This Friday, the festival will host "To Live In A Sea Of Happiness" - a samba concert that seeks to convey discovery and hope. The music, born in the poverty of Brazil, is an expression of joy and hope performed through music and dance, according to organizers. It will be performed by Ney Vasconcelos, Antonio Gomes, and Marcelo Rocha.
That same day, the festival will also host "Every Separation is a Link: Being Found Behind Bars," a discussion on how inmates are "found" in prison. It will include discussions with professionals such as Dr. Louis Mendoza, director of the Pen Project, a program that connects maximum-security inmates to Arizona State University students; and Ron Zeilinger, the founder of Dismas Ministry, a Catholic prison ministry based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Elisabeth Kramp is the editor-in-chief of Revolution of Tenderness' biannual journal Convivium and was one of the performers at last week's event, "From Whence Springs a Boundless Fruitfulness." Kramp recited poems, along with several other authors including Ewa Chrusciel and Suzanne M. Wolfe.
"This year I made a recording of myself reading in my study," she told CNA. "In giving a reading, I hope the language I use incites listeners' imaginations. Poetry is a way of knowing, and I'm all the richer when, through poetry, I see or sense the world in new ways. That's why I write it, and that's what I hope is transferred in a reading."
She said the author and poets were able to place their own spin on interpreting the theme, "boundless fruitfulness." For herself, she said fruitfulness inspired questions about the fruits of labor, fruits of the Holy Spirit, and the impact of language, especially as a literary artist.
"Language conveys so much of that fruit, the way that we strive to make beauty, the way that we patiently toil for words, not necessarily for books and publication, but for the sharing of ideas," she said.
Kramp described her experience as an artist during the pandemic. Putting together an issue of Convivium, she was able to read a variety of submissions from artists across the world, including poems submitted from Nigeria, Wales, France, and Siberia.
"How strange that a small journal could connect me to so many in a time when I very occasionally left my home," she reflected. "And the work on the journal knits my collaborators and I together in friendship - in spite of our being far flung across the U.S. This work has been a reminder that artistic collaboration fosters friendship, even though the overt goal is to produce the work of art."
Lewis said efforts such as the Festival of Friendship are particularly important today, given the tension and division in society.
"In a time of increasing division and polarization, when dialogue often seems impossible among opposing camps (both inside and outside the Church), we bring diverse people together to look for what is true and useful and enduring in every discipline and topic imaginable," she said. "We want to recover the art of authentic and convivial debate, and we want to share this gift with others."
"Many in the Church spend enormous resources and time answering questions that no one is asking," she continued.
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"We need first to develop a capacity for listening, so that we might hear the questions, articulated and unspoken, that our fellow human beings, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, wrestle with, and then we need to do the work of discovering, within the daily realities and the fabric of ordinary life, how our own priceless inheritance answers those questions in very particular and unique ways."
Perry West is a staff writer for Catholic News Agency. He graduated from Franciscan University with his bachelor's in English. Prior to his job at CNA, he worked in construction staffing and coffee.