WHEN I WAS 8 years old, I fried an egg on the street. Well, I tried to fry an egg on the street. It had been a particularly brutal summer in Florida. On the days when the playground slides were too hot to go down, my mom would say, “It’s hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk!” I kept my eyes glued to that splattered yolk for two hours until a car tire brought the grand breakfast experiment to an end. Frying eggs on sidewalks was how I learned to conceptualize extreme heat.

When it comes to describing climate change urgency in Black communities, Heather McTeer Toney taps into something simple: streetlights. In Before the Streetlights Come On: Black America’s Urgent Call for Climate Solutions, she writes that when she was growing up, kids could play all day outdoors, but they had to be home “before the streetlights came on.” As twilight settled in and streetlights started to flicker, kids would call out, “Hurry up, we ain’t got all day!”

“Right now, that same call to action is carried in the waves of massive hurricanes, on the winds of devastating firestorms, and in the uncharacteristic heat of winter,” McTeer Toney writes. Using a familiar metaphor, she issues a call to action of her own.

Climate change and environmental justice is not foreign to McTeer Toney or the communities she writes about. At age 27, she was the first female and youngest person to serve as mayor of Greenville, Miss., where she was born and raised. As mayor, she brought the city out of debt and established sustainable infrastructure repair. For three years, she led the Environmental Protection Agency for the southeastern United States. While at the global nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, she addressed environmental policy and community organizing within and beyond the U.S. This spring, McTeer Toney became executive director of Beyond Petrochemicals, a campaign to stop the rapid expansion of petrochemical and plastic pollution, particularly in the Ohio River valley and along the Gulf Coast.

McTeer Toney and her family attend Oxford University United Methodist Church in Oxford, Miss. I spoke with her by phone about her work, her book, and the hope her faith demands. — Christina Colón

I know I’m not alone in feeling exhausted. In 2018, More In Common — a nonprofit that researches what’s driving political polarization — found that two-thirds of Americans share a series of characteristics that make them a part of what they call the “exhausted majority.” This group of people is “fed up with the polarization plaguing American government and society,” feels forgotten in the public discourse, and often has flexible views that don’t fit consistently in the Left/Right binary. Yet, they believe we can still find common ground. Sound familiar?

I remember the flood of emotions I felt almost a year ago when I heard that the major news networks were calling the 2020 election results: overwhelming relief and renewed hope. Far beyond a victory for then-to-become President Joe Biden, it felt like a victory for our democracy — and an imperative to resuscitate, revitalize, and reinvent that democracy.

Fast forward a year: I’m filled with a festering weariness and escalating heartache.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday endorsed two Republican-backed ballot restrictions in Arizona that a lower court found had disproportionately burdened Black, Latino and Native American voters, handing a defeat to voting rights advocates and Democrats who had challenged the measures.

The 6-3 ruling, with the court's conservative justices in the majority, held that the restrictions on early ballot collection by third parties and where absentee ballots may be cast did not violate the Voting Rights Act, a landmark 1965 federal law that prohibits racial discrimination in voting.

In president-elect Joe Biden’s acceptance speech on Saturday he “pledge[d] to be a president who seeks not to divide, but to unify. Who doesn’t see red and blue states, but a United States.”

Yet over the weekend, some social media users used their platforms to warn pastors not to conflate peace-building and unity with forced reconciliation.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a request by President Donald Trump's campaign to block North Carolina's extension of the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots in the latest voting case ahead of Tuesday's election.

The work of unlearning racism and undoing our habit of exploitation — of the earth, of other bodies, and other neighborhoods — is long.

With four weeks to go before Election Day, more than 4 million Americans already have voted, more than 50 times the 75,000 at this time in 2016, according to the United States Elections Project, which compiles early voting data.

Pamela Ebstyne King believes that “[t]hrough spirituality, people potentially have access to prosocial ideals and beliefs, a community to support them, and a source of transcendence that motivates behaviors aligned with their spiritual ideals.”