January Series: From Wakanda to a Rainforest to Disability Inclusion in the Church

The 2019 Oscar nominee for best costume design for her work in the hit movie Black Panther, a former international community development worker now living with his family in a village by the Brazilian rainforest, and an advocate for including all people with disabilities in the life of the church shared their stories and insights during recent January Series presentations.

Ruth Carter

Ruth Carter sought to costume the characters in the hit movie Black Panther with authentic textiles, images, jewelry, and materials that had a connection to the African continent, home of the fictional country of Wakanda.

For instance, she found and used as inspiration for a crown from a traditional married Zulu women’s hat; she wrapped certain characters in the kinds of blankets worn by members of the Lesotho tribe in South Africa; she created a costume featuring shells, beads, and leaves that partly replicated clothing worn by women of the Suri tribe in Ethiopia, and she developed a warrior’s outfit featuring elements from the Maasai and Turkana tribes in eastern Africa.

“I wanted to share and build this world of Wakanda,” she said. “This is a place to which no ticket will take you. It is a place where I wanted to honor a culture as they moved into a new-thinking society.” Wakanda is portrayed as a country steeped in tradition and yet moving toward joining the wider world.

Carter has also been nominated for Oscars in costume design for the movies Amistad and Malcolm X. Black Panther has been nominated for six academy awards.

“For every movie, I do a great deal of research. For Amistad [about a mutinied slave ship], I was able to get ideas for costumes by reading the cargo shipping logs of the materials people brought with them off the boats from that period [the 1830s],” she said. “For Malcolm X, I was able to access and read his journals from prison. I try to make everything as authentic as possible.”

Based on the Marvel comic book character of the same name, the Black Panther becomes the king of Wakanda, where limitless deposits of the magical metal vibranium are located and mined. The metal can be used to heal illness, make weapons, and create pendants that ward off attackers. Bullets can’t penetrate it. It is a fictional material that can absorb, store, and release kinetic energy.

The plot of the movie revolves around an heir apparent to the throne seeking to become king so that he can use the vibranium to attack other countries in retribution for how they exploited Africa and Africans over the centuries.

In crafting the costume for the Black Panther himself, said Carter, she thought that “if the man of steel had muscles of steel, then the Black Panther would have muscles of vibranium.” Under the suit were these muscles and at times as the Black
Panther moved, energy could be seen shooting through it like small bolts of lightning.

“This was an amazing, incredible movie to work on,” said Carter. “I knew it would be a special piece, but not that it would make $1.3 billion worldwide.”

For Carter, creating costumes is a form of artistry that she considers a type of prayer. “It feels like a gift you keep on giving. You try to make it so others feel something from it. There is the responsibility to create something new for the world. There is a spirit moving through me.”

William Powers

A leader in the slow-growth movement, William Powers and his wife were living in New York City when they tried a new spin on downsizing.

“We went from a 1,000-square-foot apartment to a 300-square-foot micro space. We got rid of 80 percent of our belongings,” said Powers, who has worked for two decades in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, and North America. “We decided to practice what we preached.”

Doing this, they focused more on their relationships and the world around them than on what they had and what they could acquire.

“Even in New York City, we decided to be more out in nature, to have more friends, and free ourselves from ambition, to live and create from deeper places,” he said.

“We slowed down in Central Park to watch a bird landing on a branch. We looked up to see the gardens growing on rooftops in Manhattan. We practiced slow parenting, setting aside more time for our children to play.”

From 2002 to 2004, Williams managed community projects in the Bolivian Amazon that won a 2003 prize for environmental innovation from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. His essays and commentaries on global issues have appeared in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune and on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air.

Powers has also spent two decades exploring and writing about the American culture of speed and its alternatives in some 50 countries around the world. Crucial, he believes, is to stop living at a breakneck pace, to slow down and look for or try to create places of silence in the midst of honking horns and loud voices. We need to pay attention and preserve God’s great creation that is everywhere, said Powers.

After several years, he and his family moved from New York City to Suraqueta, Bolivia, where, he said, “the Andes meet the Amazon. It is a gorgeous place. We’d been working there before in aid and human rights work and dreamed of going back.”

They live in a round adobe house constructed with bricks from their own land, which had been deforested. And they have planted hundreds of trees, many of them for fruit that they eat. They have a large garden and, he said, attempt “to live sustainably, in deep community and in balance with nature.”

Suraqueta, their village, is what is called a “transition town,” one of many in countries around the world that are trying to link the community with nature and with the goal of building family life and friendships by living slower lives in ways that can rely on their own resources. Often these towns have a city square for gathering, and they emphasize recycling and cutting down on use of carbon gases that are causing a change in the climate.

“We believe that you don’t need crazy economic growth in order to have well-being,” he said. “You need to live close to nature and create family and community around that. . . . We believe creation care is itself self-care, and you do it with confidence.”

Erik Carter

Church should be a place that welcomes everyone, regardless of their disabilities, to worship God on Sundays and to use their gifts to enhance God’s kingdom in this world, Erik Carter said at the January Series 2019.

Currently, only a small portion of churches have fully opened themselves to people with disabilities in North American society, where an estimated one in four people have some form of disability, said Carter, the Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Special Education and a researcher within the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center in Nashville, Tenn.

“The gap is large between meeting these needs and what is available,” he said. “Christianity should be marked by care for one another ... In our churches we need people who know you and love you because this is the key to our flourishing. We need to take friendship to a new level.”

Carter helps lead the Collaborative on Faith and Disability and the Putting Faith to Work project, and he collaborates on the annual Summer Institute on Theology and Disability. He has coauthored more than 200 articles/chapters and six books, one of which is Including People with Disabilities in Faith Communities: A Guide for Service Providers, Families, and Congregations.

Churches must be intentional about including everyone in the life of the congregation, and this especially means finding ways — often simply linking people together as friends — to support those who have disabilities. Some of those with disabilities face major challenges, while others live with struggles that aren’t so large.

Whatever the case, said Carter, God has endowed everyone with gifts that can be used in being part of a faith community. And by acknowledging and encouraging use of these gifts, a person with a disability will feel needed. “We need to design programs to move people from being an afterthought to a forethought,” said Carter.

Larger society tends to view people in “instrumental and transactional ways,” which means society judges others by what they can do to boost the economy or someone’s else’s vision for what it means to be successful. Often, only those without limitations are prized.

“This is upside down in the kingdom,” said Carter. “In God’s kingdom, a kingdom of love, we must do ministry, not apart from but among and within. I’m speaking of people who have the same deep needs to be included, to be welcomed, supported, and loved, that we all have.”