HOROSCOPES
ARIES (March 21-April 19). Keep things brief, especially conversationally. You’re captivating in this mode. If you’ve stopped talking but your audience is still listening, then you have them.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20). Too much business ruins the mood. Temper activity with bouts of lackadaisical daydreaming of sunny skies behind the faces you love so much.
GEMINI (May 21-June 21). It’s considered vulgar to acknowledge the business aspect of interpersonal relationships and discuss the financial end of beautiful experiences, which supposedly transcend such banality. And yet... everything has a bottom line.
CANCER (June 22-July 22). There is no more favorable aim today than the aim to lighten up. Shift a burdensome thought from your brain to the external world by writing it down, projecting it into a physical symbol or sweating it away through exercise.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22). One benefit of living a principled life is that the rules can simplify your thought process by eliminating dozens of small decisions in the way that “no wheat” or “no meat” eliminates an entire category of options.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). Remote bits of personal history will pop to mind from out of the blue, likely called up by new information that speaks to the choice you made in the distant past. It wasn’t ideal, but you’ll do better next time.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 23). Tke the origin of action into account. Audacious moves are made out of overblown self-regard while brave moves involve moving through fear in the name of what’s right.
SCORPIO (Oct. 24-Nov. 21). This day unspools like a good conversation, and you participate by going with the flow of tone, feeling and new information and sidestepping the hot spots, triggers and danger zones.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21). It’s hard to say why important life skills are typically left out of school curriculums in favor of classes that, arguably, have limited application in the average adult day. You’ll fill holes of knowledge today.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19). The reason that hard evidence carries more weight than personal testimony is that the fallibility of human memory, morality and prejudice is high, whereas pictures and written contracts are far less corruptible.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18). Models sit in makeup chairs for hours. Lawyers are paid to argue, and doctors mix mostly with the minutia of illness. The actuality of glamorous or important roles is seldom as it seems, as you’ll personalize today.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20). You’re firing on all cylinders, and the realizations come one after the other. Write them down. Before you go to sleep tonight, ask your subconscious to work on tomorrow’s ideas.
YOUR BIRTHDAY TODAY (Feb. 11). This year sees you on a mission to serve, in a small but meaningful way, a wide variety of people. Your multifaceted personality allows you to make the connections that will bring understanding and support to the cause. You’ll be the object of attention and affection. Scorpio and Libra adore you. Your lucky numbers are: 3, 1, 30, 15 and 24.
When Henry Louis Gates Jr. was naming his upcoming PBS documentary on the Black church in America, he and series producer/ director Stacey Holman quibbled over the title.
Gates, host of “Finding Your Roots,” favored lyrics from the 1873 hymn “Blessed Assurance,” while Holman championed “How I Got Over,” a 1951 hymn performed by Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin.
His earthly solution? Ask Oprah Winfrey.
“I emailed Oprah. I said, ‘Stacey and I are arguing about this. What do you think?’ One morning, I wake up. I turn my cellphone on and there’s a message. It’s Oprah. And I played it and it was, ‘This is our story, This is our song,’” the Harvard professor and author said, imitating Oprah singing the slightly altered “Blessed Assurance” lyrics during a Television Critics Association panel last week. “And that was it. The vote had been cast.”
Winfrey is one of many luminaries from the church, politics and entertainment featured in the four-hour documentary, “The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song” (Feb. 16-17, 9 EST/ PST, check local listings). Others include John Legend, Jennifer Hudson, Yolanda Adams, Bebe Winans, Bishop Michael Curry, Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. Raphael Warnock, the newly elected U.S. senator from Georgia.
“The Black Church” explores a bedrock religious institution with cultural and political influence far beyond church walls, dating back to religious roots in Africa that contributed to what Gates called “a big religious foundational stew.”
Legend, who joined Gates, Adams and Holman on the panel and is an executive producer, connected the message and power of the Black church with what its congregants have endured over centuries in America.
“So much of the way we’ve interpreted the Bible and so much of the way we’ve embraced it has been about the struggle,” said Legend, whose family was deeply involved in the church and its music during his upbringing in Ohio. “In the Old Testament, a lot of the doctrine that we hold onto is that that idea of the Exodus, going to the Promised Land, Moses leading his people to freedom and ‘Let my people go’ – these were the mantras that were part of the freedom movement, both freedom from slavery and freedom from Jim Crow.”
The documentary, which delves deeply into music, notes flaws in the church, including a male-dominated leadership presiding over a largely female membership and a history of homophobia, Gates said. However, the project mostly celebrates an institution that remains relevant, he said, describing his experiences at a chapel on Martha’s Vineyard as “a circle of warmth.”
Such religious gatherings are “a celebration of our culture, our history, of who we are, of how we got over, how we survived the claustrophobic madness of hundreds of years of slavery and then a century of Jim Crow and then anti-black racism that we saw manifest itself at the capital in the last four years under Donald Trump and in the Capitol on January 6,” he said. “It’s that that I wanted to celebrate – in an honest way.”