A SUNDAY SERMON ON FRIDAY.

I'll conclude this week with two optimistic posts from two very different sources.  First up, Micah Meadowcroft on sustaining the bourgeois virtues when all around you are losing their minds and blaming you.

The task in the meantime, then, is to light whatever little candles of culture you can in the face of an encroaching dark and keep them lit by any means necessary, conventionally political or otherwise. Then marry, have children, and add fuel to the fires till they become conflagrations big enough to burn away the chaff. The twilight that is falling now will only make it easier to see the other points of light, to find your companions in the long war’s fight.

Followed by Matt "Dean Dad" Reed.

Better, I think, to acknowledge that we’re all good and we’re all flawed. The work of ethics is to move toward getting better in the ways we treat each other. Sometimes that means charity; sometimes it means structural change; sometimes it means just extending patience and forgiveness as somebody else makes the mistakes of growth. That’s a conscious choice that needs to be made over and over again. It requires listening to people who see things differently, in recognition that everyone has some truth to share. It requires avoiding the cheap thrills of condemnation in favor of the slow work of education. It embraces second chances, rather than taking initial failures as signs of irredeemable fallenness. We’re all flawed, and we’re all capable of more. All who want to do better should be welcome.

Enjoy the basketball championship, dear reader.