Weekly Wrap 8.9.19: The 10 Best Stories You Missed This Week | Sojourners

Weekly Wrap 8.9.19: The 10 Best Stories You Missed This Week

1. Toni Morrison, Towering Novelist of the Black Experience, Dies at 88

Morrison, who wrote “Beloved” and “Song of Solomon,” was the first African-American woman to win the Nobel in literature.

2. 'Threats of Annihilation Live in Our Bones': The Enduring Resilience of Latinx Communities

It’s tempting to believe all this has been incited by the current president’s violent rhetoric. But while that rhetoric has added much fuel to the fire, the fire has been burning for a long time.

3. The Generosity of Toni Morrison

She committed to holding the door open wide for other black writers for as long as she could, writes Hanif Abdurraqib.

4. God, Guns, and the Seductive Power of 'Spiritual Warfare'

When people ask how Christians can support Trump given the mass murders, they forget the invisible math being done.

5. Ta-Nehisi Coates Talks to Jesmyn Ward About Writing Fiction, Reparations, and the Legacy of Slavery

With his groundbreaking nonfiction works, Ta-Nehisi Coates emerged as our most vital public intellectual. Now, his debut novel, The Water Dancer, takes him to uncharted depths.

6. When Purity Culture's Gatekeepers Fail to Address Sexual Violence

The Evangelical women finding their voice in the #MeToo & #ChurchToo era.

7. Some White People Don’t Want to Hear About Slavery at Plantations Built by Slaves

"We didn't come to hear a lecture on how white people treated slaves," one plantation visitor complained in an online review. Screenshots of nasty reviews have gone viral on Twitter.

8. When the Youth Rise: How the NAACP's Youth & College Division Transformed Activism

Amid a nation wrecked with laced bigotry, pointed racism, and damning white nationalism, black voices and bodies are challenging the morale and future of this nation.

9. The Hidden Life of a Forgotten Sixteenth-Century Female Poet

Anne Lock was the first English poet to publish a sonnet cycle—more than thirty years before Philip Sidney’s “Astrophil and Stella.”

10. When American Christians Were Socialists

Capitalism was neither a natural force nor a supernatural one. This hand was not invisible and it was certainly not the hand of God.