Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
Scientists are asking a question both humble and unsettling — when we flush our antidepressants into the water supply, what happens to the creatures living there? Fish, it turns out, share our monoamine chemistry, and the drugs we take for sorrow may be quietly reshaping their behavior in ways we are only beginning to understand.
From the inner life of rivers, we move to the inner life of institutions. Andrew Walker has been formally installed as dean of the School of Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, a moment his colleagues describe as one of divine preparation — a theologian, they say, shaped precisely for this hour in the life of the church.
And yet the church this week also confronts its shadows. Cindy Clemishire, a survivor of child sexual abuse, is asking the Texas Supreme Court to revive her civil claims against Gateway Church and its founder Robert Morris — a case that presses the question of whether powerful institutions can be held accountable when they fail the most vulnerable among them.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
