By Wendy McDowell

The humanities teach us many things we crave more than ever now. They teach…virtues. They teach us to have courage. They give us a way of understanding that we are not as alone as we think. They help us reckon with our mortality and that of those we love. They help us grapple with whatever we mean by fate, accident, chance, luck, miracle. They help us grasp cruelty, greed, brutality, evil in the human heart. They help us intuit the difference between being saved and being spared. They ask us—in the deepest way possible—do you really want to be spared? —Jorie Graham¹

In February of 2023, my 59-year-old brother Tim suffered a severe stroke. Initially there was hope he might gain back some functioning but he never did. Placed in a full-care nursing home, he wasted away from more than 200 pounds to 107 pounds. His limbs looked like spindly bird’s legs by the end, and he died on November 7. In December, I found out that my good friend Julia had taken her own life a couple of weeks earlier.² Meanwhile, my father was slipping into dementia at 89. After he was nearly killed attempting to cross a Wisconsin highway one night—he’d escaped his house to “get back home to New York”—my sister knew the only option was to move him into a memory care facility. He, too, declined in a matter of months and passed away on July 4, 2024.

In my grief-addled condition this past year, I’ve only been able to read poetry. Nonfiction, novels, and mysteries sit untouched and distant on the bedside table, but poetry I bring into bed with me, many nights falling asleep clutching it against my chest like a beloved teddy bear. I’ve found solace in some collections explicitly themed around loss (especially Anne Carson’s Nox, Marie Howe’s What the Living Do, and Victoria Chang’s Obit), but I’ve been especially comforted by longtime favorites, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the collected poems of Seamus Heany, Gwendolyn Brooks, Denise Levertov, Czeslaw Milosz, and Elizabeth Bishop.

Imagine my relief when I discovered that several parts of Francis X. Clooney’s memoir were centered on poetry, and that he, too, was an appreciator of T. S. Eliot. “I find that poetry can be a best teacher for the theologian,” he told me. He reflected, “comparative theology is more like poetry than it is like the scientific study of religion or the history of religions as academic disciplines. It is on the edge between disciplines, engaged in many, owned by none.” This led him to venture a defense of the humanities: “I think there has to be room for poetry and for humanistic comparative learning in a university, even if the payoff isn’t immediately quantifiable.”

What strikes me about this issue of the Bulletin is that it is a ringing endorsement of the humanities. Our authors come from many different disciplines: Black women’s studies, history, anthropology, psychology, Islamic studies, theology, ethics and politics. Henry Love is a psychologist, Sevonna Brown is a doula, Diane Mehta is a poet, Bradley Shingleton is an attorney. From their range of perspectives, they ask searching questions and propose creative solutions to some of our biggest challenges.

The dialogue section, edited presentations from the “Black Religion and Mental Health Symposium,” is required reading for us all. As Monica A. Coleman, author of Bipolar Faith, makes clear: “people who have experienced enslavement, sharecropping, sexual violence, war, poverty, ongoing state violence, reproductive injustice, and [largely forced] migration are understandably not OK.” There is a long history and deep structural racism behind the inequality that drives disproportionate homelessness in BIPOC communities, as Henry Love points out, and that drives disproportionately high rates of Black maternal morbidity and of postpartum depression, anxiety disorders, and suicidal ideation among Black mothers, as Sevonna Brown stresses.

Of course, racism does not only plague obstetrics. Judith Weisenfeld’s important work on the history of white-controlled psychiatry and insane asylums shows how “racialized theories of religion [became] part of a medical specialty that has the capacity to link long-standing racialized constructions of deviant culture and religion to biological conceptions of the normal mind.”

Conference presenters also raise up practices of collective care and resilience and name necessary interventions. Stephanie Y. Evans discusses Black women’s engagement in yoga and other practices, Love describes coalition building and mosques in African communities housing migrants in NYC, and Brown’s nonprofit Black Women’s Blueprint facilitates “somatic modalities and interventions,” holds trainings, and aims to provide “full spectrum reproductive and maternal health for Black women.”

Coleman notes that Black religious traditions already do some things well but they can propound “long-held beliefs that serve as barriers to mental health discourse,” amounting to “spiritual terrorism.”³ She recommends they start talking explicitly about mental health and for religious leaders to have relationships with trusted clinicians.

These discussions dovetail with Mara Willard’s review of Donovan X. Ramsey’s When Crack Was King, which reframes the narrative around crack cocaine as one “of Black Americans overcoming the epidemic, of the history of community mobilization and collective recovery.”

And for those of us who have ever wandered in the wilderness of grief, this issue has much to teach us. Both poems address mourning. Mayra Rivera’s lead feature on Hurricane María and its aftermath explores the ability of apocalyptic language and images to “express lament at what we already lost, at all we cannot save—acknowledging all beings in their precious particularity.” This kind of mourning necessarily includes “a critique of the systemic dimensions of ecological devastation.”

In her essay on transcendent friendships among artists, Diane Mehta identifies a different climax in Dante’s Divine Comedy than is usually suggested—not when Dante meets God in Paradiso, but when his companion Virgil leaves in Purgatorio. “There are no worthwhile stories without loss in them,” she suggests. “There is no forward motion in life without loss.”

“We are the children who leave and the parents who die,” Mehta writes. “This is our lot, and our job. Dante wants to teach us how to say goodbye.”⁴