Welcome to The Light, your quiet moment of reflection in a restless world.
Australia has taken a rare and sobering step, charging two women who returned from Syria with crimes against humanity for their alleged roles in the Islamic State's system of sexual slavery. In a world that sometimes forgets its own moral weight, this act of legal reckoning reminds us that accountability is itself a form of witness.
That question of moral weight carries us to Francis Schaeffer, whose work continues to press on the conscience of our age. Writing decades ago, Schaeffer warned that when we abandon the idea of absolute standards in truth, goodness, and beauty, we do not find freedom. We find only a slow unraveling, a culture that cannot name what it has lost.
And perhaps what we lose most quietly is the ability to simply be still. The lockdowns of two thousand twenty revealed something Pascal glimpsed centuries earlier, that we are restless creatures, uneasy in our own company. The noise we reach for in solitude is not distraction. It is, perhaps, a fear of what silence might ask of us.
That's this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
