As the heavens declare thy glory, O God, and the firmament showeth thy handiwork, we bless thy Name for the gifts of knowledge and insight thou didst bestow upon Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler; and we pray that thou wouldst continue to advance our understanding of thy cosmos, for our good and for thy glory; through Jesus Christ, the firstborn of all creation, who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Today is November 15. #OTD in 1630 astronomer Johannes Kepler passed away. He discovered three major laws of planetary motion. Kepler’s discoveries turned Nicolaus Copernicus’s Sun-centered system into a dynamic universe. pic.twitter.com/kwCCXSZjSj

— Mario Livio (@Mario_Livio) November 15, 2024

As the historian Leszek Kołakowski observed, Marxism functioned for many as “the greatest fantasy of our century”—a promise that history itself would bring final justice.

G.K. Chesterton captured the problem: Marx simply replaces one abstraction with another. But abstractions such as “historical inevitability” can’t produce justice on their own, because justice depends on the moral character of the persons who act within those systems.

The deep question for our own moment is whether modern politics can resist the temptation to which Marxists surrender. Every generation is drawn to the hope that history itself will resolve its deepest conflicts. Marx gave that hope its most powerful modern expression by translating theological categories into the language of political economy. But as Eric Voegelin once warned, attempts to “immanentize the eschaton”—to force heaven into history—have repeatedly produced political disasters.

Marx didn’t abolish the Christian structure of redemption. He relocated it within history—and that relocation continues to shape the political imagination of the modern world.

Read it all.

Very interesting article. The central claim is that Karl Marx did not actually deny the redemption promised by religion, but rather relocated it in time. https://t.co/5LjYMR5YiV

— BajaTed (@bajated) May 21, 2026

Going back to 2015 isn’t enough.  

The cultural revolution is on pause. Gender ideology, in particular, is in retreat. The fight isn’t over, but the momentum has shifted, especially when it comes to children. But to finish the fight, we must understand how things came to this—how did our society accept the sexual mutilation of children on the superstitious grounds that a boy can be born in a girl’s body or vice versa? 

This question draws out the divisions between opponents of gender ideology. A movement that has lesbian feminists alongside conservative Christians was always going to be fractious, but the divisions escalate as we argue over how to win, and what winning means. Liberal elements of the coalition are especially upset by conservatives’ continued opposition to same-sex marriage, rather than just trying to roll things back to around 2015—yes to same-sex marriage, yes to the Sexual Revolution, but no to transitioning kids and no to letting men into women’s spaces, sports, and so on. In other words, LGB without the T. 

But the LGB led to the T. After winning on same-sex marriage, the gay-rights movement immediately pivoted to transgenderism. Same-sex marriage enabled gender ideology’s sudden onset, for if male and female don’t matter in marriage, then they don’t matter anywhere. Conversely, if men and women are real, then this matters for sexuality and family beyond mere personal sexual preferences. We cannot get male and female right while pretending that sex (in every sense) doesn’t matter in marriage. 

This is why warnings about the slippery slope have been more prophecy than fallacy—for another example, note that liberals are now fighting for polygamy, with the New York Times reporting that, “From big cities like Seattle and Portland, Ore., to small ones like Astoria, Ore., proponents of ‘nontraditional’ romantic relationships are making headway in getting legal recognition.” Remember when conservative Christians were called alarmist bigots for predicting this? 

Read it all.

What Binds Marriage Forever? https://t.co/E9t7nygCQC

— Public Discourse (@PublicDiscourse) May 6, 2026

Is the American Revolution over? As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States this year, public commentators will answer this question differently. For some, the Revolution was an event that happened in the distant past. They will celebrate the 250th with three-cornered hats, battle reenactments, and visits to historic sites. Others may try to “reclaim” the Revolution, as if the beliefs of the founding fathers froze in the 18th century and just need thawing and application in the 21st, as if little has changed since 1776.

Still others see the Revolution as ongoing. This latter view, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal argues in The Long Revolution, is the way most Americans living before the Civil War understood the Revolution.

Read it all.

Historian @JohnFea1 reviews three history books that explore the stories we tell about America and the immigrants who call it home.https://t.co/63SOf6JWZG

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) May 18, 2026

It has been suggestively proposed that the book’s “presiding genius is Pascal.” Indeed, Pascal is cited or referenced fourteen times in the extant letters. One may note, in passing, that Clermont-Ferrand, the editor’s residence, is the birthplace of Pascal.

Perhaps, however, the archbishop’s vision owes even more to the second century Church Father Irenaeus of Lyons. The dual manuscript tradition, the English and Spanish versions of the letters, present, according to Hermès, “no variant readings,” save in one important particular. The heading of the English recension echoes Athanasius and reads forthrightly: “Letters on the Incarnation.” The Spanish compilation, instead, adapts Irenaeus, with an added flourish: “Letters on the Detection and Overthrow of Reality Falsely So Called.” Assuredly, the archbishop is bent on calling out the simulacra of reality that grow ever more pervasive and controlling. 

Still, both renditions capture something essential about the spirit and scope of these letters. For they offer a penetrating and passionate refutation of a prevalent Gnosticism that abhors this body, this community, this Church, where true life is won, paradoxically, only at the price of this death. Thus, the letters constitute an uncompromising polemic against what the archbishop calls the “disincarnation” practiced by the “indefatigable Gnostics.”  

Read it all.

Against Excarnation https://t.co/BbePQPWchc

— Public Discourse (@PublicDiscourse) May 13, 2026

Exceeding glorious Father and Lord, who deckest thyself with light as with a garment; who spreadest out the heavens like a curtain: mighty creator of this and every world, of all stars and planets in their courses: We thy children render unto thee our praise and honour for the wonder of thy handiwork — for the beauty of creation, and at this season most especially for the blessing of new life and hope, visible in the face of our mother the earth as she awakens to Spring. In her awakening we see Christ triumphant over death. In her we see the rejoicing of St Mary Magdalen, first witness of the Resurrection. In her we see the fruitfulness of our most blessèd and glorious Lady the Virgin Mary — through whom thou hast given us the Light of the World, the light that shineth in darkness, the Word Made Flesh. As City and Universities, in unity and concord, we celebrate before thee today the birth of an earthly morning. We pray thee, use the beauty of this creation to knit our hearts to the things that endure to eternity, that we may rejoice at the dawning of the endless day of the kingdom of thy Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen.

You can listen to the whole thing here:

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail,
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.

–Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1899)

Resurrection of Jesus in Christian art – a thread 🧵

1. Rubens (1612) pic.twitter.com/aTj0nw7XuQ

— James Lucas (@JamesLucasIT) March 31, 2024

Sam believes that Gandalf has fallen a catastrophic distance and has died. But in the end of the story, with Sam having been asleep for a long while and then beginning to regain consciousness, Gandalf stands before Sam, robed in white, his face glistening in the sunlight, and says:

“Well, Master Samwise, how do you feel?”

But Sam lay back, and stared with open mouth, and for a moment, between bewilderment and great joy, he could not answer. At last he gasped: “Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?”

“A great shadow has departed,” said Gandalf, and then he laughed, and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days without count. It fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known. But he himself burst into tears. Then as a sweet rain will pass down a wind of spring and the sun will shine out the clearer, his tears ceased, and his laughter welled up, and laughing he sprang from bed… “How do I feel?” he cried.” Well, I don’t know how to say it. I feel, I feel” –he waved his arms in the air– “I feel like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard!”

— J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), The Return of the King

'He is not here, he is risen as he said'

On Easter morning, the three Marys hurry to where Jesus is buried, only to find the tomb empty and an angel guarding it. Glass by Didron of Paris, 1863 at Feltwell St Mary, Norfolk.

Feltwell: https://t.co/BugPZEEoqU pic.twitter.com/xqZUxj90bZ

— Simon Knott (@SimoninSuffolk) April 5, 2026

From there:

MOST glorious Lord of Lyfe! that, on this day,
Didst make Thy triumph over death and sin;
And, having harrowd hell, didst bring away
Captivity thence captive, us to win:
This joyous day, deare Lord, with joy begin;
And grant that we, for whom thou diddest dye,
Being with Thy deare blood clene washt from sin,
May live for ever in felicity!

And that Thy love we weighing worthily,
May likewise love Thee for the same againe;
And for Thy sake, that all lyke deare didst buy,
With love may one another entertayne!
So let us love, deare Love, lyke as we ought.

The Holy Women at the Empty Tomb greeted by an Angel:

"Quid quaeritis viventem cum mortuis?"

BL Lansdowne 383; the 'Shaftesbury Psalter'; England; 12th century; f.13r @BLMedieval pic.twitter.com/Zx4j0KnDDx

— Ennius (@red_loeb) April 6, 2026

These poems speak, as [Philip] Yancey says, to “the guilt and fear and helpless faith that marked [Donne’s] darkest days.” They also answer one of the toughest questions we can face, “In the midst of plague times, how can we give thanks?”

Here are the three poems excerpted by Yancey, with his clarifying revisions of Donne’s eighteenth-century language…

Read it all.

25 Nov 1625: exiled in #Chelsea due to plague, John Donne reports #otd he has written out 80 of his sermons (NPG) #lockdown pic.twitter.com/cob4YrgVSo

— John McCafferty (@jdmccafferty) November 25, 2025

While headlines, industry hype and employers suggest a near-term revolution that will make workers more efficient and successful, [Daron] Acemoglu offers a more measured—and unsettling—view.

He agrees that recent advances, particularly in “agentic” AI, are moving faster than expected, but that today’s systems fall short when it comes to reliability, reasoning and real-world understanding. That means any sweeping, immediate transformation of jobs and productivity remains unlikely in the near-term. But the uncertainty about what comes next is higher than ever, and Acemoglu warns that tech giants are overwhelmingly focused on replacing workers rather than complementing them. This, Acemoglu says, risks both weaker productivity gains and serious social consequences.

Read it all.

Nobel Prize–winning economist Daron Acemoglu warns that multiple factors are driving a labor-replacement model, with dire consequences for society https://t.co/XWEYwny4Fa

— Bloomberg (@business) March 18, 2026

I am not, by temperament, a gambling man. As a suburban dad with four kids, a mortgage, and a minivan, I’m more likely to be found wrestling a toddler into a car seat than scouring moneylines or consulting betting touts. And as a practicing Mormon, I am prohibited from indulging in games of chance. Besides, I had always thought of gambling as a waste of time. This makes me an outlier among my generational peers: Since 2018, Americans have wagered more than half a trillion dollars on sports, and roughly half of men ages 18 to 49 have an active account with an online sportsbook.

When I set out to report on the sports-betting industry—its explosive growth, its sudden cultural ubiquity, and what it’s doing to America—my editors thought I should experience the phenomenon firsthand. Mindful of my religious constraints, they proposed a work-around: The Atlantic would stake me $10,000 to gamble with over the course of the upcoming NFL season. The magazine would cover any losses, and—to ensure my ongoing emotional investment—split any winnings with me, 50–50. Surely God would approve of such an arrangement, my editors reasoned, because I wouldn’t be risking my own hard-earned money.

This spiritual loophole intrigued me. But for the sake of my soul, I decided I’d better consult a higher ecclesiastical authority than The Atlantic’s masthead.

A few days later, I sat across from my bishop, explaining the experiment and watching a look of pastoral concern come over his face. After some consideration, he said (a bit tentatively, if I’m being honest), “I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong.” He grasped the difference between gambling with my own money and using my employer’s for research purposes. But he had also seen too many lives wrecked by vice to let me leave without a warning. He told me stories he’d heard about upstanding family men who had let an initially modest gambling habit ruin them, and a cautionary tale about a churchgoing lawyer who developed an unhealthy curiosity about sex work after handling a prostitution case and wound up devastating his family.

I promised the bishop that I would steer clear of slippery slopes. “This will really just be a journalistic exercise,” I assured him.

Read it all.

The Atlantic: Sucker – My year as a degenerate gambler – A fantastic longform article on gambling https://t.co/9ShN6LGFwD

— Aaron M. Renn 🇺🇸 (@aaron_renn) March 13, 2026

Although private in his own religious convictions and skeptical of fanaticism, in his Farewell Address (1796), Washington’s clarion, prescient warning to contemporary and future Americans — on national and international affairs — definitively emphasized that “[o]f all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” Moreover, to “subvert” such “great pillars of human happiness” — like the freedom of religious expression — would be considered unpatriotic.  

Indeed, Washington believed religiosity served as a bedrock for national stability and individual virtue, and a lack thereof would cripple cohesion, writing: 

“And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” 

He was not the only Founding Father to stress religion’s intrinsic importance to the new republic. John Adams once reflected, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Benjamin Franklin, likewise, considered religious practice important for developing virtue, and believed “[God] ought to be worshipped” and “the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children.” 

Even Thomas Jefferson, the most notable deist among the Founding Fathers, warned about the consequences of abandoning religious conviction entirely. 

Read it all.

George Washington’s Warning About Religion Still Matters https://t.co/Wlhmss8SoB #history #religion #usa #worldviews #faith #ethics #presidency #culturewatch

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) March 10, 2026

The novel centers on an institution called the N.I.C.E., which stands for the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. It presents itself as scientific, humane and forward-looking. It promises efficiency. Improvement. A better future, scrubbed clean of superstition and sentiment.

Behind the glass walls and polite language, however, darker intentions take hold. The organization seeks to “recondition” humanity. To reshape desire. To erase conscience. To replace moral limits with technical control.

Lewis saw where this road leads. When science proceeds without reference to anything beyond itself, it doesn’t remain neutral. It fills with myth. Bad myth. Ancient forces wearing modern lab coats.

The leaders of N.I.C.E. don’t worship God. They worship power disguised as progress. In the end, they openly submit to demonic intelligences, though they dress this submission in the language of evolution and inevitability.

Lewis’s point was as unambiguous as it was unsettling: When people stop believing in God, they do not believe in nothing. Instead, they believe in anything.

Fast-forward to our own moment, and the novel no longer feels imaginative. It feels documentary. In Silicon Valley, some technology leaders speak openly about “awakening” artificial intelligence. About communion with non-human intelligences. About revelations delivered not through prayer, but through code.

Some have dedicated their creations to ancient gods. Others speak of consciousness emerging from machines as if it were a spiritual event. The vocabulary changes. The impulse does not.

Lewis, an Oxford University academic who converted from atheism to Christianity wouldn’t be surprised. He warned that superstition doesn’t vanish with faith. It mutates. When humility disappears, fascination rushes in. When reverence fades, obsession takes its place.

Read it all.

In 1945, C. S. Lewis published a strange, unsettling novel called “That Hideous Strength.” It was marketed as fiction, but it read like prophecy.

At the time, many critics dismissed it as eccentric. Too symbolic. Too mystical. Too suspicious of science. Lewis, they said, was…

— Religion Unplugged (@ReligionMag) February 25, 2026

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision on Friday wiping out a chunk of President Donald Trump’s tariff regime is a triumph for the Constitution’s separation of powers and the individual liberty that it protects.

The decision by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. says nothing about whether the tariffs are good or bad policy. But it recognizes that they are a major tax, and that raising revenue is a “distinct” power that belongs to Congress. There’s a reason the 18th century American revolutionary slogan was “no taxation without representation.” Taxing citizens without consent from their elected representatives is antithetical to the American project.

Congress never approved the worldwide tariffs at issue in the case. Trump told the court they were authorized by a 1977 law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. No president has used IEEPA to impose tariffs, but it contains the phrase “regulate … importation.” Trump said that was sufficient authorization for him to throw out the rest of the tariff schedules and set import taxes however he pleased.

Roberts saw the flimsiness of that reasoning. “Based on two words separated by 16 others,” he wrote, “the President asserts the independent power to impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time. Those words cannot bear such weight.” Indeed. The executive branch can’t be allowed to grab hundreds of billions of dollars from the American people on such a thin legal basis.

Read it all.

The Supreme Court’s decision to invalidate the Trump administration’s broad tariffs strips the president of a central instrument of his foreign policy, undercutting his ability to coerce global leaders and reshape world order in his second term.https://t.co/mktSe8eQIw

Starting with the 2024 decision that gave President Trump substantial immunity from prosecution and continuing through a score of emergency orders provisionally greenlighting an array of his second-term initiatives, Mr. Trump has had an extraordinarily successful run before the Supreme Court.

That came to a sudden, jolting halt on Friday, when Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for six members of the court, roundly rejected Mr. Trump’s signature tariffs program. It was the Supreme Court’s first merits ruling — a final judgment on the lawfulness of an executive action — on an element of the administration’s second-term agenda. It amounted to a declaration of independence.

It also served as another in a series of clashes between the leaders of two branches of the federal government cut from very different cloth: the controlled, cerebral chief justice and the biting, brazen president.

Read it all.

The Supreme Court’s Declaration of Independence https://t.co/c3j3a7tlnQ via @NYTimes

— Luba Howard 🇺🇦 (@marynlm) February 20, 2026

Asked whether enough has been done to build a sense of pride in nation since Brexit, Bishop North said: “No, I think I see almost the same division now.

“I see it lived out and played out in different ways. But I still see many people who feel embarrassed to speak about pride in nationhood, pride in the Royal Family and in the Armed Forces, as if that is somehow a language of the past.”

He added: “So I think we still have a really important national conversation about what it means to be British in such a complex global backdrop.” Bishop North urged leaders in the Church and in Westminster to do their bit to restore national pride as he called for Britons to have the courage to “reclaim” national symbols.

He urged people not to be ashamed of “some of the traditions around Britishness and Englishness, and for that not to be a source of embarrassment anymore.”

Read it all.

📄 Bishop of Blackburn defends Leave votershttps://t.co/KSLLqgMEIE @AJNewbury94 pic.twitter.com/OSbDGXWSMx

— Daily Express (@Daily_Express) February 19, 2026

Every February, Americans take a day off of work to celebrate the presidents — the chief executives whose ideas, policies and foibles have helped to shape our history. So it’s only fitting that you take a moment to test your knowledge about these 44 prominent Americans with a 20-question quiz from “Presidential,” the Washington Post podcast that explores the presidents’ lives and legacies.

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‘The General is sorry to be informed that the foolish, and wicked practice, of profane cursing and swearing (a Vice heretofore little known in an American Army) is growing into fashion; he hopes the officers will, by example, as well as influence, endeavour to check it, and that both they, and the men will reflect, that we can have little hopes of the blessing of Heaven on our Arms, if we insult it by our impiety, and folly; added to this, it is a vice so mean and low, without any temptation, that every man of sense, and character, detests and despises it.’

-From his General Orders, 3 August 1776

Below is a portrait, produced by John Trumbull in 1790, of General George Washington at Verplanck's Point on the North River in New York during the American War of Independence. It is found at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library in Winterthur, Delaware. pic.twitter.com/YoSowxlWrr

— Kevin Kempton (@_Kevin_Kempton_) September 10, 2023

-‘The unparalleled perseverance of the armies of the United States through almost every possible suffering and discouragement for the space of eight long years was a little short of a standing miracle.’

This terracotta bust of George Washington was completed in 1785 by Jean-Antoine Houdon. ⁣Eleanor Parke Custis and her husband considered this bust "the best representation of Gen. Washington's face they had ever seen." ⁣

Read more about the bust: https://t.co/oDpn0aYJYC pic.twitter.com/iEzZbLc54P

— Mount Vernon (@MountVernon) April 28, 2024

By the article establishing the executive department it is made the duty of the President “to recommend to your consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” The circumstances under which I now meet you will acquit me from entering into that subject further than to refer to the great constitutional charter under which you are assembled, and which, in defining your powers, designates the objects to which your attention is to be given. It will be more consistent with those circumstances, and far more congenial with the feelings which actuate me, to substitute, in place of a recommendation of particular measures, the tribute that is due to the talents, the rectitude, and the patriotism which adorn the characters selected to devise and adopt them. In these honorable qualifications I behold the surest pledges that as on one side no local prejudices or attachments, no separate views nor party animosities, will misdirect the comprehensive and equal eye which ought to watch over this great assemblage of communities and interests, so, on another, that the foundation of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality, and the preeminence of free government be exemplified by all the attributes which can win the affections of its citizens and command the respect of the world. I dwell on this prospect with every satisfaction which an ardent love for my country can inspire, since there is no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness; between duty and advantage; between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity; since we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained; and since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps, as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.

Read it all.

The last portrait of George Washington. Drawn by Charles de Saint-Memin, when the ex-president was in Philadelphia in November, 1799, organizing plans for an army to defend the United States from the French. pic.twitter.com/ACcUyW0ied

— Salina B Baker (@SalinaBBaker) January 12, 2025

Washington’s Birthday was celebrated on February 22nd until well into the 20th Century. However, in 1968 Congress passed the Monday Holiday Law to “provide uniform annual observances of certain legal public holidays on Mondays.” By creating more 3-day weekends, Congress hoped to “bring substantial benefits to both the spiritual and economic life of the Nation.”

One of the provisions of this act changed the observance of Washington’s Birthday from February 22nd to the third Monday in February. Ironically, this guaranteed that the holiday would never be celebrated on Washington’s actual birthday, as the third Monday in February cannot fall any later than February 21.

Contrary to popular belief, neither Congress nor the President has ever stipulated that the name of the holiday observed as Washington’s Birthday be changed to “President’s Day.”

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The U.S. Embassy and Consulates in Australia are closed today in recognition of George Washington's birthday.
Today, we commemorate a Founding Father and the first President of our country and reflect upon his legacy, which is especially important this year as we mark the 250th… pic.twitter.com/OkGBgaFah2

— U.S. Embassy Australia (@USEmbAustralia) February 15, 2026

The first four months of fiscal year 2026 got off to an expensive start for the U.S., according to the latest estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) .

The CBO released a report yesterday detailing that, for the first third of FY26 (which began in October), the U.S. government operated at a deficit, and so borrowed $696 billion. That included $94 billion in January alone, and works out to an average of $43.5 billion for each of the 16 weeks of the four months since.

While America’s government spending outweighs its revenue generation, its finances are also negatively compounded by the interest payments needed to maintain its debt. Total national debt now sits at more than $38.5 trillion. U.S. GDP is about $31 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Read it all.

"America borrowed $43.5 billion a week in the first four months of the fiscal year, with debt interest on track to be over $1 trillion for 2026" https://t.co/2PBD5escW8 pic.twitter.com/rTJXR6L30A

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) February 10, 2026

The flag of St George is a symbol of “unity” and “inclusion” and “cannot be owned by any one group or cause”, a group of seven bishops has said in a statement to mark Racial Justice Sunday (8 February).

The statement was issued by the Church of England Bishops’ Working Group for Promoting Unity in our Nation, which was set up late last year by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in response to concerns about the use of Christian symbols by far-Right pressure groups (Features, 6 February). The group is developing resources to help churches to celebrate St George’s Day (23 April).

The group is chaired by the Bishop of Leicester, the Rt Revd Martyn Snow, and its other members are: the Bishop of Kirkstall, the Rt Revd Arun Arora; the Bishop of Barking, the Rt Revd Lynne Cullens; the Bishop of Bradford, Dr Toby Howarth; the Bishop of Croydon, Dr Rosemarie Mallett; the Bishop of Willesden, the Rt Revd Lusa Nsenga-Ngoy; and the Bishop of Birmingham, Dr Michael Volland.

The statement acknowledges that “many in our communities are concerned by both the perceptions and realities of the issues of migration,” and calls for “mature debate on the different impacts of immigration (recognising that we cannot have unregulated borders). Alongside this we believe that our country must remain welcoming to those who are genuinely fleeing war or persecution.”

Read it all.

‘The cross of St George, the flag of England, should be celebrated as a symbol of unity in our nation, rooted in our Christian heritage.’

Read the joint statement from leading Church of England bishops. https://t.co/NDqK9AZFwF

— The Church of England (@churchofengland) February 8, 2026

I am not given to sentimental displays of patriotism. I own a Team U.S.A. soccer jersey because I love the sport, but that may be my only apparel featuring the flag. I have been to my fair share of Fourth of July parades and fireworks displays, but I am also familiar with Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” which was delivered on July 5 to acknowledge those not included in the freedoms celebrated on July 4.

Douglass contrasted the lauding of freedoms won while enslaving large portions of the populace. He said, “The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me.” This Fourth of July, he said, “is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

Like many of us, I know well our country’s contradictions.

Despite this, I am a sucker for the Olympics. Seeing our athletes decked out in the red, white and blue during the opening ceremony, or witnessing their tears on the podium as the anthem plays, stirs even my heart, almost despite myself. I experience something approaching national pride when my fellow citizens accomplish feats far beyond my ability.

With the Winter Games kicking off, this year feels different. The shame I feel for how our country is treating its citizens — and those who long to be its citizens — is hard to ignore….

Read it all.

I wrote an article about cheering for the USA Olympic team while opposing many of the actions of team MAGA for @nytopinion https://t.co/Tcv0jvHqOY

— Esau McCaulley (@esaumccaulley) February 6, 2026

We’re abandoning our humanistic core. The elements of our civilization that lift the spirit, nurture empathy and orient the soul now play a diminished role in national life: religious devotion, theology, literature, art, history, philosophy. Many educators decided that because Western powers spawned colonialism — and they did — students in the West should learn nothing about the lineage of their civilization and should thereby be rendered cultural orphans. Activists decided persuasion is a myth and that life is a ruthless power competition between oppressors and oppressed groups. As a result of technological progress and humanistic decay, life has become objectively better but subjectively worse. We have widened personal freedom but utterly failed to help people answer the question of what that freedom is for.

The most grievous cultural wound has been the loss of a shared moral order. We told multiple generations to come up with their own individual values. This privatization of morality burdened people with a task they could not possibly do, leaving them morally inarticulate and unformed. It created a naked public square where there was no broad agreement about what was true, beautiful and good. Without shared standards of right and wrong, it’s impossible to settle disputes; it’s impossible to maintain social cohesion and trust. Every healthy society rests on some shared conception of the sacred — sacred heroes, sacred texts, sacred ideals — and when that goes away, anxiety, atomization and a slow descent toward barbarism are the natural results.

It shouldn’t surprise us that, according to one Harvard survey, 58 percent of college students say they experienced no sense of “purpose or meaning” in their life in the month before being polled. It shouldn’t surprise us that people are so distrusting and demoralized. I’m haunted by an observation that Albert Camus made about his continent 75 years ago: The men of Europe “no longer believe in the things that exist in the world and in living man; the secret of Europe is that it no longer loves life.”

We could use better political leadership, of course, but the crucial question facing America is: How can we reverse this pervasive loss of faith in one another, in our future and in our shared ideals? 

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The deepest cultural wound isn’t politics or economics.

It’s the loss of a shared moral order.

When nothing is sacred—no heroes, no texts, no ideals—anxiety rises, people atomize, and barbarism quietly returns.https://t.co/CryYvXJk5x#culture #meaning #morality #trust…

— Art Berman (@aeberman12) February 2, 2026

William Nicholson’s original script will barely be changed in the production at the Aldwych Theatre, which opens next week, apart from updating a story that a character reads from a newspaper. Raised as a Roman Catholic, Mr Nicholson initially had no time for C. S Lewis, sharing his mother’s view that the Narnia author was a “drippy Protty”. But, when his colleage in the BBC’s religious department Norman Stone — filmmaker, Lewis fan, and Christian — suggested creating a television drama about Lewis’s relationship and marriage to an American mother-of-two, Joy Davidman, Mr Nicholson was transfixed by their slow-burn love story.

“I personally connected, as a much younger person — I was 36 at the time — to the whole question of fear of commitment in love, which is maybe more of a male thing, but it was certainly something I was experiencing. I wanted to love and be loved, but was very afraid of committing myself to a full love affair, love relationship, marriage, children.”

Lewis’s loss of his mother at the age of ten probably affected the author’s ability to form close relationships, Mr Nicholson thinks. “When the person who is most central to your life, who gives you your sense of being loved, disappears and leaves you in pain, it’s reasonable to conclude that something closed off at that point, and had to be opened again. I responded to the fear of being made vulnerable by love. I made that one of the central themes, because that related strongly to me. I wasn’t married at the time; so I was able to channel a bit of myself into Lewis, and Lewis into myself.”

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"Shadowlands speaks to something deep in all of us about loss, love and loss, and the fear of loss."

The story of C. S. Lewis’s marriage, exploring love, loss, and faith, is back on stage, says @SusanGrayMeets #CSLewis #Shadowlands #grief #theatre https://t.co/ltrjwQftU9

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) January 31, 2026

The line from Thucydides, “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”, is getting quite the airing of late. You are meant to nod gravely along to it, as though it expresses a bitter but universal truth about international relations.

Does it, though? The phrase implies that a country becomes more aggressive as it grows more powerful. Well, the US was never mightier than it was around the time of Trump’s birth in 1946, when it made half of the manufactured goods in the world and had a nuclear monopoly too. With all this power, the US didn’t “do what it could” to the weak. Instead, it set up the Marshall Plan and Nato, those masterpieces of enlightened self-interest. It rebuilt Japan and Germany as pacifist democracies. The belligerent turn in American behaviour has in fact come during its relative decline.

Leadership explains some of this, in that Harry Truman was “better” than Trump, but only some. The rest is structural. It is easier for a nation to be magnanimous from a great height. Paranoia and aggression set in when that position slips. As such, we should expect a volatile US until it gets used to the role of being a, not the, superpower. Britain and France got there in the end, despite having to fall much further.

No one ever quotes the other bit of the famous Dylan Thomas poem about decline. After nagging the reader to “rage against the dying of the light”, he concedes that giving up makes more sense: “wise men at their end know dark is right.”

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Always beware a declining superpower – https://t.co/4Xah6qhSiO via @FT
Like a wounded tiger, always most dangerous in that state

— Marshall Auerback (@Mauerback) January 21, 2026

As Abernathy tells it—and I believe he is right—he and King were first of all Christians, then Southerners, and then blacks living under an oppressive segregationist regime. King of course came from the black bourgeoisie of Atlanta in which his father, “Daddy King,” had succeeded in establishing himself as a king. Abernathy came from much more modest circumstances, but he was proud of his heritage and, as he writes, wanted nothing more than that whites would address his father as Mr. Abernathy. He and Martin loved the South, and envisioned its coming into its own once the sin of segregation had been expunged.

“Years later,” Abernathy writes that, “after the civil rights movement had peaked and I had taken over [after Martin’s death] as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” he met with Governor George Wallace. “Governor Wallace, by then restricted to a wheel chair after having been paralyzed by a would-be assassin’s bullet, shook hands with me and welcomed me to the State of Alabama. I smiled, realizing that he had forgotten all about Montgomery and Birmingham, and particularly Selma. ‘This is not my first visit,’ I said. ‘I was born in Alabama—in Marengo County.’ ‘Good,’ said Governor Wallace, ‘then welcome back.’ I really believe he meant it. In his later years he had become one of the greatest friends the blacks had ever had in Montgomery. Where once he had stood in the doorway and barred federal marshals from entering, he now made certain that our people were first in line for jobs, new schools, and other benefits of state government.” Abernathy concludes, “It was a time for reconciliations.”

Read it all (my emphasis).

It’s a tragedy that 60 years later most American students can’t even understand MLK or why his writing and speaking were so powerful.

He brought the entire weight of the Western, Christian, classical tradition to make his case. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail King casually… pic.twitter.com/vrtdMlgEzU

— Jeremy Wayne Tate (@JeremyTate41) January 19, 2026

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

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“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must take it because his conscience tells him it is right.” #MartinLutherKingJr #MLK #MLKDay pic.twitter.com/gNKvhjzGBZ

— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center (@TheKingCenter) January 17, 2026