Welcome to The Light, where we pause and consider what the news is quietly asking of us.
Something is shifting in how Americans seek the sacred. Wicca and earth-based spiritual traditions are now claiming more adherents than some historic Protestant denominations. The reasons are layered — disillusionment, autonomy, a hunger for embodied ritual. But observers note a darker current emerging alongside the healing imagery: marketplaces for curses, grievance dressed as spiritual power. The question of what we do with our wounds is never purely theological.
Closer to the ground of political life, a conservative commentator named Erick Erickson found himself accused of inciting violence simply for reporting on the patronage network surrounding Charles Haywood, a figure on the far right. The ferocity of that reaction — from within conservatism itself — told its own story. When exposure is treated as aggression, it suggests the thing being exposed carries more weight than anyone wished to acknowledge.
And in the steady, unfolding conversation about land and wealth, Lars Doucet returns five years on to revisit Georgism — the philosophy that land value, not labor, should bear the burden of taxation. With two American states now enabling land value tax legislation, what once felt theoretical is becoming something else entirely. How a society decides who owns the earth beneath our feet is perhaps the oldest moral question we keep forgetting to ask.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
