Feature Stories

After spending five days planting trees in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward during a spring break service-learning trip, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign student Ariel Russell recapped how the experience gave her a firsthand look at the neighborhood’s ongoing recovery from Hurricane Katrina, along with the power of efforts driven to improve the quality of life […]

Nearly 21 years after Hurricane Katrina, Robert Green still calls New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward home. The neighborhood where he grew up looks different from what it did before the storm. A majority of residents never returned. Vacant lots stretch where family homes once stood, and many of the replacement houses built after Hurricane Katrina […]

Preston Stanley sat on his front porch, gently swaying back and forth in a white rocking chair. Surrounding him, there are several lots full of overgown weeds, swarming with mosquitoes that are buzzing through the humid air. Stanley points from lot to lot, recalling the families from his youth whose houses once stood there before […]

It’s August 2005. It’s dark outside, and the floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina keep rising higher and higher. Yvonne Blue and her family are forced into their attic, as their alternative option is to wade through the waist-deep water that has consumed the main level of their home. For one long night, Blue and her family […]

The scars of Hurricane Katrina stretch far beyond New Orleans, lingering in damaged homes, partially repaired neighborhoods and communities across Louisiana. Damage throughout New Orleans is still prevalent, even almost 21 years later, but what tends to get overlooked is the damage outside of the city. “You can still walk by houses today and see […]

For photojournalist Ted Jackson, covering Hurricane Katrina was not just about documenting destruction. It was about deciding, in real time, whether to capture suffering or step in to stop it. “I think what made my coverage different was that I found myself alone in a lot of situations, in moments of highly charged ethical decisions,” […]

In a world where African spirituality is often reduced to Bourbon Street caricatures and neon “Psychic” signs, Andrew McKee approaches his practice with a quality of quiet covertness. Based in Milwaukee, McKee’s journey into the spiritual arts is deeply personal, rooted in his own family background and cultural inheritance. While he lives far from the […]

In the heart of the French Quarter, the line between the sacred and the mundane often blurs at 4 a.m. inside a 24-hour Walmart. For Mambo Brandi Kelley, the founder of Voodoo Authentica, those early morning hours spent having fun and trying on hats with her late godmother, the renowned Mama Lola, were just as […]

Located in the southern corner of Louis Armstrong Park, just outside the perimeter of the French Quarter, lies Congo Square—a sacred open space that served as the cultural and spiritual beating heart for enslaved and free Black people in antebellum America. Beginning in the eighteenth century under Code Noir regulations, Sunday was designated as a […]

Nana Sula, a veteran priestess and vice president of the Congo Square board, rejects the modern tendency to broadcast ancient rituals, viewing the public display of spirituality as a betrayal of the ancestors who fought to preserve these traditions in secret. She argues that the commercialization of the craft has stripped it of its inherent […]

For Laurita Marie, the journey from a strict Catholic upbringing to becoming a high priestess in both the Ifa tradition—as Iyanifa Ifashade—and Haitian Vodou—as Mambo Aqua Wiwa—represents a profound reclamation of self. A New Orleans native and granddaughter of a Baptist minister, Marie turned to the Orishas at age 19 after navigating personal trauma and […]

In the heart of the French Quarter, the Island of Salvation Botanica serves as both a sanctuary and a focal point for the city’s complex spiritual landscape. For Sallie Ann Glassman, Mambo Osagway, the work of African-derived spirituality is an ongoing battle against a centuries-old effort to cast the practice as something to be feared. […]