Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
Five years under Taliban rule, and the silence around Afghan Christians has grown heavier. Experts in religious freedom now use the word genocide — not lightly, but with the weight of documented disappearances, forced conversions, and a people who must worship in complete invisibility, their faith a thing that could end their lives.
And yet faith, in its many forms, continues to be tested not only by persecution but by the violence it sometimes inspires. Federal authorities this week say they prevented an ISIS-inspired plot to bomb the New York state Capitol in Albany and kill sitting senators — a plan allegedly driven by a Muslim convert whose radicalization reminds us how ideology, when hollowed of mercy, becomes capable of almost anything.
In the quieter corners of thought, the writer Maria Popova has been sitting with the physics of entropy — that slow, inevitable unraveling the universe tends toward — and asking what it means to love anyway. She draws on the poet W.H. Auden, who wrote that if equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me. Perhaps that is the only answer to a world that tilts toward dissolution: to choose, deliberately, to love more than the moment requires.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
