Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
At a recent gathering of the Gospel Coalition, scholar David Pao offered a striking idea — that the biblical authors were themselves subversives, intentionally challenging the dominant ideologies of their age. His colleague Bill Riedel then asked the pastoral question that follows naturally: how do we carry that same subversive grace into our own fractured, polarized moment?
That question finds an unexpected echo in Texas, where the state has become the first in the nation to mandate a statewide required reading list for public schools — one that includes roughly a dozen passages from the King James Bible, woven across grades from second through senior year, taking effect in the two thousand thirty to thirty-one school year.
And yet the conversation does not rest there. Thoughtful voices are pushing back, not against the Bible itself, but against the particular weight of state authority behind it — asking whether sacred texts, when made mandatory, risk losing the very reverence they deserve, and whether the classroom is truly the right sanctuary for that kind of encounter.
These are not simple questions, and perhaps that is precisely their gift to us. That's this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
