In this book, Austin Channing Brown explores what it is like to be a Black Christian in America. She writes beautifully. Her ideas leap from the page and elicit every kind of emotion: anger, sadness, joy, exhaustion and determination.

Her stories range from personal ones to her experiences with events that captured national attention like Ferguson and the 2015 shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. There are interludes, in which she offers advice or personal notes like a letter to her unborn son.

I enjoyed this book, and it’s an urgent read. I hope you read this too, and if you’ve become complacent in your anti racist work, I encourage you especially to pay attention to the chapter titled “Ain’t No Friends Here” and find yourself on that bus with Austin and her college classmates. For me, I aspire to be like the white classmate she described saying:

“Doing nothing is no longer an option for me.”