Marie-Thérèse Gerstner, S.S.L.·
5 October 2026
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4 min di lettura
We live in a culture that has made optimism a duty. Think positive. Count your blessings. Others have it worse. Pain is to be managed, distracted, scrolled away: a thousand short videos, another evening out, one more painkiller so that we can keep moving the injured arm. Christians have often baptized this reflex. Prayer becomes a row of little hearts: thank you, God; Jesus loves you; all is well. None of this is false, and gratitude is indispensable. But we arrive there too quickly. A gratitude reached in a hurry rings hollow, because it has never looked at what is not well at all.
The Bible is far less embarrassed by pain and lament than we are. Depending on how one counts, the Psalter holds some fifteen to twenty psalms of thanksgiving and sixty to seventy psalms of lament, more than a third of the prayer book Jews and Christians have shared for over two thousand years. “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me.” Jesus died with such a psalm on his lips.
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New!
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Riccardo Colasanti MD·
1 September 2026
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4 min di lettura
What is happiness? For much of the West, happiness is living in a society that’s like a massive amusement park—a noisy, colorful world where one can get by by hopping from one digital game to another, always young, always having fun, and always entertaining others. The progress of nations can only aim for this ultimate goal.
After all, the great dream—“Make It Great Again”—is to expand the amusement park and equip it with even more beautiful and newer rides: if possible, without having to pay for them.
Certainly, the land of milk and honey, the Shangri-La, is threatened by villains, terrorists, migrants, and the world’s poor. But let them stay out. A good whack with a baton will be enough to make them flee, or a nice deportation program—an expression of the great charity of Western thought.
We have degraded ourselves so much that we have reached our lowest point. The Land of Plenty, Shangri-La—if you look closely—seems more like a ballroom with a broken heater, where worn-out seniors with dyed hair are still looking for a dance partner. With ordinary, worn-out music.
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