Divorce is sometimes necessary, but it is never “good.”

Family members confronted the racist who killed their loved ones in Buffalo for the first time in court. They read him a lot of Scripture, on both love and God’s vengeance.

In his new book, David Platt urges Christians to leave behind the “American gospel that has hijacked our hearts.”

Divorce is sometimes necessary, but it is never “good.”

José Rojas, a Seventh-day Adventist minister and president of Puente Ministries, discusses the significance of spiritual mentorship on this week’s Viral Jesus.

Behind the story

From Emily Belz: We’ve spent a lot of time covering the aftermath of the Buffalo grocery store shooting last year because the testimony of local Christians there is something to behold. What I have heard consistently in interviews with Buffalo’s Black Christians, from the attack last May to the sentencing of the white supremacist shooter on Wednesday, is an inextricable union of God’s love and God’s righteous anger.

I visited a cigar shop that is a community gathering place by the Tops grocery store not long after the shooting as funerals were taking place. People were very angry. Multiple people in the short time I was there also asked me if I knew Jesus.

On Wednesday, the son of one of the church matriarchs who was killed and other family members had their first words with the attacker in court for his sentencing. What came out was a lot of anger, imprecatory psalms, and words about God’s mercy. The story of Buffalo’s Christians is one that can show, as the stepbrother of victim Aaron Salter told me, that “there is evil among us, but God is alive.”

In other news

Three independent missionaries from Texas have died in a plane crash in Guatemala.

Methodist archivists are working to preserve church history in the midst of a denominational split.

The earliest copy of the Hebrew Bible in existence is going up for auction this spring. It’s expected to bring in $30 million to $50 million.