Check out these recent articles from around the web:

Jubilee of Prisoners: Hope is not lost for anyone by Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy: “The Jubilee reminds us that no one is beyond redemption. No human being is to be discarded when it suits our purposes. No one can forfeit their worth or dignity as a child of God. We cling to the hope that this throwaway mentality can be vanquished, that mercy can overcome the desire for vengeance or an imagined community of the morally pure.”

Dying to Work by Colin Miller: “Efficiency, Han argues, is our ideology, incarnate in the ubiquitous technology that just is the contemporary world, and in whose image we remake and enslave ourselves….We feel guilty for relaxing; we are constantly harried in the name of productivity; we calumniate those, like the homeless, we suspect of laziness; and we fill our lives and homes with as much ‘smart’ technology as possible to maximize efficiency and convenience.…We live to work….The goal of work is the maintenance of what Han, following the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, calls ‘bare life.’ Han contrasts bare life with other forms of life that have usually been recognized as essential for genuinely human life: art, beauty, literature, philosophy, liturgy, community, the spirit, relationships, and contemplation. These cultural expressions arise not out of a concern for the body or a fear of death but from leisure, celebration, festivity, play, enjoyment, fun, devotion, and love. ‘As forms of play, festivals…are characterized by an excess, an expression of overflowing life that does not aim at a goal,’ Han writes in The Disappearance of Rituals. ‘This is what lies behind their intensity. They are an intense form of life. In the festival, life relates to itself instead of subordinating itself to exterior purposes.’ These forms of life are what the encyclicals call ‘higher goods,’ and Berdyaev and Mounier call ‘the life of the spirit.’ They are not concerned with efficiency, and they are about much more than ‘mere’ biological life and the means necessary to reproduce it.”

The Sierra Club Embraced Social Justice. Then It Tore Itself Apart. by David A. Fahrenthold and Claire Brown: “The group has lost 60 percent of the four million members and supporters it counted in 2019. It has held three rounds of employee layoffs since 2022, trying to climb out of a $40 million projected budget deficit….It drove away longtime volunteers who loved the club’s single-minded defense of the environment, by asking them to fully embrace its pivot to the left. Some even felt they were investigated by the club for failing to go along. Many hard-core supporters felt the Sierra Club was casting aside the key to its success: It was an eclectic group of activists who had one, and sometimes only one, cause in common.”

HBO’s ‘Task’ is tense, exciting, dark—and the most Catholic TV show of the season by John Dougherty: “But Catholic characters aren’t solely what makes ‘Task’ a Catholic show. More significantly, it is in how Ingelsby (the series’ sole credited writer, though he shares story credits with David Obzud) draws his characters—on both sides of the law—with compassion, depth and a basic capacity for goodness, even in desperate situations. The entire series has a sacramental worldview, which might sound contradictory when it is so focused on the profane. But the characters are all grasping for something higher, striving for an ideal that they may not be able to articulate but clearly believe in nonetheless.”

The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth by Anne Applebaum: “Violence inspired and fueled by multiple outsiders has already destroyed Syria, Libya, and Yemen, and is spreading in Chad, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and beyond. Greed, nihilism, and transactionalism are reshaping the politics of the rich world too. As old rules and norms fall away, they are not replaced by a new structure. They are replaced by nothing.”

Democracy’s crisis of faith by Fareed Zakaria: “Today, America’s central institutions — courts, media, universities, even elections — are widely viewed as biased. Trust in government has fallen to around 20 percent; congressional approval often hovers in the teens. The media is trusted by fewer than a third of Americans, down from nearly three-quarters in the 1970s. The issue is not competence but cohesion and trust.”

How billionaires took over American politics by Beth Reinhard, Naftali Bendavid, Clara Ence Morse, and  Aaron Schaffer: “Economists say wealth is now more concentrated at the very top than at any time since the Gilded Age. The tech and market revolutions of recent decades have created riches on an unprecedented scale….As a result, U.S. politicians are more dependent on the largesse of the billionaire class than ever before, giving one-four-hundredth of 1 percent of Americans extraordinary influence over which politicians and policies succeed. Political scientists and campaign finance watchdogs also say big money is driving up campaign costs and eroding public confidence in American democracy.”

Why Is Christianity So Hard to Find in the Trump Administration? by Ross Douthat: “The administration has offered a lot of general rhetoric about the value of Christianity to American civilization, along with presidential complaints about Christian persecution overseas and pious social media posts on Catholic holidays. But in the absence of religious-informed policymaking, this sometimes feels more like a performance of a Christian politics than a full reality.”

Don’t Ignore the Darkness of Advent by Adam Russell Taylor: “Amid this darkness, Advent isn’t passive waiting—merely counting down the days to Jesus’ birth. Instead, Advent is about active expectation: staring at all that’s broken around us and reflecting on how we are called to join God in interrupting the darkness.”

Why Couples Therapists Are Sick of ‘Therapy-Speak’ by Olga Khazan: “But many of the therapists told me that too many people get sucked into social-media videos and posts about pop-psych concepts that they then misapply to their own relationships….Another problem is that therapy-speak can exaggerate the severity of what might be typical conflict.”