Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
On the last day of June, two thousand twenty six, the Supreme Court handed down a six to three ruling affirming that states may reserve women's athletic competitions for biological females. The decision, touching West Virginia and Idaho cases, asks us to sit with the tension between inclusion and fairness, between identity and biology, and what it means to protect a space built for women.
From law we move further back in time, much further. The book of Jude, tucked quietly near the end of the New Testament, draws from a text called First Enoch, written during the four hundred years of silence between the testaments. That hidden page turn in our Bibles conceals an entire world of Jewish reflection, longing, and imagination that shaped the very writers we read as scripture.
And then there is something quieter still, a parent watching a child's face and recognizing themselves. The poet of Hiawatha captured it, and a modern essayist has rediscovered it, that strange ache of seeing your own youth rise from someone else's eyes, proof that love moves forward even as it echoes backward.
That's this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
