Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
There is a question many households carry quietly into each new month: why do prices still feel so heavy? Economist Wayne Grudem traces the answer not to corporate greed, but to the expansion of the money supply itself, arguing that when government spending inflates prices, it functions as a kind of invisible tax, one that falls hardest on those with the least.
From the weight of economics, we turn to something lighter and older. A collection of praise songs from the nineteen nineties has been drawing people back, those simple, earnest melodies that once filled sanctuaries with raised hands and closed eyes. There is something worth noticing in how certain music refuses to age, how it holds meaning across decades and across very different lives.
And then there is this: a political theory tested and, by most measures, found wanting. The Inflation Reduction Act was built on a belief that good jobs in forgotten communities would translate into gratitude at the ballot box. Voters, it seems, experienced the law differently than its architects imagined, which is perhaps a reminder that people rarely feel policy the way policymakers intend.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
