Check out these recent articles from around the web:

Are racial justice movements straying from Catholic tradition — or are Catholic leaders out of touch? by Alessandra Harris: “The racial justice movement will continue until Black people are no longer treated as second-class citizens, segregated in economically depressed neighborhoods, denied adequate education and health care, and disproportionately incarcerated and murdered by the death penalty. I, along with millions of Christians and Catholics, will continue to carry the mantle while proclaiming the Gospel message. We do not need the U.S.C.C.B. to give us permission. We need only follow what the prophet Micah proclaims the Lord requires: to do justice, to love goodness and to walk humbly with God.”

The Racial Justice Debate Needs Civil Discourse, Not Straw Men by Esau McCaulley: “By God’s grace, we can find our way forward in the critical race theory debate and the various related disputes. That progress begins with interpreting others’ words and ideas with generosity, not with fearmongering. It begins with seeking semantic clarity and understanding semantic range. And it begins with opening to the world the whole of our faith tradition—including Christian social teaching—with the confidence that he who began a good work will carry it on to completion on the day of our Lord.”

The Black church has major generational challenges. Here’s what we’re doing about it. by  T.D. Jakes and Sarah Jakes Roberts: “As pastors with more than 50 years’ experience between us, preaching and ministering to people in several of the nation’s largest cities, we maintain that the role of the church as an anchor of the Black community is just as important as ever, despite emerging data that shows fewer young people in our community are embracing the church.”

A crisis within a crisis by Nicquel Terry Ellis and Adrienne Broaddus: “The US has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed countries. About 700 women die each year in the US due to a pregnancy-related complication either during pregnancy or within the year after delivery, says Dr. Wanda Barfield, Director of the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health. ‘What’s even more striking is when you’re looking at the differences between Black and White women,’ she says.”

I was disturbed reading ‘Beloved’ at my Virginia high school — and rightly so by Christine Emba: “I was also asked to read “Beloved” in a high school English class, also in Virginia — Richmond, to be precise. It was a hard read. You felt bad. It was also an illuminating corrective, studied against the Virginia backdrop of Robert E. Lee worship, Stonewall Jackson fetishization, and the plantations where enslaved people, we heard in our history classes, worked mostly happily for noble, caring masters.”

Black Catholic History Month: An Interview with Dr. Shannen Dee Williams: “In the United States, where the Church’s African roots are as old as its European roots, many people, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, believe that African American Catholics do not exist or are historical anomalies resulting from the Church’s twentieth-century evangelization efforts to Black migrant communities in the urban North, Midwest, and West. However, much of early African American history is Catholic history, and much of early American Catholic history is Black history.”

Is America Willing to Tell the Truth About Its History? by Tish Harrison Warren: “The question before us as a nation is simple: Are we willing to tell the truth about our history or not?”

How to Teach a Little Girl to Love Her Brown Skin by Wajahat Ali: “How many girls like Nusayba look in the mirror and see only defects and imperfections? A nose that’s too big, lips that are too full, eyes that should be rounded, hair that must be straightened, skin to be bleached. This must end here.”