via Instagram: May this be the day We come together. Mourning, we come to mend, Withered, we come to weather, Torn, we come to tend, Battered, we come to better. Tethered by this year of yearning, We are learning That though we weren’t ready for this, We have been readied by it. We steadily vow… Read More Amanda Gorman Releases Her Latest Poem, “New Day’s Lyric”

via NOLA.com: Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards on Wednesday formally pardoned Homer Plessy, the long-dead civil rights pioneer whose stand against racial segregation led to an infamous U.S. Supreme Court case. Edwards issued the pardon on the grounds of what is now the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where Plessy bought a ticket for… Read More Governor John Bel Edwards Pardons Homer Plessy

via the Vatican: We too have experienced uncertainty, loneliness, the loss of loved ones; we too have been forced to leave behind our certainties, our “comfort zones”, our familiar ways of doing things and our ambitions, and to work for the welfare of our families and that of society as a whole, which also depends… Read More Pope Francis’ Message to Married Couples

via the Vatican: The humble allow themselves to be challenged. They are open to what is new, since they feel secure in what has gone before them, firm in their roots and their sense of belonging. Their present is grounded in a past that opens them up to a hope-filled future. Unlike the proud, they… Read More Pope Francis on Humility

Michael Gerson writes: Many in our country have lost the simple confidence that better days are ahead, for a variety of understandable reasons. There are the coronavirus’s false dawns, followed by new fears. There are rising prices and empty store shelves, as if in Soviet Romania. There is Afghanistan, descending into man-made catastrophe. There are… Read More Christmas Hope in a Time of Despair

via the Vatican: Here man first became conscious of being “a political animal” (cf. ARISTOTLE, Politics, I, 2) and, as members of the community, began to see others not subjects but as fellow citizens, with whom to work together in organizing the polis. Here democracy was born. That cradle, thousands of years later, was to… Read More Pope Francis on How We Can Respond to the Retreat from Democracy

via the Vatican: I want to say to you and to everyone here: don’t be afraid of doubts, because they are not a sign of the lack of faith. Don’t be afraid of doubts. On the contrary, doubts are “vitamins of faith”: they help strengthen faith and make it more robust. They enable faith to… Read More Pope Francis: Don’t Be Afraid of Doubts