News with Nuance: Dec. 9, 2022

Your Friday dose of News with Nuance: the week's biggest stories, unpacked + more ..

Welcome to News with Nuance. My plan for this post is, every Friday, I will break down some of the week’s top news stories and put them into context, with special attention to the impact of these stories where I live: Middle America; and also an analysis of these stories with historical, political, and spiritual context. This is the kind of work that breaking news journalists often simply don’t have time to do — and I’m hoping it supplies the needed nuance and context that’s often missing from our news cycle, humanizing the people and places behind the headlines.

I’ve had a busy week here personally, possibly over-scheduling myself a bit in the midst of Advent and Christmas preparations, and it’s also one of those news weeks where there is so much news flying at you, it seems tough to make sense of it all, even for a news junkie like me. Earlier this week, Georgia held its Senate runoff, and the Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock, who occupies the former pulpit of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, beat out former football star Herschel Walker, who was recruited to run by Donald Trump. I’m sure I could write a whole essay on this election and what it means for America, but instead I’ll point you to the excellent work of author Dante Stewart, who has taught me much about race in America and White Christian Nationalism.

Dante’s article link brings up another important news item: that (as of this writing) New York Times employees are on strike. So other than reading that article (which, importantly, is a guest essay), maybe don’t access NYT digital news this week in support of the employees. Journalism salaries have lagged behind the rest of professional career salaries for a long time, which is why you see a lot of young reporters end up leaving mid-career for PR or marketing positions. That’s also true in expensive markets like New York City, and it’s rough to see hugely inflated salaries for a few people in media, most of them already coming from obscene family wealth, while most journalists continue to work for below-market value. It’s also frustrating to see the NYT continue to elevate religion columnists who do not affirm LGBTQ rights and who represent a small slice of white conservative Christianity, Catholic and Protestant.

Whew. Again. A lot of news. Hard to keep up. That being said, for today, I’m going to focus our newsletter on a few stories coming out of Russia and Ukraine, involving POW mistreatment of Ukrainian soldiers in Russia, and a report of extrajudicial killings of civilians in Ukraine by Russia. The other, related, story is the long-awaited release on Thursday of basketball star Brittney Griner, who had been held in Russian detention for 294 days, most recently in a penal colony notorious for its mistreatment of prisoners.

The reason I ultimately ended up choosing these stories in the midst of so many breaking news stories is that they both exemplify for me one of the goals of these News with Nuance posts: that you get to see the human beings behind the headlines. We live in a culture that is deeply dehumanizing: people get to be statistics, punchlines, or representatives of larger demographic groups. But these stories denote the human cost of war, in the case of the POWs and extrajudicial killings, as well as a move by the American government to demonstrate its commitment to human rights and equitable treatment of its citizens, in the case of Brittney Griner’s release.

So without further ado, here are the biggest stories of the week - with nuance - plus an update on the week in Christian Nationalism …

The Headline: As Ukraine and Russia step up prisoner exchanges, scarred POWs tell of abuse

As Jeff Stein and Kostiantyn Khudov recount for the Washington Post, when 60 prisoners of war returned to Ukraine this week, nurses caring for them were warned against over-feeding people who had been denied adequate nutrition for so long. Nurses were told the prisoners would only be able to digest around 20 tablespoons of chicken broth, no more, and photos of their bodies told of the cost of forced starvation and even torture.

The cost of the war in Ukraine is such that Europe is forced to remember viscerally the death and destruction of World Wars I and II - including the Holocaust - and somehow, improbably, the unbelievable endurance of the human spirit to survive and even love in the midst of so much violence and hate.