Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
A federal judge has dismissed a class-action lawsuit against Gateway Church and its former leaders, who stood accused of misusing millions in donated funds. The court ruled that the First Amendment shields religious institutions from civil oversight of how they steward their own offerings — a boundary as old as the republic, and as contested.
That question of institutional boundaries carries into another story, where an eighty-year relationship between Asbury Theological Seminary and the United Methodist Church has quietly ended. The denomination removed Asbury from its list of approved schools over disagreements on same-sex marriage and LGBT clergy — a parting that reminds us how long-held bonds can fray when conviction and community diverge.
And from the natural world, writer Richard Louv, who gave us the phrase nature deficit disorder, invites us to reconsider what it means to be human. He suggests we are more like bloodhounds and bats than we imagine — creatures of deep sensory attunement, slowly forgetting how to listen to the world that made us.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
