Misha Penton, a musician, director, filmmaker, and writer. Her projects blossom in many forms: live performances, video and audio works, and site specific installations. Misha has shared a multi-media exploration of spring via weekly micro-operas that are paired with brief visuals of spring bursting forth. Take a minute to let sound and image work on you.

More pieces are available here and by following #MicroOperaMonday on social media. More about Misha’s work is available here.