Featured
The Sermons I Needed to Hear Right Now. The Ezra Klein Show / NYT Podcast (Image ABC News)
This is a conversation about the relationship between Jewishness and the Jewish State. About believing some aspects of Israel have become indefensible and also believing that Israel itself must be defended. About what it means when a religion built on the lessons of exile creates a state that inflicts exile on others. About the ugly, recurrent reality of antisemitism.
In these past few months, I’ve been moved by the sermons of Rabbi Sharon Brous, which have managed to hold these paradoxes with more grace and prophetic wisdom than most. Brous is the founding and senior rabbi of IKAR, a Jewish community based in Los Angeles, and the author of the forthcoming book “The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World.” And so I asked her to be on the show to talk about things that are deeply uncomfortable to talk about. Read more and listen here
Related: The War in Gaza Is Splintering the Democratic Party. By Michelle Goldberg / NYT
Related: Palestinian Americans face fear, violence amid Israel’s war in Gaza. By Reis Thebault / Wash Post
Related: Protests suggest split among US Jews on war, but support for Israel is high. By Yonat Shimron / RNS
Political / Social
Nikole Hannah Jones’ ‘Democracy Summit’ rings the alarm about rising threats. By Gerren Keith Gaynor / The Grio
“A culture of balance and covering both sides has impeded our ability to accurately convey to the public what’s actually happening,” says the founder of Howard University’s Center for Journalism & Democracy.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Nikole Hannah Jones convened political journalists, elected officials, students and educators at Howard University earlier this week to discuss the rising threats against democracy. One political party comprised of mostly white, straight men, she argued, is rolling back democratic norms and circumventing power from a collective majority of Americans, including Black, brown and LGBTQ+ communities, as well as women and young people. Read more
Related: When It Comes to Disdain for Democracy, Trump Has Company. By Jamelle Bouie / NYT
Why Georgia Republicans Are Protecting the D.A. Who Indicted Trump. By Richard Fausset / NYT
G.O.P. leaders, including Gov. Brian Kemp, are shielding Fani T. Willis from political threats, not so much to protect her, as to protect the image of the state.
“They know that if they went after her, there would be national press berating them as being a bunch of far-right nuts,” said Roy E. Barnes, the moderate Democrat who served as governor from 1999 to 2003. “And that’s the last thing they want to do. They want to say, ‘Listen we can run this state, we can take stands that keep us prosperous.’” Read more
Related: Georgia DA asks to jail Harrison Floyd for alleged bond violation. By Bart Jensen / USA Today
The Supreme Court should have heeded Ketanji Brown Jackson’s wisdom. By George F. Will / Wash Post
Punishment that causes durable impairments of the punished person’s brain surely violates the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment proscription of “cruel and unusual punishments.” So, last week the Supreme Court’s three “liberal” justices rightly dissented against the six “conservative” justices’ decision not to hear a case concerning the all-too-common prison practice of protracted solitary confinement. Read more
Harvard Report Shows Significant Drop in Black Student Enrollment. By Atiya Jordan / Black Enterprise
The report showed that the number of Black or African American students at the school dropped from 68 in 2021 to 31 this year.
The Harvard Kennedy School has witnessed a significant drop in enrollment rates for Black students in 2023 compared to the 2021 academic year. On Nov. 14, the school released an annual diversity report to “understand demographic diversity at the Kennedy School and see where we need to improve,” according to Dean Douglas W. Elmendorf. In doing so, he pledged to create a diversity task force of faculty, staff, and students to increase the demographic diversity of the student body. Read more
Related: Universities Are Failing at Inclusion. By David Brooks / NYT
Lung cancer survival rates have risen, but data show racial inequality. By Sabrina Malhi / Wash Post
Lung cancer survival rates have increased over the past five years, but serious disparities remain among Black and Latino communities, according to the American Lung Association’s 2023 “State of Lung Cancer” report released Tuesday. (Image NCI)
The report highlights the need for better messaging about screening for lung cancer, which is still the nation’s leading cause of cancer-related deaths. The disease claims more than 120,000 lives each year, according to the American Cancer Society, in part because it is most often diagnosed at later stages when the cancer is harder to treat. Read more
Related: There’s a racial gap on covid vaccine — because of the partisan gap. By Phillip Bump / Wash Post
Howard University’s New President, Using His Unique Background for Unique Times at ‘The Mecca.’ By Nigel Roberts / Bet.com
Dr. Ben Vinson III isn’t deeply rooted in the HBCU community but is committed to seeing “the Mecca” flourish and to nurturing Black excellence. Growing up in Europe fueled his curiosity about the Black experience across the globe, planting the roots of his lifelong passion to become a historian of the African diaspora. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
The Religious Right Finally Calls Christ’s Teachings, “Woke,” “Liberal,” and “Weak.” By Julie Nichols / Patheos
We (Christian Left) predicted this might happen. The signs have manifested for at least 5 years now, even longer.
The Religious Right finally calls the teachings of Jesus “Woke,” “Liberal,” and “Weak.” Let me again clarify who the Religious Right is. The Religious Right is not most Christians. It’s a percentage of mostly white American Christians, under 15%, in all branches of Christendom (Evangelical, Catholic/Orthodox, Protestant) who are weaponing the Christian faith for purposes of political power. Read more
New book ‘bell hooks’ Spiritual Vision’ celebrates and examines hooks’ interior life. By Amanda Bolanos / NCR
Nadra Nittle’s new book, bell hooks’ Spiritual Vision: Buddhist, Christian, and Feminist, offers an account of hooks’ thoughtful engagement with her interior life.
Ultimately, Nittle’s book offers a blueprint to the interior life of bell hooks, reflecting on how a dedication to her Buddhist roots strengthened her relationship with Christianity, and vice versa. For hooks, Buddhism, Christianity and feminism work together, not against each other. Read more
American Christians and the Anti-American Temptation. By Russell Moore / CT
Christians can love America—with all of its flaws and failures—precisely because we don’t expect it to be the kingdom of God.
If any political idea in American life has proven itself over the past several years, I can’t think of a better candidate than the “horseshoe theory”—the notion that, at their extremes, Left and Right bend toward each other, sometimes as to be almost indistinguishable. One of the ways we can see this is in a bleak and darkening view of the United States of America. The question is not so much whether extremists of the Right or Left seem to hate America these days as much as it is the question of why. Read more
Advertisers Flee X as Outcry Over Musk’s Endorsement of Antisemitic Post Grows. Ryan Mac, Brooks Barnes and
Disney, Apple, Paramount and Lionsgate halted marketing on X, formerly Twitter, as Elon Musk faced a furor over antisemitic abuse on his social media platform.
Mr. Musk, who bought Twitter last year and renamed it X, has been under scrutiny for months for allowing and even stoking antisemitic abuse on the site. That snowballed on Wednesday when the tech billionaire agreed with a post on X that accused Jewish people who are facing antisemitism amid the Israel-Hamas war of pushing the “exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them” and supporting the immigration of “hordes of minorities.” “You have said the actual truth,” Mr. Musk replied. Read more
Historical / Cultural
How Reconstruction Created American Public Education. By Adam Harris / The Atlantic
Freedpeople and their advocates persuaded the nation to embrace schooling for all. (Image New Georgia Encyclopedia)
Before the civil war, America had few institutions like Antioch College. Founded in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1850, Antioch was coed and unaffiliated with any religious sect; it was also the first college in the nation to hire a woman to serve on its faculty as an equal with her male colleagues. It was unquestionably progressive, and would not have been that way without its first president: Horace Mann. Read more
Should Frederick Douglass be posed in a rap squat? Descendants say no. By Petuyla Dvorak / Wash Post
The man on the building-high mural is crouched in a rap squat, his suit cut slim and feet in high-top Converse sneakers. Behind him, the word “liberty” appears as spray-painted graffiti, still dripping. A chunky watch adorns his wrist.
The interpretation, unveiled at a recent festival in the Chesapeake tidewater hamlet of Easton, is dividing the town and fueling debate over how America redefines and reimagines its ever-present past. Read more
The urgent need for a truth and healing commission on Indian boarding schools. By Bridget Moix / RNS
A makeshift memorial for the dozens of Indigenous children who died more than a century ago while attending a boarding school that was once located nearby is displayed under a tree July 1, 2021, in Albuquerque, N.M. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan, File)
In late May, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies in the U.S. Act was reintroduced in the Senate. We still await its reintroduction in the House. The bill, which has bipartisan support, would authorize the creation of a truth and healing commission to formally investigate, document and acknowledge past injustices of the government’s Indian boarding school policies and make recommendations for how the government should move forward with this knowledge. Read more
The Supreme Court blew a chance to fix its second-worst decision ever. By George F. Will / Wash Post
Social worker Ursula Newell-Davis in an undated photo outside her office in New Orleans. (Pacific Legal Foundation)
The Supreme Court on Oct. 2 spurned an opportunity to correct the second-worst mistake in its 233-year history. If it had agreed to hear Ursula Newell-Davis’s case, and had then decided it correctly, the court would have scrubbed a 150-year-old stain from its reputation. Newell-Davis, a New Orleans social worker with undergraduate and master’s degrees in social work and more than two decades of experience, wants to provide respite child-care services to parents who have special-needs children. But Louisiana’s Health Department requires a “Facility Need Review,” which evaluates not a caregiver’s competence but four bureaucrats’ determination that the community needs the caregiver’s services. Read more
‘Rustin’ shines a long overdue spotlight on the architect of the March on Washington. By Max Gao / NBC News
Colman Domingo stars as Bayard Rustin, a key adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. who was overlooked because of his sexuality, in the buzzy Netflix biopic.
Six decades after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech in front of an estimated 250,000 people on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a new Netflix film is shining a spotlight on one of the architects of the March on Washington who has largely been left out of the history books. Read more
Why We Have to Reckon With the Real Malcolm X. By Peniel E. Joseph / NYT
Malcolm X, Black Nationalist leader, New York, March 27, 1963 (contact sheet).Credit…Richard Avedon/The Richard Avedon Foundation
In my own research and writing on Malcolm X, I have endeavored to peel back the thick layers of historical framing that have varnished the monument. And I’ve found that, rather than devaluing the myth of Malcolm X, I’ve come to a deeper appreciation of the man. I’ve discovered a Malcolm who was more than a martyr. This is the Malcolm X who believed so much in human dignity and a revolutionary notion of freedom that he was willing to not only die for it, but to live for it — and to love for it. Read more
Black Music Sunday: Prep your holiday meal with a side of ‘that sweet soul music.’ By Denise Oliver Velez / Daily Kos
Arthur Conley sings in London, August 19, 1970
To most music fans, Arthur Conley is the answer to a trivia question – that question being, who sang the 1967 hit song, “Sweet Soul Music?” And it is a shame that, good as that song is, it is all that most know him for. Sweet Soul Music, an album released in the immediate aftermath of the single’s success showcases Conley’s stylings, showing him to be among the best southern soul singers of the late 1960s. Arthur Conley was the personal protege of the King of Soul himself, Otis Redding, who managed Conley, in addition to cowriting five of the album’s tracks, as well as producing the record. Conley does not sound much like Redding, yet he lives up to his mentor’s standard of excellence throughout this record. Read more and listen here
Sports
Michael Oher’s Foster Brothers Claim Iconic ‘Blind Side’ Scene ‘Didn’t Occur.’ By Curtis M. Wong / HuffPost
A CNN documentary, “Blindsided,” is calling out perceived inaccuracies in the 2009 film about the NFL player, which earned Sandra Bullock an Oscar.
As Michael Oher’s legal battle regarding the blockbuster movie “The Blind Side” intensifies, more people from the former NFL player’s past are casting doubt on the Hollywood portrayal of his life story. A new CNN documentary, “Blindsided,” looks into the perceived inaccuracies in the 2009 film, which earned Sandra Bullock an Academy Award. Among those interviewed by CNN were Oher’s foster brothers Nate and Quwanda Hale, who said the level of financial hardship that the athlete experienced was greatly exaggerated for the film and that his home life prior to being taken in by Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy was vastly different from the way it was depicted on-screen. Read more
Bronny James Tumbles, But $93K Loss Pushes Shedeur Sanders Much Deeper in the NIL Race. By Dhruv Shastry / Essentially Sports
The Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) is as an important part of a student-athlete’s journey. This concept, however, is more like a ranking of the players, who are representing their colleges.
And in these rankings, the athlete who reigns supreme is the LA Lakers star’s son Bronny James. Due to his recent health condition, James’ valuation had gone down a little. Be that as it may, he still has the highest NIL valuation compared to other college athletes. The player who is just after him is the talented quarterback for the Colorado Buffaloes, Shedeur Sanders. However, his recent $93,000 drop in price has sparked debate about where he stands in the NIL race. Read more
Warriors, Timberwolves fight involves 3 ejections, Draymond Green chokehold on Rudy Gobert. By Jon Krawczynski, Anthony Slater and Marcus Thompson II / The Athletic
Golden State Warriors guard Klay Thompson, forward Draymond Green and Minnesota Timberwolves forward Jaden McDaniels were ejected after an altercation broke out in the first quarter of Tuesday’s game.
Just 1:43 into the matchup, Thompson and McDaniels got into a scuffle at midcourt that saw both players grabbing each other’s jersey. Moments later Minnesota’s Rudy Gobert — who appeared to attempt to break up the altercation — was grabbed around the neck by Green before players and coaches stepped in to break it up. Read more
Related: Warriors’ Draymond Green suspended 5 games by NBA over fight. By ESPN
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