Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour for reflection.
Glen Scrivener reminds us that secular culture is more shaped by Christian ideas than it realizes, and that the strangeness of the gospel, honestly embraced rather than apologized for, may be precisely what opens conversations in a world that has forgotten where its own values came from.
From that question of cultural rootlessness, we turn to something achingly concrete. A college football player named Eli Thompson has written with unusual courage about sports betting consuming his teammates, pulling young men into debt and despair through platforms designed to feel like play. His witness suggests that Gen Z's financial nihilism is not merely economic but spiritual, a hunger for meaning dressed in the language of odds.
And behind both of these present struggles stands a figure worth recovering. John Cotton, the seventeenth-century Puritan, once felt relief at the death of a preacher who unsettled him, only to later become one of the most consequential voices in early America. His story asks us quietly whether the truths we resist are sometimes the ones most meant for us.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
