Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
The evangelical world pauses today to remember Jim Bakker, the pioneering televangelist whose life traced a wide and complicated arc — from the heights of Christian broadcasting to federal prison, and back again to ministry. Leaders are calling his a most interesting life, marked by both remarkable reach and profound failure, a reminder that legacy is rarely simple.
From individual lives we turn to families, and to a question Pope Leo the Fourteenth is now placing before bishops worldwide. Ten years after Pope Francis published Amoris Laetitia, the church is being asked to look honestly at what people actually encounter when they arrive at their most fragile moments. It is a courageous invitation to sit with difficulty rather than look away from it.
And in West Virginia, two TikTok influencers now face first-degree arson charges after a fire they allegedly set to a vacant home spread to a neighboring church, causing ten thousand dollars in damage. It is a quiet and sobering thing — the way a careless act, performed perhaps for an audience, can consume something sacred without a second thought.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
