Donate to help rebuild black churches burned by arsonists

In the dentist's waiting room yesterday, I caught a few minutes of Today. At the top of the hour, this news was just in: Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner are splitting up! The assembled panel discussed it for a while. They have kids! And Ben said that thing at that award show a while back! To Ellie Kemper's credit, she did work in a subtle jab about how one of the difficulties of a marriage in the public eye is the simple fact of everyone talking about it. After that, they talked about it some more.

Then it was on to story #2: guys, Siri is rude!

I know, it's the Today show. If I want hard news in the morning on network, I should do like not very many people do and switch over to CBS.

Still, this week it's harder than usual to watch big-budget news media keeping things light. It's hard to watch them spend much time on anything other than the scourge of white supremacy that persists in this country. Since 9/11, white terrorists have been a deadlier threat here than the jihadist variety, even before the Charleston massacre. Last month, three black female clergy in South Carolina received death threats.

Oh, and black churches keep ending up on fire.

I get that there is always bad and heavy news, that the basic rhetorical move of urging a shift of attention from that frivolous thing to this serious thing can be undertaken at any moment ever. But black churches burning? It's such a ghastly part of our collective memory, the sort of thing that shocks people of all kinds of political persuasions when we see its history depicted.

Now it's happening again. And part of me wishes we could just decide that first we're going to figure out who is burning black churches and put an end to it, and then we can all have our celebrity news back.

One thing we can do: donate to help undo what arsonists have done. The Episcopal cathedral in St. Louis is raising funds to rebuild those churches where the fires are confirmed as cases of arson. It's a good opportunity for us white Christians to give our money, along with our unflinching attention.

UPDATE: The National Council has a fund you can contribute to as well.