Welcome to The Light, your quiet-hour reflection.
In Alexandria, Virginia, a sculpture now stands at Virginia Theological Seminary honoring Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde, whose measured rebuke of President Donald Trump drew both admiration and controversy. The seminary chose to mark the moment not with words, but with form — a reminder that moral courage, when it appears, tends to leave a shape in the world.
Courage of a different and far more troubled kind surfaces in the case of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother convicted of killing her three children. Her attorney is now appealing to President Trump for a pardon, arguing that severe postpartum depression rendered her incapable of premeditated intent. The request opens a quiet and agonizing question about where illness ends and culpability begins.
And across the Atlantic, nearly six hundred churches in the United Kingdom are preparing for Franklin Graham's God Loves You Tour, set to draw thousands to Manchester's Co-op Live arena. Whatever one makes of Graham's theology or his politics, the mobilization of so many congregations speaks to a persistent human hunger — the need to gather, to be addressed, to believe something larger is listening.
That's this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
