Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
Something is stirring in worship music this year. The strongest albums of two thousand twenty six share a willingness to slow down, to resist the polished and the predictable, and instead press deeper into Scripture and the texture of lived experience. It is a reminder that sincerity, given room to breathe, still moves people.
That tension between what nourishes and what merely sells finds a darker echo in a new investigation tracing the roots of ultra-processed food marketing directly back to Big Tobacco. The same parent companies, the same psychological tactics, now aimed at children's lunch boxes. What we feed the body, it turns out, has always been entangled with questions of power and profit.
And questions of belonging and authority are alive within the Southern Baptist Convention this week, as a Baptist advocacy group has placed billboards near the annual meeting in Orlando, declaring simply that God calls women to pastor. The denomination has moved to restrict women in ministry, and that billboard stands as a quiet, public act of conscience, asking the gathered thousands to sit with the question a little longer.
That's this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
