Can you beat Pokemon without breaking the Ten Commandments?

Welcome to Modern Relics, the newsletter that digs up artefacts found at the crossroads of religion, pop culture and the internet! For example:

I’m feeling a bit unwell this week, so this will just be a quick post. Sorry!

Them: Sufjan Stevens songs were always gay and about god

About five or six people sent me this article by Lexi McMenamin in Them. “Sufjan Stevens Songs Were Always Gay and They Were Always About God”.

The singer recently made public his relationship with his partner Evans Richardson, who died in April. Before this, it was a meme to ask, “Is this Sufjan song gay or about God?”.

From Them:

I have spent the last decade moving between faith spaces, queer spaces, and organizing spaces, watching the divisions between them melt away. What I once saw as contradictions that could never be resolved now look more like a modern theology for and by LGBTQ+ people pushing for a different world. Long before Javelin, Sufjan Stevens embodied that very promise: that queerness and divinity could coexist and thrive. Being gay and being into God never had to be a binary choice.

While I’m on the subject, I’d like to recommend this post from Tyler Huckabee’s Substack, Clusterhuck. Tyler asked a bunch of his friends for their top five Sufjan songs and why they are significant. It is probably a millennial cliche now to have Sufjan Stevens as your favourite musician, but it’s really beautiful to read the perspectives of these folks about this music that has been a constant in their lives. Plus, as millennials get older, Sufjan’s musings on grief and mortality only get more relevant.

Comments!

Last week I wrote about the AI-generated Lord of the Rings icons, and the artist that actually makes them for real. Ivan writes:

It's worth adding this wonderful series of pseudo-iconographic, pseudo-tarot illustrations for "The Lord of the Rings" from Russia in 1993, just barely post-Soviet.

Also, in my roundup of Christian music that doesn’t suck, Jayne writes, “This is Seven Swans erasure.” Fair! Seven Swans by Sufjan Stevens qualifies under my rules for the post. Sorry Sufjan!

Can you beat Pokemon without breaking the Ten Commandments?

You’re religious, aren’t you?

Roblox Palestine protest

I was interested to read about this pro-Palestine protest that happened in the game Roblox.

From Kotaku:

On October 23, an X (formerly Twitter) user shared a post that read “y’all my cousin is 15 and couldn’t join a protest so she just went to one on roblox bro i’m crying.” In the replies, people posted footage of the Roblox protest, which boasted hundreds of players waving Palestinian flags walking down a massive, red brick road lined with more Palestinian flags.

@roshanotgamerLebih ‘200’ player roblox telah berkumpul untuk “Solidarity UntukMu Palestine”. @Cikgu Zyd Gaming ✪ @Akif Iskandar #fyp #palestine #foryou #roblox #robloxfyp #israelkoyak #robloxedit #fypシ #fypシ゚viral #foryoupage #visitisrael #robloxstory #bloxfruit #bladeball #robloxgames

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Expanding the Quaker Oats picture using AI

Apparently the prompt for this was simply “The FULL Quaker Oats painting”.

BL Bible

Okay that’s all from me this week. Have a good one!