WHEN I FIRST read Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “truth” early last year, I did a double take to make sure it wasn’t written in 2021. The 1987 poem personifies its titular subject as a living being that can knock its “firm knuckles / Hard on the door,” whose arrival brings an equal mix of anticipation and apprehension. Brooks describes multiple responses one can have to the arrival of truth. For those who have made peace with lies, the truth can be threatening: “Shall we not dread him, / Shall we not fear him / After so lengthy a / Session with shade?” Even for those who have longed for truth’s arrival, blissful or willful ignorance seems to be a better alternative than the terror of having to engage truth head on: “Shall we not shudder?— / Shall we not flee / Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter / Of the familiar / Propitious haze?” Regardless, Brooks makes one thing clear: The question is not a matter of if truth will come, but when. The most important question of our lives then becomes, how are we to greet it?

In the poem, Brooks doesn’t name the truth that haunts her—although since she first published it in 1949, as the stage for the civil rights movement was being set, one possibility might be the systemic mistreatment of Black people and white people’s willful obliviousness to it. I found the poem to be a peculiar comfort in this time as we try to adjust to an ever-shifting landscape of new realities and reckon with truths about ourselves we might otherwise prefer remain hidden.

Similarly, several films offer insight into how people receive truth’s advent.

Moved by Love

The limited ABC series Women of the Movement follows Mamie Till-Mobley as she grieves the murder of her son Emmett Till and fights for justice. Directed by four Black women, the show tells the true story of the woman who helped fuel the civil rights movement. Two Drifters

We are currently in the midst of what the American Library Association condemned in November as “a dramatic uptick” in efforts to challenge or remove certain books from libraries and schools. Many of these censorship efforts have been led by conservative Christians and conservative politicians who are concerned these books will dissuade their kids from embracing what they call “Judeo-Christian values.” But as Ryan Duncan explained, Christians are deluding themselves if they believe banning stories about gender, race, or sex will halt their kids’ curiosity. Ban ’em or burn ’em, these books will not disappear and kids will continue to seek out resources on these topics — to some parents’ chagrin.

Lincoln’s Dilemma, released this month on Apple TV+, presents a complicated version of the 16th president. The four-part series portrays Lincoln as a man of his time and place, wrestling with the culture war of his day: slavery.

If we analyze our current conditions, avoid circular debates, stop waiting for heroes to save us, speak honestly about our past and present, and try to change today, we might just save tomorrow.

One of the defining features of cosmopolitan Protestantism is the sweet little promise — whispered even — that Christianity is not going to ruin your life. You can still love salty language (and I do) and feel justified by holding prevailing opinions (which I do) and have many mild to moderate faults that are not polite for me to mention. Its wonderful accommodation to modernity has liberated the church from a great many sins (Phariseeism, disembodied love, political acquiescence, etc.), but I’m afraid it has laid itself quite open to the glories of idolatry. And let me be clear, idolatry — which is to say, comforting false images of a true God — is the most fun in town.

Danny McBride’s HBO show The Righteous Gemstones is a dark comedy about corrupt, hyper-wealthy Christian pastors. The Gemstone family runs a famously successful megachurch in South Carolina, but behind the scenes, they evade taxes, snort cocaine, pull knives on their friends, bicker like filthy-mouthed children, and say things like, “You are forgiven for my suspicions of you.” And though they all live in mansions on the same compound, patriarch Eli Gemstone and his three adult children — Jesse, Judy, and Kelvin — generally only come together in spirit when they need to ward off blackmailers, snoops, and evil grifters from their past: anyone who might reveal their secrets or jeopardize the family’s wealth-hoarding.

the vast

              and all its definitions had dumbfounded. I bit the hand
that fed imagination, took

for pestilence, the flies. For end-of-world, the gully washers.
I shook in handfuls
petals fetched from

                                                     doubt

THE SCENE APPEARS idyllic: “Golden sand, a vast red horizon, and shards of light scattered across the water.” But on this beach in Gaza, in Palestine, the mood is desperate. One man there describes Palestinian Christians as living artifacts of the 2,000-year-old Christian community in the Holy Land.

With grace and deep reporting, Janine di Giovanni, an acclaimed author and war correspondent, has captured the often overlooked plight of the dwindling Christian communities of the Middle East—specifically in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Palestine. The Vanishing is a tender if deeply disturbing travelogue, filled with stories told by Christians about the ferocious politics and desperate economics that shattered their communities. She writes in an elegiac tone while marveling at the resiliency of the few who remain.

Di Giovanni describes the trajectory of collapse, carefully providing the markedly different history of each country that nonetheless has led to similarly tragic outcomes.