Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
New scholarship is asking us to reconsider who held power in ancient Britain. Historians now believe a Roman client king long assumed to be male was in fact a woman, a queen whose exile helped ignite the conditions that brought Roman Britain to its knees. Power, it seems, has always been harder to see clearly than we imagined.
From ancient authority we turn to ancient crime. Archaeologists have finally unraveled the eighty eight year old murder of James Leslie Starkey, a British excavator killed in nineteen thirty eight near Lachish in what is now Israel. New evidence points toward a political killing, a reminder that the pursuit of the past has never been without its dangers.
And in quieter corners of this season, writers are reflecting on the strange pull of Christmas distraction, suggesting that humility, not willpower, is what allows us to return to what matters. Focus, they argue, is less a discipline than an act of honest surrender to what is truly before us.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
