“Everyone is a feminist until a spider is around.”

It’s one of those lines that ricochets around the internet every few months — half-meme, half-truth, always good for a laugh. It’s funny because it captures something deeply human: the way ideals crumble under pressure, the way fear rearranges our values in real time.

You can almost see it unfold. A spider skitters across the wall, silent and sudden. A few startled gasps, a reflexive step backward, a glance exchanged across the room. Someone — often the woman who’s been quietly keeping everything else in life running — points and says, “Can you please get that?”

“If you reap what you don’t sow, then distribute where you don’t benefit.”

The proverb “You reap what you sow” has long symbolized moral causality — effort rewarded, negligence punished. But real economies, both human and divine, are rarely so symmetrical. Rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous; wealth accumulates as much by inheritance, ownership, or algorithm as by sweat.

So what happens when you reap what you didn’t sow? The biblical answer, echoed faintly even in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, is this: redistribute what you did not earn, for none of it was ever fully yours.

Every age produces its monsters, but it also produces something far more subtle and enduring: good people convinced of their own goodness.

They do not wake up intending to do harm. They pay their taxes, love their families, donate to charity, and say the right things. Yet history shows that some of the worst evils are committed not by villains, but by people persuaded that their cause is righteous.

When a person assumes they are moral, anything that disturbs their conscience begins to feel wrong — not because it is false, but because it threatens the identity they’ve built on being one of the “good ones.”

There comes a moment in every honest life when the mirror cracks.

You look at yourself — not the self you present to the world, but the one you really are — and the realization stings: I have been wrong.

Not mistaken, but morally wrong.

In every generation, humanity faces an unsettling truth: evil rarely arrives wearing horns. It comes dressed in reasonableness, progress, necessity, or comfort. And when people no longer recognize it, when they grow numb to cruelty, lies, and corruption, the result is moral blindness — a condition far more dangerous than malice itself.

So how does one awaken a society’s moral sense? How can people learn again to see evil, name it truthfully, and resist it courageously? The answer lies not in new technology or policy, but in a reformation of conscience — one nurtured by truth, history, and the moral imagination that only deep education and great books can sustain.

Morality is not inherited; it is formed. Every human being is born with the capacity for empathy and conscience, but those capacities must be cultivated through education, example, and discipline.

Halloween can be a complicated day for people of faith. For some, it’s innocent fun — costumes, candy, and community. For others, it represents something darker, a flirtation with fear, death, and superstition.

But what if, instead of rejecting or uncritically embracing the day, Christians could redeem it — using it as an opportunity to reflect on God’s victory over death, His remembrance of the forgotten, and the hope of resurrection that defines our faith?

Modern Halloween is a blend of ancient traditions. Its earliest roots trace back to Samhain, a Celtic festival marking the end of harvest and the beginning of winter — a season when people believed the veil between the living and the dead grew thin.

There’s a moment in Good Will Hunting that’s more than a punchline — it’s a worldview.

Will, the janitor-genius from South Boston, humbles a pompous Harvard grad student by saying:

“You dropped a hundred and fifty grand on an education you coulda got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library.”

“You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them.

Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave—just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.”
— Jesus (Matthew 20:25–28)

The Church has always wrestled with authority.
Who has it?
Who gives it?
Who can speak for God, or act in His name?

“The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors.

But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves.”
— Jesus, Luke 22:25–26

It’s almost absurd when you think about it.

Across centuries and civilizations, the question of what makes a person righteous has never been answered by creed alone. In the Christian Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, the answer is disarmingly practical. When Christ describes the final judgment, He does not ask about theology or liturgy. He speaks instead of mercy enacted in the simplest gestures: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, visiting the sick, and caring for the prisoner. “Whatever you did for one of the least of these,” He says, “you did for me.” Holiness, in this vision, is not an abstraction; it is a pattern of care.

Though these words stand within a Christian text, their moral grammar echoes through the world’s great spiritual traditions. In Islam, in Buddhism, in Taoism, and in the Hebrew scriptures that precede them all, compassion is the test of wisdom. The forms differ, but the current is the same. Love for the neighbor—however one defines “neighbor”—is the truest measure of the divine within human life.

To feed the hungry is to recognize that the world’s gifts are not private property. The Hebrew Bible commands farmers to leave the edges of their fields for the poor and the stranger. Jesus repeats the lesson by multiplying loaves and fishes, turning scarcity into sufficiency. In the Qur’an, one of the surest signs of faith is generosity: “And they give food, in spite of love for it, to the needy, the orphan, and the captive.” The daily fast of Ramadan trains the believer to taste hunger, not as punishment but as solidarity.

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“Disrespectful.”

It’s the word power uses to shame anyone who refuses to look away.

Every year, the United States spends close to $5 trillion on health care — roughly 18 percent of GDP — yet tens of millions of Americans carry medical debt.

The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that about 100 million people owe medical or dental bills, with total household medical debt near $200 billion. That’s more than the GDP of Greece — owed mostly because someone got sick.

The paradox is simple: we spend more on health care than anyone in the world, and still can’t protect people from the bills.

For much of modern history, compromise has been the engine of social progress.
Every major expansion of human rights, from labor protections to civil liberties, was made possible not by revolution alone but by negotiation — by the willingness of opposing moral visions to meet halfway. Incremental reform produced tangible improvements in daily life, and for generations, that pattern bred optimism: the belief that reasoned compromise could make society fairer, freer, and more humane.

Yet in the 21st century, that very faith in progress has fractured. Compromise, once seen as the path toward human flourishing, now feels to many like a trap. Some believe compromise has gone too far, eroding tradition and stability. Others fear that any further compromise will mean going backward — undoing the fragile gains already achieved. The result is a strange and self-defeating tension: because compromise has worked, it has become harder to believe in it.

The 20th century offered strong evidence that compromise could serve humanity well.
Democratic institutions learned to translate moral conflict into functional policy — a process that, however messy, generally bent toward inclusion. Workers gained protections; women gained representation; civil rights and environmental safeguards emerged from bipartisan bargaining tables. Compromise did not deliver utopia, but it reliably produced better outcomes.

In American politics, compromise has long been both a virtue and a vice — praised as the cornerstone of democracy yet criticized as a betrayal of moral clarity. Nowhere is this tension more evident than in debates about rights: immigration, civil liberties, LGBTQ+ equality, and the treatment of unhoused people. Each issue asks a version of the same question — how do we govern together when we fundamentally disagree on what is fair, moral, or even constitutional?

The story of rights in the United States isn’t one of sudden breakthroughs or tidy consensus. It’s a story of incremental progress achieved through uneasy bargains. These bargains rarely satisfy anyone fully, but they keep the republic moving. To understand today’s stalemates — and the persistent calls for purity on both left and right — it helps to look backward at how compromise has actually built the architecture of modern American rights.

Compromise in a democracy is often misunderstood. It doesn’t mean abandoning values; it means legislating within pluralism. When competing moral frameworks share the same institutions, no side gets everything it wants. The challenge is to produce policy that functions in a divided society — something that holds together long enough to be tested in real life.

Every age fears compromise, but the kind of fear changes.

In a democracy, compromise is supposed to be the instrument of coexistence — the bridge between competing moral worlds. Yet for many Americans today, compromise feels less like virtue and more like surrender. Whether one’s language is moral, religious, or secular, the suspicion is the same: if you bargain too long with the enemy, you’ll lose your soul.

Two archetypes haunt modern politics — the fear of the wolf and the fear of the devil.

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“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”
— Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter VIII

Adam Smith’s name has been invoked for centuries as the prophet of the “free market.”
Politicians quote his invisible hand as if it were scripture — proof that greed, left alone, leads to prosperity.

Every week, millions of Christians pray the same short line:

“Give us this day our daily bread.”

It’s one of the simplest, most universal sentences in Scripture — and one of the most misunderstood.

Martin Luther’s revolution began with a scream of the soul — “How can I find a gracious God?” That question tore through the medieval world like a thunderclap. His answer — salvation by grace through faith alone — changed history, shattered the unity of Western Christendom, and birthed the modern idea of conscience.

But for all his brilliance and courage, Luther remained stuck in the very question he answered. He found the door to grace but never quite walked through it. His Reformation freed the church from one set of chains, yet left him spiritually circling the same locked cell, still arguing with God.

Luther’s early life was consumed by religious terror. As a young Augustinian monk, he spent sleepless nights confessing minor sins, convinced that one unacknowledged fault could damn him forever. He feared a God who was righteous but not merciful — a cosmic judge tallying his failures.

Do you condemn Hamas?
Do you condemn the genocide in Gaza?

One of these questions dominates headlines; the other is asked too late. The first functions as a litmus test of loyalty, a way to prove which tribe you belong to. The second is treated as a post-mortem, asked only once the destruction is undeniable — after the funerals, after the headlines fade, after the damage is done.

We shouldn’t have to wait for the bodies to pile up before we recognize that our inaction, our political cowardice, and our obsession with choosing sides are costing lives. Every day that politicians debate definitions, children die waiting for clarity.

“If you were Abraham’s children, you would do the works of Abraham.” — Jesus (John 8:39)

For centuries, people have claimed legitimacy through lineage — kings by descent, priests by ordination, and churches by succession. But Jesus’ piercing words to the religious leaders of His day cut through all such claims: true lineage isn’t proven by ancestry, but by resemblance.

It’s an idea that still speaks powerfully today — especially in an age when institutional religion often grounds its authority in an unbroken line of offices and ordinations rather than the living fire of faith.