Sunday Morning Musings

The Black That Makes the Grey Darker

There are moments in history when the curtain is pulled back, not by prophets or poets, but by bureaucrats, technicians, and men in lab coats, who never think in terms of souls. COVID was one of those moments. Not because of the virus alone, but because of what it revealed: the machinery behind the world, churning in the darkness, indifferent to the people it was built to serve. The people who are now nothing but lab rats.

We learned that the line between government and industry is not a line at all, but a braid. We learned that "public health" can be weaponized into fear, obedience, and profit. We learned that the institutions meant to guard life can become the very engines that endanger it. And we learned that when the powerful make catastrophic decisions, they rarely pay the price — the victims do.

Machines Versus Souls

A strange quiet settles over the world before dawn—the kind that makes you wonder whether the world is holding its breath. And as the sun rises this morning, I find myself thinking about the newest fear making the rounds: that artificial intelligence will rise up, take over the world, and make slaves of us all. It's a compelling story. It has the drama of Revelation without the humility. But I don't think the machines themselves are the danger. I think the danger is the spirit that builds them.

How the Cow Eats the Cabbage!

In the aftermath of the 911 memorial remembrances in this year of our Lord, 2026, I feel obliged to include a short idiom from years ago: Once upon a time, a circus came to a small rural town. While they were putting up the big top, a baby elephant escaped and found his way to a little old lady's garden up the road. The lady in our story couldn't see very well, but she was alarmed enough to call the police and report a cow in her cabbage patch pulling up her cabbages with his tail. The policeman on the other end of the line listened patiently. "I see. So a cow is eating your cabbage, ma'am? We'll send someone right out."

"Excuse me," the lady said, "I never said he was eating 'em."

"No?" The policeman replied. "Then what is he doing?"

The woman hesitated before responding quietly, "You wouldn't believe me if I told you!"

9/11, The Memory That Must Not Be Softened

Last Sunday, I wrote of the quiet moment when a civilization begins to forget the moral architecture that once held it together. This week the calendar itself refuses to let us forget.

Friday, one week before the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11, New York's mayor signed two executive orders meant to honor that day. One established a citywide Day of Remembrance and Service. The other strengthened preparations against future terror. Then, in the same room, he handed the ceremonial pen used to sign those orders to his chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem.

The Moment Before the Turning

I have a question — why is it that 25 years after 3000 people were murdered in New York City by radical Islamist terrorists, a self-identified Muslim socialist is sitting in the mayor's seat? Why has Islamic immigration increased instead of being reduced to a trickle? Why is someone named Abdullah Hussein Hammoud the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan? Why is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed the Michigan democratic nominee for the Senate?

There is a moment in every civilization—quiet, almost polite—when the ground begins to shift beneath its feet. It doesn't look like revolution at first. It looks like a city council meeting. It looks like a pastor standing up with fire in his bones. It looks like a frightened child asking whether the shouting outside means someone is coming to kill him. It looks like Dearborn.

Cynicism and the Modern Soul

There is a peculiar disease abroad in our age. It doesn't cloud the lungs; it clouds the heart. It is the quiet sickness of cynicism — a slow corrosion of trust, wonder, and the ability to recognize goodness when it appears.

Cynicism always dresses itself as wisdom. It speaks with the voice of someone who has "seen too much" and "knows how the world really works." But beneath that armor is usually something smaller and more fragile: a wound, a disappointment, a betrayal that hardened instead of healed.

The Wrong War

My coffee is still hot. The morning is still quiet. And somewhere over the ancient lands of the Middle East, something is burning that the headlines cannot fully explain.

I have been sitting with a sentence this morning. Not a scripture — though one will come — but a sentence from H.G. Wells, written in 1898, that feels less like science fiction and more like prophecy with each passing year: "Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."

The Dark Angel and The Hive Mind

He was there before the first human voice ever named a thing. He walked among the stones of fire. The prophet Ezekiel reaches for language that strains under the weight of what he is describing: the anointed cherub, the seal of perfection, full of wisdom, perfect in beauty. This is not the red-caped cartoon of popular imagination, nor the abstract symbol of systemic evil favored by those who find the personal unsettling. This is a biography — abbreviated, terrifying, and real. And at some point in that biography, something went wrong in the way that only something very right can go wrong.

The ancient Fathers speculated that the rebellion was not ignited by ambition alone, but by refusal. That when the hosts of heaven were shown the image of God dwelling in flesh, shown the scandal of Incarnation, shown that the eternal Word would become a creature of dust and be called Lord of all, one voice in the choir fell silent. Not from confusion. From contempt. The one who had been the worship leader of the cosmos, in whose voice the music of the spheres was said to reside, looked at what God was about to become and decided he would not bow. Not to that. Not to something so small, so breakable, so human.