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What the Black Church Can Teach the Rest of American Christianity. The Russell Moore Show / Christianity Today Podcast

Located on the Eastside of Jacksonville Florida, Mother Midway is known as the “mother” of the Florida Conference of A.M.E. church. Organized on June 10, 1865, a few weeks after the Confederate Army surrendered to the Union in Florida, it is the first Black independent church established in Florida. Although the original church, located in the settlement of Midway, was burned by the Klan, it was replaced by the building (left), which was later replaced by the building (right). The congregation has been in continuous existence since its founding.

Dr. Walter Strickland talks about spiritual formation, God’s faithfulness, and the five anchors of Black Christianity.

Strickland, an author, educator, and pastor, joins Moore to talk about the titles that have formed their experiences as Christians and academics. They consider how slaveholders used biblical texts to defend their actions and weaponized faith against enslaved people. Strickland and Moore observe the ways that God remains faithful to his Word amid oppression and explore the phenomenon of Black worshipers leaving predominantly white churches. They discuss African American theologians, the witness of the Black church, and the five anchors that Black Christianity has contributed to the body of Christ. Listen here

Political / Social

It is Elon Musk who is now running the United States. Not Donald Trump. By Moira Donegan / The Guardian

An unelected billionaire is running the state through a shadow government without formal checks – the constitutional order, now, is largely window dressing. Cover by Time Magazine

It’s one of the humiliations of our historical moment that the constitutional order has been destroyed by such stupid and unserious people. On the trail with Donald Trump, the billionaire Elon Musk, who financed Trump’s campaign to the tune of about $250m, pledged to cut $2tn from the federal budget, a project that promised to wreck the economy, destroy the nation’s credit, eliminate programs and institutions that structure people’s lives and create an international economic and leadership vacuum into which America’s rivals – namely, China – could step. Read more

DEI programs benefit many groups, not just Black and brown communities. By Nicquel Terry Ellis / CNN

Diversity, equity and inclusion programs were created to help communities that have historically faced obstacles to equal opportunities in the workplace or felt a lack of belonging in majority-White corporate settings.

These programs expanded on the Civil Rights Act, signed in 1964 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, outlawing employment discrimination based on race, religion, sex, color and national origin, experts say. Read more

Education Department Cancels $15 Million in Grants for DEI Programs at Three Universities. By Aaron Sibarium / The Wash Free Beacon

The Department of Education on Friday canceled $15 million in federal grants that were used to fund diversity programs at three universities, according to information provided by a department official, the latest move in the Trump administration’s efforts to defund DEI.

The universities—California State University, Los Angeles; Virginia Commonwealth University; and the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota—had received a series of grants for their education schools under the Biden administration. Ostensibly meant for teacher training and development, the grants were in fact used to support courses and workshops on DEI concepts—including “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” and “linguistic supremacy”—as well as the establishment of a “social justice” center. Read more

Efficiency − or empire? How Elon Musk’s hostile takeover could end government as we know it. By Allison Stanger / The Conversation

Musk has an enormous corporate empire, ambitions in artificial intelligence, desire for financial power and a long-standing disdain for government oversight.

His access to sensitive government systems and ability to restructure agencies, with the opaque decision-making guiding DOGE to date, have positioned Musk to extract unprecedented financial and strategic benefits for both himself and his companies, which include the electric car company Tesla and space transport company SpaceX. Read more

‘We’re Being Punished’: NIH Tosses Some Grant Applications From Minority Researchers. By Maddie Khaw and Megan Zahneis / The Chronicle of Higher Ed

The National Institutes of Health has suddenly withdrawn researchers’ applications for a prestigious grant that were submitted with a diversity notation — effectively disqualifying many early-career academics from underrepresented backgrounds.

Meanwhile, a number of other grant programs directed at scholars from underrepresented backgrounds were also shuttered this week by the NIH, after President Trump signed executive orders taking aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Read more

Trump’s new attorney general plans to make fighting racism a crime. By Oliver Willis / Daily Kos

Hours after being sworn in as the U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi sent a memo within the Department of Justice instructing lawyers within the agency’s Civil Rights Division to begin probing ways to prosecute companies for instituting diversity initiatives.

Slate reports that in a memo titled “ENDING ILLEGAL DEI AND DEIA DISCRIMINATION AND PREFERENCES,” DOJ lawyers have been told to create a plan that will include “specific steps or measures to deter the use of DEI and DEIA programs or principles” and to include “proposals for criminal investigations” against those organizations. The memo marks a complete change of direction for the Civil Rights Division, which was created via the landmark 1957 Civil Rights Act. Read more

Now Is Not the Time to Tune Out. The Editorial Board / NYT

Don’t get distracted. Don’t get overwhelmed. Don’t get paralyzed and pulled into the chaos that President Trump and his allies are purposely creating with the volume and speed of executive orders.

All of this is intended to keep the country on its back heel so President Trump can blaze ahead in his drive for maximum executive power, so no one can stop the audacious, ill-conceived and frequently illegal agenda being advanced by his administration. For goodness sake, don’t tune out. Read more

World News

Trump says some white South Africans are oppressed, could be resettled in the US. They say no thanks. By Gerald Imray / The Hill

Groups representing some of South Africa’s white minority responded Saturday to a plan by President Donald Trump to offer them refugee status and resettlement in the United States by saying: thanks, but no thanks. Shown is President Ramaphosa

The plan was detailed in an executive order Trump signed Friday that stopped all aid and financial assistance to South Africa as punishment for what the Trump administration said were “rights violations” by the government against some of its white citizens. Read more

Trump’s Gaza Plan Is Not a Distraction. It’s a Potential War Crime. By Michael Tomasky / TNR

The U.S. has committed war crimes in its history, but they’ve never been part of stated peacetime policy—until this week.

When the initial shock began to wear off from Donald Trump’s announcement Tuesday evening describing his “beautiful” plans for Gaza that “everybody loves,” two schools of thought emerged. The first was that we can’t possibly take this seriously. The president apparently thought of it two hours before blurting it out. It’s preposterous on several levels. Never going to happen. Read more

More Kenyan police arrive in Haiti to shore up security mission after US funding limbo. By Reuters

More than 100 Kenyan police arrived in Haiti’s capital on Thursday to reinforce a security mission whose future has been in limbo, after the U.S. froze some funding before passing a waiver to unlock a separate batch of funds.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking from Santo Domingo alongside Dominican Republic President Luis Abinader, acknowledged that the current mission, backed by the United Nations, was not enough to solve the current crisis. Read more

Ethics / Morality / Religion

Trump to form task force aimed at rooting out ‘anti-Christian bias.’ By Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy, Francesca Chambers and Jayme Fraser / USA Today

President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order creating a Justice Department task force to eradicate what he called “anti-Christian bias” within the federal government.

The mission of the task force will be to “immediately halt all forms of anti-Christian targeting and discrimination in the federal government,” including at the Department of Justice, the FBI, the IRS and other agencies, Trump said in a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday. Read more

Editorial: Silence in the face of Trump’s cruelty is complicity. By NCR Editorial Staff

The unprecedented cruelty of the Trump administration was on full display with the news that Catholic Relief Services faces massive cuts in staff and programs because of reductions in international aid.

The U.S. was never a nation of angels. But we have aspired to noble ideals no matter how imperfectly lived over our history. We are now in danger of abandoning any pretext to living those ideals. Never before has intentional cruelty and intentional destruction of democratic institutions and norms been wedded as national policy. Read more

Tech Broligarchs Want Jesus Out of the Way. By Russell Moore / Christianity Today

It’s been a long, strange trip from George Washington to Elon Musk—and maybe we should ask if that has anything to do with Jesus.

For many years, some of us have warned that this moment’s technological platforms would lead us to the point of constitutional crisis. Most of us, though, meant that this would happen indirectly—through the erosion of social capital and the heightening of polarization by social media. Read more

Historical / Cultural

The Trump-Musk power grab has happened before — in Hungary. By Zack Beauchamp / Vox

Hungarians who lived through Viktor Orbán’s 2010 power grab warn Americans: Act now, before it’s too late.

A leader who voters rejected several years ago returns to power, largely thanks to discontent with the incumbent party’s economic performance. Almost immediately upon taking office, the leader launches a blitzkrieg designed to strengthen his personal grip on power. He claims unprecedented power over the budget, fires the leaders of government oversight agencies, and places vast policymaking power in the hands of an unelected wealthy ally. The opposition, divided and disorganized after electoral defeat, struggles to formulate an effective response as democracy begins to buckle. The country I am describing is, of course, Hungary in 2010. Read more

The ‘First Negro Novelist’ Saw the South Clearly. By Kerri K. Greenidge / NYT

A new biography of Charles W. Chesnutt, by Tess Chakkalakal, explains the friendships and tensions he had with his white literary contemporaries.

Three years after the Wilmington Massacre, in 1901, the North Carolina-born writer Charles W. Chesnutt challenged Waddell’s narrative with the publication of his second novel, “The Marrow of Tradition”: a gripping tale of family secrets, white resentment and Black ambition in the face of post-bellum racial reaction. Though Chesnutt’s masterpiece would later be called “probably the most astute political-historical novel of its day,” by the contemporary scholar Eric J. Sundquist, the book failed to make the commercial splash that its literary complexity deserved. Read more

If this love affair didn’t happen, the Harlem Renaissance may not have ever occurred. By Kay Wicker / The Grio

Veteran author Victoria Christopher Murray returns with her first solo work of historical fiction, “Harlem Rhapsody.” Jessie Fauset and W.E.B. Du Bois.

The book, out Tuesday, is a fictionalization of the lives of many of the Harlem Renaissance’s key figures, including Hughes, Countee Cullen, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the woman credited as the whole movement’s “midwife” Jessie Fauset. Read more

The Black librarian who rewrote the rules of power, gender and passing as white. By Deborah W. Parker / The Conversation

“Just Because I am a Librarian doesn’t mean I have to dress like one.” With this breezy pronouncement, Belle da Costa Greene handily differentiated herself from most librarians. She stood out for other reasons, too.

In the early 20th century – a time when men held most positions of authority – Greene was a celebrated book agent, a curator and the first director of the Morgan Library. She also earned US$10,000 a year, about $280,000 today, while other librarians were making roughly $400. She was also a Black woman who passed as white. Read more

Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose (It’s Not Acting). By David Marchese / NYT

So many of Denzel Washington’s greatest performances — from the majestic title role in “Malcolm X” to the unrepentantly corrupt cop Alonzo Harris in “Training Day” — have been defined by a riveting sense of authority, an absolute absence of pandering or the need to be liked. There’s an inner reserve deep down inside his characters that is unassailable, a little enigmatic, and that belongs to them alone.

I can’t with any certainty really say why, but things just felt easier on the second go-round. What I do know, though, is that the entire interview experience was, for me, as indelible as one of his performances. Read more

Sports

Trump’s Presence at the Super Bowl Is an Affront to Every NFL Player. By Dave Zirin / The Nation

From his position on Colin Kaepernick, to his slanders about those concerned about brain injury, the sitting president has demonstrated just how much he disrespects the NFL.

Donald Trump will be the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl, and his presence will be a gob of spit in the face of every NFL player, whether they voted for him or not. Trump’s plan to attend the game is made even more egregious by commissioner Roger Goodell’s ostentatious decision to remove the words “End Racism” from the end zone for the first time in four Super Bowls. Read more

After he reached the Super Bowl, Colin Kaepernick’s racial justice protests helped expose US views toward sports activism. By Betina Cutaia Wilkinson / The Conversation

Back in 2012, quarterback Colin Kaepernick was one of the NFL’s most popular stars. He led the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl and was just a few plays away from winning the title and lifting the Lombardi Trophy.

But America’s focus on Kaepernick’s athletic success waned in 2016. That’s when he began to kneel before games during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” to protest the deaths of young Black men at the hands of white police officers. Read more

The illusion of equal opportunity for minority NFL coaches. By Joseph N. Cooper / The Conversation

On the day after the New England Patriots ended their NFL season with a miserable 4-13 record, team owner Robert Kraft fired Jerod Mayo, the team’s first Black head coach. In a press conference following his decision, Kraft explained that he put Mayo in “an untenable situation” by hiring him to lead an underperforming team.

At the beginning of the 2024 season, the NFL set its own league record with nine of its 32 head coaching jobs held by minorities. By season’s end, three of those coaches were gone, including the Raiders’ Pierce. Pierce, like Mayo, was given one season to turn around a team with a losing record. Saleh was fired during the season. In my view as a scholar of race and professional sports, the firings revealed the NFL’s double standard for Black head coaches and suggest that Black men are still valued more for their athletic prowess than their leadership skills. Read more

Black History Month: List of first Black players to reach NBA milestones. From NBA.com Staff

Celebrating key Black players, coaches and referees who helped propel the sport of basketball and the NBA. NBA’s 1st Black starting five in 1964: No. 24 Sam Jones, No. 25 K. C. Jones, No. 6 Bill Russell, No. 16 Tom Sanders & No. 12 Willie Naulls.

In honor of Black History Month, it’s important to recognize the key Black figures who helped propel the NBA to the levels we all enjoy daily. Here’s a list of firsts from the NBA’s Black pioneers and the milestones they reached. Read more

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