Join us on Saturday, October 11, for a screening by The Abortion Clinic Film Collective, a group of feminist filmmakers with diverse backgrounds and distinctive styles who came together from around the country in the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade. In the ACFC series, we hear from medical directors and staff, mothers and daughters, criminal defense attorneys and advocates, about how their personal and professional lives have been affected post-Dobbs. Each portal provides a window into the broad and life-threatening ramifications of that Supreme Court decision and its devastating legacy for the health and well-being of our country and people.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with filmmakers Cali M. Banks, Lori Felker, KellyGallagher, Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, Đoan Hoàng, Luiza Parvu, Raymond Rea, Lynne Sachs, and Sasha Waters.
About:
The ACFC was born out of rage. After the overturn of Roe V Wade and the end to a woman’s federal right to abortion, I began reaching out to filmmakers from across the country. I asked if they would contribute to a project looking at the impact from different states’ perspectives, especially in those areas most affected. The Abortion Clinic Film Collective was born. In haste and with limited access to resources, seven films were created focusing on states from Arizona to Tennessee, South Dakota to Texas, and beyond.
-Kristy Guevara-Flanagan
Films
A Mile and a Half by Raymond Rea
Contractions by Lynne Sachs
As Long As We Can by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan
Retracing Our Steps by Kelly Gallagher
Longest Walk by Đoan Hoàng Curtis
We Are About to Commit a Felony by Sasha Waters
Hemorrhage by Ruth Hayes
Catch Us On The Way Down by Cali M. Banks
What Was (Working Title) by Lindsay Opoku-Acheampong
Lynne Sachs has always defied easy labeling. She captures movement and skin texture, fragments of speech, casual moments, and hidden personal memories, weaving them into unexpected images… She elevates personal experience into dramatic expression… and uses a diverse range of cinematic languages to record and digest the world, presenting it to the audience through the beauty of performance.
—Excerpt from Ren Scateni’s 2020 article
Lynne Sachs, a master of experimental documentary, has carved a unique niche in the field of experimental nonfiction over the past four decades. Her work is diverse not only in form but also in subject matter. She uniquely interweaves the personal and the social, the poetic and the political. Her work often spans a variety of media, including sound, performance, correspondence, and archival footage, integrating nonfiction narrative, poetry, feminism, and experimental aesthetics. She frequently collaborates with diverse artists to explore the boundaries of her work.
Whether she shoots on her own or collaborates with others, her work often begins with an “accident”—a poem, a powerful emotion, a chance encounter with a vintage home video, or an encounter with a friend—rather than a neat documentary proposal. Her films often blur the lines between politics and poetry, family and society, inviting viewers to view cinema as a constantly fluid space of encounters, memories, and genuine emotional concerns.
This masterclass will offer an intimate glimpse into Lynne’s rich and profound oeuvre. She will recount her journey across media, from 16mm film to video to hybrid performance, weaving the stories behind key works such as “A Film About A Father Who,” “A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer),” “Your Day is My Night,” and “The Washing Society.”
Allied/LPV has a double presence at the fair this year with Table T17 & a site specific installation, -INTERSECTIONS- for PM’s new project, The Reading Room.
Book Launches / Signings @ Allied Booth T17
Thursday September 11 7pm: Peter Cramer & Jack Waters 8pm: Ministry, Reverend Joyce McDonald
Friday September 12 3pm: Lucia Maria Minervini, Not Selfies, Portraits
Saturday September 13 Noon – 2pm: Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs – Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry 4pm: Ethan Shoshan, Self-Help Psychic Reading
Sunday September 14 2pm: Lucia Maria Minervini, Not Selfies, Portraits
Among the book artists at our Table T17 we will present:
Joyce McDonald – Ministry: Reverend Joyce McDonald – Catalogue published in conjunction with Visual AIDS and Bronx Museum for her upcoming exhibition at Bronx Museum – 2025. The first book dedicated to the sculptural practice of Reverend Joyce McDonald, published on the occasion of her solo exhibition at The Bronx Museum. Through sculpture, Reverend Joyce McDonald crafts moving testimonies to themes that have shaped her life: hope, grace, and serenity, but also hardship, loss, and devotion. Her work often depicts figures in repose or embrace, embodying the strength, support, and unconditional love that has sustained her life.McDonald began working with clay in 1997 through an art therapy program, shortly after her diagnosis with HIV. She quickly recognized the medium’s potential for healing and transformation. Working intuitively, she allows figures to emerge from the clay, giving form to memories and emotion while processing experiences of addiction, domestic violence, and illness.The fully-illustrated catalogue features essays by Kyle Croft and Dr. Jareh Das, alongside a conversation between McDonald and fellow artist Rafael Sánchez.
Lucia Maria Minervini – Not Selfies, Portraits – 2025 “Not Selfies, Portraits” began in 2012 as a reaction to the rise of the very popular and still invasive mania of taking selfies. The great respect for the long history of Portraiture inspired this digital project in response to selfies, which appeared to the author as a degradation of the historical genre of portraiture. For Lucia Minervini as a follower of Jungian psychology, these portraits trace her path of individuation through some of Jung’s great ideas: the collective unconscious, archetypes, the anima/animus and the shadow.
Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs – Hand Book: A Manual on Performance , Process, and the Labor of Laundry – 2025 Hand Book is a collection of writings and images that came out of a hybrid documentary performance and film made by Sachs and Olesker that was set within a neighborhood laundromat, a microcosm of service work within our city. With a focus on the people who wash and fold “drop-off” loads, Hand Book explores the convergence of dirt, stains, money, identity, and desire.
Sur Rodney Sur – Ribald Jack Waters – Pestilence #8 GRRRR – Various unique art books Ethan Shoshan – Various titles and objects Peter Cramer – Acqua Dotte / Covid TImes / B&W Study-The Zine.
And other unique publications from our archives including Diseased Pariah News, HYPE, Leilah Babirye monograph, RED TAPE Magazines.
Allied Productions/Le Petit Versailles presents INTERSECTIONS,a multi media installation for The Reading Room at Printed Matter NY Art Book Fair 2025. This project will encompass archival materials from various projects initiated by Peter Cramer and Jack Waters that highlight decades of art, activism and advocacy. Subjects include LGBTQ identity & AIDS politics, gentrification and preservation of NYC gardens, and will feature cable access videos as represented by HoMoVISIONES, a Latino caucus of ACT UP.
The Reading Room is a new incarnation of Friendly Fire, a program initiated in 2011 to highlight activist and grassroots-focused Fair exhibitors. The Reading Room highlights Fair exhibitors engaged in activism and grassroots struggles related to a particular theme. The NYABF 2025 Reading Room is produced in dialogue with Archivos Desviados, an ongoing exhibition at Printed Matter’s bookstore in Chelsea, and explores the relationship between publishing and queer and trans liberation, third world solidarity, and revolutionary action. In contrast to the rapid speed at which visitors move through the Fair, this program offers an alternative space to engage in close reading, critique, and reflection.
In a world of acceleration and distraction, this collection offers a cinematic pause. Through inner landscapes, gentle rituals, and attentive observation, we explore films that breathe. These works trace the intimate connection between mind and body—where thought meets sensation, and perception becomes presence. States of attention unfold into states of wellbeing, revealing how cinema can hold space for stillness, awareness, and transformation.
LABOCINE stands for LABOratory + CINEma. It’s a beautiful and necessary symbiosis affair.
LABOCINE has many identities: a platform, a magazine, a portal, an archive, a networket al.
LABOCINE’s utopian dream is to disrupt the status quo of the streaming business by allowing for more transparency, access, data and tools. It wants to tackle some existential questions around filmmaking. How do narratives come to life? What is the process + evolution of a film? Who is making and who is watching?
In Conversation: Steve Anker, Lynne Sachs, and John Sundholm.
Steve Anker is an expert on experimental film as a teacher, curator, and author.
Lynne Sachs (Brooklyn) discovered her love of filmmaking while studying in San Francisco, where she worked closely with artists including Gunvor Nelson.
John Sundholm is a Professor of Cinema Studies at Stockholm University.
A brilliant feminist classic, Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley’s first film is a dynamic polemic combining live action footage, print media, and broadcast television. Shattering the mass media’s sanitized idealizations of romance and motherhood, with loaded diapers and kitchen sink crud, Schmeerguntz is as hilarious as it is revolting. Nelson’s 1969 cinematic portrait My Name Is Oona is a magical and hypnotic portrait of her daughter set to a score composed from looping audio of the girl’s voice. Made on return trips to Sweden, Frame Line (1983) and Light Years (1987) both combine live action footage with animation techniques, creating gorgeous, layered reflections of Stockholm and the Swedish countryside, respectively.
The Last Happy Day is a stunningly beautiful essay film by Lynne Sachs, in which she uses the remarkable story of her distant cousin Sandor Lenard, a Jewish Hungarian doctor who survives two world wars, as a lens for her meditations on trauma, survival, history, and healing.
The outline of Lenard’s story is fascinating by itself: he hides his Jewishness from his first wife and children, and mysteriously disappears as the Nazis come to power. He turns up in Rome, where he works for the American army, grimly handling corpses and reconstructing the remains of American soldiers. He later moves to Brazil, where his knowledge of Baroque music wins him quick cash on a TV quiz show, enabling him to retire to a quiet life in the countryside, where he becomes famous for his translation of the book Winnie the Pooh into Latin.
The film, however, rather than simply telling his story, is a complex and exquisitely constructed film essay, in which the elements of Lenard’s story (told through his letters) are interwoven with archival footage and stills, ambient sounds, and interviews with family members. Impressionistic montages of images and sounds create a meditative and melancholy atmosphere, while superimposed text is used to reinforce key phrases from the letters. Sachs interweaves these elements into an elegiac counterpoint, much like Lenard’s beloved Bach, music which figures prominently in the soundtrack. (This soundtrack is notable for its subtle blend of historical sounds, such as radio war reports in Italian and airplanes, with music and narration.) Film footage about the war is projected onto ordinary household objects and medical equipment, an effective image of the superimposition of war memories onto daily life. The result is a double portrait, capturing Lenord’s sense of displacement, but also capturing the filmmaker’s own mind, as she investigates the story and learns more about Lenard’s life, and contemplates the variety of human responses to the devastation of war.
One of the film’s strongest and most original strategies is the use of four children as a kind of Greek chorus, commenting on the film throughout in a variety of ways. These children at times narrate the story, act it out, provide the music (pantomiming a string quartet playing Bach), and perform the story of Winnie the Pooh. The kids do not function merely as a screen onto which Sachs projects her ideas; they become as genuinely obsessed with Lenard’s story as the filmmaker herself is. (Two of them are Sachs’ daughters.) They sift through Lenard’s letters together, searching for clues to his story. Although, as children who have grown up in peaceful, prosperous America, it must be difficult for them to imagine Lenard’s experiences, they comment on them with great sophistication and empathy. (Sachs juxtaposes the kids’ scenes with contrasting images of children in fascist uniforms in Italy.) The children are always shown working as a group. Images of collaborative work, especially the collaborative work of a group investigating archival texts, are an important theme running through many of Sachs’ recent films, such as The Task of the Translator and Wind in our Hair.
Lenard’s Latin version of Winnie the Pooh is not merely a whimsical side project. The story itself is not fluff: the quoted texts acted out by the children deal with death and violence, and Lenard’s translation, as Sachs explains to the kids, consciously cites Latin poems about war. It almost seems as if, for Lenard, the study of Latin represented a civilized, educated world, the world which was utterly destroyed by two world wars, and which he never ceases to long for. As the language of science and Linnaean classifications, Latin is also part of the comforting process of ordering and containing the world, of turning the unspeakable horrors of the war into safely intellectual experiences. (Many educated people seemed to find Lenard’s translation appealing; my parents had a copy.) One begins to see how the same man who picked up bodies from the chaotic scenes of battlefields and methodically reconstructed them also translated a children’s book into Latin.
Lenard’s basic approach to the presence of war, violence, and trouble is an approach that has been central to Jewish life for thousands of years: run as far away from it as possible. The result is living in a condition of permanent spiritual exile. Like many American Jews, even before the war he found it more convenient to elaborately erase any evidence of his Jewishness. (His family name was originally Levy.) Lying, hiding, and escape become lifelong habits, making it especially challenging for Sachs to try to find out details about his story. (He hides the fact that his own father died in a concentration camp.) The images of the interviews with Lenard’s relatives are punctuated with frequent gaps in the image and sound, like the gaps in the story. This condition of uncertainty about the facts becomes a permanent part of the film, as it was a part of Lenard’s life. Like many Holocaust survivors,he becomes bitterly disillusioned when he observes that the racist ideology of Nazism, far from being discredited after the war, seems stronger than ever. His escape to Brazil seems motivated as much as anything by a disgust with Europe.
This is a man who develops a sophisticated and profound understanding of the art of healing, both for himself and for others. He surrounds his house in Brazil with healing plants, and writes that he rarely prescribes medicine for patients, instead, advising them to climb a mountain and look at the sky. The Brazilian sections of the film, near the end, are filled with entrancing tropical birdsong.
Sachs has reached a new height in her exploration of the personal essay film in The Last Happy Day. The viewer can feel the hunger for meaning and connection which drives her through her investigation, sending her to Europe and Brazil in search of clues. Her sophisticated gift for montage, which balances sounds with images in an elegantly musical form, turns her curiosity into a thing of beauty.
We are oh-so-lucky to host the most lovely presence of thee queen of contemporary film-essay, Lynne Sachs! Returning to the site of her very earliest retrospective, Lynne blesses the first section of our semi-annual SisPix with an hour of her engaged oeuvre: Beginning with a brief reading from her Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry, and Lizzie Olesker‘s Handbook: Labor of Laundry–even another perfect-bound bundle of Lynne’s image-text brilliance–she proceeds with The Washing Society cine-excerpt that best complements that new release, then clothes-pins her abortion-rights-ritual short Contractions to our riveted line-of-sight, and closes her Artist’s Talk with a few choice chapters from her forthcoming feature, Every Contact Leaves a Trace. Tonight’s second set of women’s work is constituted by a quintet of feminist films that parlay personal insights into the public sphere: Shapeshifter Kathleen Quillian‘s Wildflower Season considers her daughters’ comings-of-age, Virginia‘s Sasha Waters‘ Fragile picks up the thread, correlating a parallel trajectory into one’s middle-age, Sacramento State‘s Jenny Stark spatializes the metaphor with her Where Your Road Ends, Mine Begins, Caribbean-based Karla Betancourt‘s NewIndigo Wave extols the organic plant-based inks of Oaxaca, Mexico, and East Bay artiste Kate Dollemeyer‘s 16mm Cycladic Thermometer imagines female figurines from ancient Greece as possible agents for healing the wounds of the world. $12
We will be having our first bookstore event for Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry at the wonderful UNNAMEABLE BOOKS in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn on Monday, September 8 at 7PM.
September 8th, 7 – 8:30 PM
Unnameable Books
Reading and performance with special guests Silvia Federici and Veraalba Santa
615 Vanderbilt Ave. Brooklyn
Please join us in the bookstore’s inimitable outdoor space for our reading. We’ve invited feminist historian Silvia Federici, who wrote our foreword, and dancer Veraalba Santa who collaborated with us on our performance Every Fold Matters and film The Washing Society to join us on this special evening. You may remember Vera dancing on top of the laundromat’s machines!
Hand Book: A Manual is a collection of writings and images derived from our film and performance project which looked at the neighborhood laundromat as a microcosm of service work within our city. With a focus on the people who are paid to wash and fold, Hand Book: A Manual explores the convergence of dirt, stains, money, identity, and desire.
Please join us for a performative book event with authors Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker and actor/writer Jasmine Holloway celebrating the publication of Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry. Just published by punctum books, an independent queer- and scholar-led, community-formed publisher, Hand Book is a collection of writings and images that came out of a hybrid documentary performance and film made by Sachs and Olesker that was set within a neighborhood laundromat, a microcosm of service work within our city. With a focus on the people who wash and fold “drop-off” loads, Hand Book explores the convergence of dirt, stains, money, identity, and desire. This theatrical reading will include short essayistic pieces, a dramatic monologue and poetic dialogue distilled from real conversations with laundromat workers, against a backdrop of projected photographic images. The work will call to mind the intimacy of laundering other people’s clothes, almost like a second skin, the textural care for things kept close to the body.
Jasmine Holloway is an actor, singer, and writer who works to excavate the bones of a character before she can tell their story, honoring the life and times of the people she is portraying in a performance. Her New York theater credits include Generations atSoho Rep, and The Wiz, In The Heights, and Tambourines To Glory at Harlem Repertory Theatre.
Le Petit Versailles is a vibrant community garden, performance space, music venue and public forum for workshops, screenings and exhibitions. It is Allied’s primary program and a focal point for participants enhancing the public spaces of our neighborhood, Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The garden has an active performance and exhibit schedule during the summer months. LPV is an NYC Parks GreenThumb garden. Le Petit Versailles occupies a 20’ by 60’ lot that was formerly the site of an auto body “chop shop”. In 1996, Peter Cramer and Jack Waters began developing the site into a garden. With years of work they created a lush open space dominated by a stage that fulfills their comittment to providing a place for performers, filmmakers, and visual artists to show their work. Since its founding, Le Petit Versailles has been home to countless art exhibitions, performances, readings, film screenings, and more.
I know I am not the only one turning to parasocial relationships to stave off despair and anxiety in the Trump era.
I’m listening to adrienne maree brown, Ezra Klein and Sam, Saaed and Zach of “Vibe Check.” I get a lot out of one-sided conversations with thought-leaders who are focused on contextualizing and complicating the present, lifting up voices of current resistance and poking fun at the absurdity of fascism 3.0.
But I also need some storytelling and inspiration, and I am finding that (and more) in “Divine Intervention.” This 10-part podcast series tells the 50-year old story of a small, marginal group of young, white Catholic pacifists.
I am here to tell you: It is helping me get through it all.
The action centers around Dorchester, Massachusetts and the Paulist Center in Boston — a venerable downtown institution transformed by a cadre of young priests in the mid 1960s. They dusted out the cobwebs of the faith, roused (and rousted) the older priests, embraced the liberatory spirit of Vatican II and made going to church “a happening,” with slideshows (the Instragram decks and PowerPoint presentations of their day), music, Bible study and community engagement.
It was totally consistent and utterly revolutionary, then, that the Paulist Center priests would offer sanctuary to a conscientious objector named Paul Couming — and become the center of the local antiwar movement. There are so many gorgeously captured moments in this series, but one I keep thinking about is the stand off between the Catholic FBI agents outside the Paulist Center — who are uncomfortable entering the sanctuary — and the Catholic peace activists who had made the sanctuary their temporary home.
It took the FBI three days to get Paul Couming out. In that time, hundreds of young people supported him, slept in the sanctuary, had meals and meetings and art making, radicalizing one another and building a culture of resistance that endured long past his arrest and trial. That scene would unfold very differently today, but show host Brendan Patrick Hughes makes the most of this clash within Catholic culture.
Hughes is a Gen X director and comedian. On the pod, he comes off as being in affable awe of his subjects, but he stays an arms length removed — dropping in occasionally to tell the listener that he’s not very religious, that he’s staggered by what his subjects are saying and doing. As I listened along to the podcast, checking back often to see if another episode had dropped, I found myself wondering who he knows in the story, how he is connected, how he got this access? He tells a very personal set of stories with both distance and intimacy. He zooms out to fill in larger geo-political context and zooms in to share archival elements like family letters and a book of meeting notes by a mysterious Father X.
“Divine Intervention” doesn’t have the same “wow, my parents were big activists” vibe that Zayd Ayers Dohrn conveys in the excellent “Mother Country Radicals” podcast about the Weather Underground. But there is an insider/outsider toggle that keeps listeners curious and invested.
Hughes wrote on Instagram, “I have been trying to get this story into the world for 20 years.” In some ways, it is a story I know pretty well — my mom (Elizabeth McAlister), father (Phil Berrigan) and uncle (Daniel Berrigan) walk in and out of the action recounted in the episodes of “Divine Intervention,” but they are not the focus. Some of the characters are familiar, and I have heard some of the stories before, like the “movement” (of hu-manure) that started the actual movement of draft file destruction. But hearing it told so well allowed me to be stunned and inspired by the power of the Catholic left.
From Paul Couming’s sanctuary at the Paulist Center, “Divine Intervention” leads the listener through a series of actions already well documented in the canon of the Catholic left — namely the Baltimore Four and Catonsville Nine draft board raids, which kicked off the hundred or more other draft board actions through the late 1960s and early 1970s. (For those wanting to go deeper, check out Lynne Sachs’s “Investigation of a Flame,” Sue Hagedorn’s “Devout and Dangerous” and Joe Tropea’s “Hit and Stay.”)
From there we hear about the 1970 Women Against Daddy Warbucks action in New York City and the Media, Pennsylvania break-in of 1971 (which Betsy Medsgers recounts with cinematic verve in “The Burglary”) and the now-infamous Harrisburg Conspiracy Trial, where letters my parents wrote to one another were intercepted and used to incriminate a group of activists on fabricated charges. We also hear about the Camden 28 draft board raid (subject of the superb 2007 documentary by Anthony Giacchino).
The characters in “Divine Intervention” experience and participate in all these resistance efforts, and Hughes has the time and the first-hand accounts to thread them (and more) all together to tell a bigger story than any one of these extraordinary episodes in American social movement history. The bigger story is one of romance and family, culture and resistance.
As he tells the story of the Camden 28 — where the activists were entrapped by a very helpful and handy provocateur on the FBI payroll — Hughes is able to emphasize that these are very real and very scared people risking everything for their beliefs. He documents how the action and its aftermath ripped families apart (including peace activists with FBI agents for brothers). The activists faced down FBI guns, decades in prison and courts that seemed stacked against them. They weren’t master strategists, they didn’t have high-paid PR people and they went to trial mostly representing themselves. They were smart and dedicated people flying by the seat of their pants — or held fast by faith (or a little of both) and working in community.
Spoiler alert: They also had the enviable experience of knowing they were right, experiencing vindication and exoneration in real time. I sobbed as I listened to the conclusion of the Camden 28 story, thinking of something my uncle, Daniel Berrigan, would always say, “Friendships are stronger than battleships.” Perhaps he learned that lesson while supporting the defendants in the Camden 28 courtroom.
Most of the people who share their lives and stories with Hughes are not the bold-faced, front-page names that have endured for the history books. I love that “Divine Intervention” centers the women of the movement, who keep the work moving, the efforts focused and laugh the whole time. Hughes celebrates the women who weave together mothering, grocery shopping, storytelling and resistance — holding the practical and the possible, the prophetic and the principled all at once! Women like Sister Anne Walsh, Anne Tobin, Cookie Ridolfi and Marianne Woodward rail against the clericalism and the sexism of the Catholic left. Hughes bolsters this with commentary from Charles Meconis, a dedicated Catholic war resister who was trained as a sociologist and wrote “With Clumsy Grace: The American Catholic left, 1961-1975.”
The Catholic left was never big, but “Divine Intervention” reminds us that the movement had a big impact. It is a lesson worth remembering as Catholicism is having “a moment.” The death of Pope Francis on Easter Monday and the appointment of the first American Pope, Robert Prevost of Chicago, aka Pope Leo XIV, means there is more curiosity about all things Catholic than usual — and an opportunity for Catholic social teaching, liberation theology and Gospel nonviolence to have a moment too. We need it as a counter to white Christian nationalism and the prominence of Catholics like JD Vance and Marco Rubio within the Trump administration.
It is worth remembering that the Catholic left is still here. We might not be front page news or on the newscrawl during the endless cycle of depressing updates from Fox News or MSNBC, but we are still doing the work. We are part of the pro-immigration/anti-ICE, anti-deportation movement. We are war tax resisters who redirect our money to worthy causes or risk jail time and foreclosure. We are in local parishes throughout the country led by lay people and women. We are part of the Catholic Worker and the labor movement and Veterans for Peace. We are present in feminist and queer movements and the anti-nuclear movement and every facet of the environmental movement. Organizations like Pax Christi and Call to Action draw inspiration from the legacy of the Catholic left. Occasional conspiracies like the Plowshares movement — where people trespass onto military bases or the campuses of weapons manufacturers to symbolically transform their destructive equipment into tools of peace — that’s the Catholic left too.
We don’t have a leader or a website, you can’t follow the Catholic left on Instagram or Facebook, but you can become a part of it. We run soup kitchens and pantries and shelters for the unhoused. We go on fasts, we march and we picket. We make art, music and liturgy. We block bombmakers, interrupt ICE assaults, hang banners and hold signs as religiously (if not moreso) as we go to church. Many of the people who share their stories in “Divine Intervention” are still doing all of this too.
My mother was always fond of pointing out that the Latin root of the word conspiracy is “breathe together” (con: together, spira: breath). Whenever she said this, I was reminded of a play on the old adage “You can take the woman out of the convent, but you can’t take the convent out of the woman.” But that is the heart of the Catholic left: People breathing, praying and studying together — and discovering their courage and following their conscience in community. Hughes’s storytelling in “Divine Intervention” gives us a piece of our history to cherish, celebrate and move us forward into the conspiracies and community called for by today’s crises.
