5/22/25 – We don’t want to hear kids tell us that they want to be “influencers” or that they don’t want to work. Having money and leisure is a recipe for a wasted life. Work isn’t just about a job or income. It’s about morality and dignity. We all have to have something that we are giving to the world. We need to share our gifts with others. Figure out what your gifts are and work. Do not come to us with laziness. It will not be well-received.
5/22/25 – Middle-class lives are the best. If the whole world were middle-class, we’re pretty certain it would be a better world than what we have now.
5/22/25 – How to be an extraordinary man (or woman): Practice sacrificial love like Jesus did. The Beauty That Moral Courage Creates
5/22/25 – How to be a good man: This is a long, involved list, so get ready. 1. Wake up at a reasonable hour. Unless you work the night shift, that means 9AM or earlier. 2. Go to work and take pride in it. (You don’t need a 6-hour morning routine, but you do need a job.) 3. Practice good hygiene, help/do work around your home (nobody, especially women, is your maid), and if you have kids, it’s called co-parenting. You need to help raise your own children. 4. Make time for your friends, family and helping others, giving of your time, talent and treasure. 5. Have good character. If you are married, be faithful to your wife. If you have kids, be a good father. No matter what, be a good person. 6. Do all of the other things that healthy people (men and women) do. In general, try to be respectful and kind, and own your short-comings. Nobody is perfect. Keep working on being a better person.
Did we miss anything? All of the other stuff is ridiculous. It’s not about being macho, your car, your house, your money, your status, etc. It’s really just about these simple things. There is freedom and simplicity in this. Embrace it and being a good man. Thank you, and know that we’re praying for you.
5/21/25 – Women are at the foundation of the church. It might be a male-dominated institution, but it was never a male-dominated faith. It attracted both genders from the beginning, and Jesus went out of his way to recognize the dignity and importance of women to the world.
Washington National Cathedral – Morning Prayer | 5.21.25
5/21/25 – One of the unfortunate aspects of this period is that there is far too much testosterone. Everywhere you look it’s some weird caricature of what it means to be a man. Even the MAGA women, like Kristi Noem, are macho. She’s cruel, crass and ignorant, and, apparently, that’s appealing these days. We’re not into it. Women are important to well-balanced societies, and their value isn’t in being like men. It’s in being themselves. The world needs more female leadership, not because of DEI, but for healthy societies and for our own preservation as a species.
5/18/25 – Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. Amen. Love the Lord, and do the right thing – always.
5/18/25 – Don’t take shortcuts. Don’t do things that are convenient but morally wrong. The process matters. Have integrity. Make choices that are faithful to good character and to God.
Washington National Cathedral – Morning Prayer | 5.16.25
5/18/25 – The representative from Minnesota, Dean Phillips, who was raised Jewish and well, and the American people deserve an apology and genuine repentance from Democratic leaders, the Democratic Party and the liberal media who deceived the American people about Biden’s infirmity and denied voters a real Democratic primary.
5/16/25 – Apparently, the country cannot escape the insane and/or senile president. Both of our last two presidents were older than the current pope, Pope Leo XIV, who is 69-years-old, when they started their first terms. Think about that. They were older than a pope, who has no term limit, so the cardinals don’t want to choose one that’s too young. The late, great Jimmy Carter’s post-presidency was almost as long as his pre-presidency. (May his blessed soul rest in peace.) Can we have a mature, wise, principled, courageous, middle-aged sane person for president? Is this possible? (Did we mention that Zelensky is our president?)
5/16/25 – Disgusting and disgraceful. It still makes us so angry. There were numerous angry posts about this BS, and there will continue to be angry posts about it. Moronic elites who think they are better than the American people, but the elites are actually stupid, incompetent ignoramuses. Look at the stupid articles the propaganda keeps publishing. The deception and the coverup were antidemocratic, an abuse of Americans’ trust, and blatant hypocrisy. The liberal legacy media needs to own up to the fact that it participated in the indoctrination and the deception of the American people and the destruction of our democracy. The “five” unelected rulers were also totally incompetent. Like well-regulated capitalism, democratic governance is the best, and it works by majority rule. Everybody needs to respect our democracy and our Constitution.
An Autopsy Report on Biden’s In-Office Decline
5/16/25 – Flashback Friday: “6/30/24 – Another terrible aspect of the egotistical old men clinging to power pretending our democracy is their kingdom is that it sucks up all of the oxygen in the room. This was religious freedom week. Could we focus on anything but that horrible debate and the glaringly obvious miserable situation? We don’t care about any of these politicians and their precious egos, feelings or ambitions. We care about the things that actually matter to us, which is not them.
God bless the persecuted church and all people who aren’t able to practice their faith, no matter what religion it is, in peace and freedom. We pray for you all the time. Remember: We love you, and God loves you.”
5/14/25 – A Jewish prayer for and some good advice on happiness. “Pleasure is short-term, like getting a massage or eating a sumptuous meal. Happiness is long-lasting. It is flourishing, which is a word preferred by the founder of the scientific study of happiness, Professor Martin Seligman. According to Seligman, flourishing contains five key components: positive emotion, engagement, relationship, meaning, and accomplishment. An easy way to remember them is the acronym PERMA…. First, it pushes us outside of ourselves. Almost all of the ten practices involve other people…. Frankl’s observation helps us see a second source of happiness in this prayer. It roots us in a religious worldview.”
Serving others, whether by helping them, teaching them, giving money or material possessions to them, makes us happy. Their joy is our joy. Their happiness is our happiness. The more we give of ourselves, the happier we are. This is obviously informed by our faith.
How to Pray for Happiness
5/14/25 – Someone might want to help the unhappy trolls in the current admin or its supporters, such as mtg. If these people are so great, evolved and such, why do they seem miserable? Why are they highly unpleasant, even repellent, to any decent person?
5/14/25 – Zelensky is our president, and he is going to remain our president until the country can produce and elect someone who is worthy of our nation’s greatness.
5/14/25 – Biden’s enablers and the legacy media should be ashamed of themselves for trying to deceive the American people, with whom they have a moral and professional responsibility to be honest, about his fitness for office. It was disgraceful. The American people didn’t buy it though, which is, in part, because we don’t trust the media and understandably so.
5/13/25 – The other day, we saw a homemade bummer sticker (white paper with black marker taped onto the bumper with clear tape) that said, “Zelensky is my president.” He’s likely also the only world leader who was applauded when he arrived at Pope Francis’s funeral. You want respect? You have to be someone who earns it.
5/13/25 – Can we all stop pretending that the moron who was presumably elected president has any clue what he is doing? Note that it’s the second term, and yet….
5/12/25 – Get the Gazan people relief now – now. We want cruelty, wherever it can be found, to stop. Be true to the faith. Be good people.
5/11/25 – Cheat sheet for those who have not been paying attention: Good v. Evil Players.
Good: Pope Leo XIV (American Christian), Zelensky (Ukrainian Jew), Elias (American Jew).
Evil: A certain person (American pagan), netanyahu (Israeli pagan), miller (American pagan).
5/11/25 – We want the forces of evil to know that we will never back down. We will fight morally and aggressively until we have victory, and during our battle, we will give them nothing, not our dignity, our joy, our hope, our faith, nothing. We surrender nothing, and they will lose everything that actually matters. They should know it now. Happy Sunday!
5/11/25 – Slava Ukraini. Ukrainians and Ukraine, its own people and country, have our support until they have victory. Nothing will change this stance.
5/11/25 – Marc Elias is correct to fight aggressively. His critics are trying to justify their cowardice and selfishness.
5/11/25 – As a world, we need peace. Any attempts at domination whether motivated by imperialism or religious nationalism will eventually fail, but considerable harm will be done in the short term. Power does not come from the sword. This type of power is illusory and ultimately fleeting. Godliness, holiness is true power. Let us be a people of real and lasting power. Let us be a people of peace.
5/11/25 – On this Mother’s Day, we are praying for the Nigerian mothers whose children are being slaughtered and brutalized by Islamic extremists. May God bless and comfort them. We pray that Pope Leo helps them spiritually and materially. They need international protection, and their plight needs to be brought before the international legal system. They deserve justice for the harm their persecutors have caused them and an end to this cruelty and violence.
5/10/25 – All the greedy tech titans who do very little for others disgust us. We do not respect or like them, and we want this to be known. Avarice is also an expression of evil.
5/10/25 – As friends of the Jewish people: stephen miller and benjamin netanyahu are putting your people in grave danger. For moral reasons and for your own self-preservation, you need to stop them. The human trafficking of illegal migrants or immigrants, the violation of their due process rights and their ill-treatment, the violation of the protesting students’ First Amendment rights, the starving of Gazan children is morally wrong and is damaging the world’s opinion of the Jewish people. You are alienating the friends you will likely need in the future, and you need to stage a concerted intervention to stop this, for their sake…and for your own.
When the Jewish chemist Fritz Haber created a chemical weapon in his nationalistic zeal to ingratiate himself with the German government during World War I, he didn’t foresee it being used to gas over 1 million Jews during the Holocaust. The nature of cruelty and violence is that it begets more cruelty and violence. Whether or not one believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ, “those who live by the sword die by the sword” applies.
Hama’s attack on October 7, 2023 was heinous, and the protestors who created a hostile environment on college campuses violated Jewish people’s civil rights. They were both wrong, but the respective responses are also wrong. They are far too strong, and the Jewish people take great risks with this approach. Revenge or opportunism is not justice. They cannot be justified and can have severe negative repercussions for the Jewish people in the future.
The nature of evil is that we all possess the capacity for it. As the opening of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible explains and, therefore, as the Jewish people would understand better than any of us, this is our fallen nature. The only thing that prevents us from becoming an evil monster is not our incapacity but our restraint. Stage an intervention, and impose the restraint.
The Bad Show
5/9/25 – Curtis Yarvin is an insane chimpanzee. He doesn’t know if he is coming or going. He is a garbage spewer who desperately wants attention. He should be committed. Then again, all of the tech titans who listen to him should also be committed. They are morally bankrupt and detached from reality. They are crazy people and a serious threat to global peace and governance.
5/9/25 – This is a dark and dangerous time for us as a global people. We must vanquish this evil that has fallen upon us. We must remember who we serve. We serve God and the poorest and most vulnerable in the world. For their sake, we cannot lose this battle.
5/8/25 – Yesterday, we remembered Saint Monica. Who was she? She was St. Augustine’s mom, a Christian woman from North Africa (likely modern-day Algeria) married to a pagan, Patricius. Many people think St. Augustine was Roman, but he was actually North African, and he was the Bishop of Hippo, also in North Africa, for almost 35 years.
Monica persistently prayed for her intellectually gifted but hedonistic son to become a Christian, and he finally did after a long, circuitous spiritual journey. He is now known as one of the greatest theologians in Christian history. (He is my patron saint.)
Conversion is sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes dramatic, sometimes quiet. Each person has their own pace and way. No matter how we come to Jesus Christ, if we are to truly follow him, it can’t be superficial gestures and words. As Jesus sacrificed for us, we also have to sacrifice. We have to help the poorest and the most marginalized in the world.
5/8/25 – We are praying for our new pope, Pope Leo XIV. It is an incredible honor for our country, especially during this difficult time when Americans have been humiliated and disgraced on the world stage. He is also considered by some as the first pope from the Augustinian Order, perhaps because he held its leadership role. It does seem like the world is hoping he can save us all, but this would be asking too much of anyone. We do hope that he can pray to God with us that God may save us from ourselves. May the Holy Spirit guide him in this challenging time and the difficult work ahead. (Note: It is unclear why some news agencies reported him as the first Augustinian pope, and America magazine wrote that there have been six before him. Changes to the text above reflect this ambiguity.)
5/7/25 – To anybody immoral and stupid enough to carry out this administration’s heinous and illegal orders, know this. The supreme sociopath is 78-years-old. His days of power are relatively short, if only restricted by his age. And when he is no longer in power, you will be hunted down like a dog, be put in prison, possibly for the rest of your life, and your family will be impoverished. The international community will make sure that justice is served.
5/7/25 – Are Europeans ever going to show some courage and conviction? Are they only capable of being lazy and entitled, or can they actually do something for the world, such as arresting the architects of these illegal deportations? Certain people land on European soil. Put them in handcuffs and escort them to The Hague.
5/7/25 – State governments need to start arresting anybody that carries out these illegal deportations.
5/7/25 – This administration is engaging in human trafficking. It is a morally bankrupt and criminal enterprise.
5/7/25 – We pray that the Holy Spirit guides the papal conclave to elect a fitting pope.
5/7/25 – Even if you disagree with his personal politics, this is what courage and conviction looks like. The law firms and lawyers that caved are an embarrassment to themselves and to our country. History will remember them as such.
Marc Elias: Trump’s Attacks on the Rule of Law and Democracy
5/6/25 – This administration’s policies are not respecting people’s due process rights in violation of our country’s Constitution. It is also sending people to a country with which they have no legal relationship and often to its prisons without proving that they have committed a crime. The administration could have easily chosen to conduct the deportations, which in many cases are justified, in a lawful and humane way, one that respects the deportees’ rights, dignity and humanity. It chose not to do so, in part, because of the sociopath, the Henry Kissinger of the modern era, Stephen Miller. It is time to bring order and morality to this entirely unacceptable situation. This is a matter of international law, and it is past time for the international legal community to step up and do their jobs. They need to start with issuing an arrest warrant for Bukele and bringing him to trial at The Hague.
5/4/25 – Either the persecution of Christians in Nigeria stops, or the Muslim extremists need to be brought to trial in The Hague for genocide. “Help Women Who’ve Endured the Unthinkable, Christian women in northern Nigeria are targets for Islamic extremists. Many have: Been forced into extremist marriages, Watched their children die, Lost everything they owned, Been rejected by their communities. Your gift provides healing, skills training, and a path to self-sufficiency.”
Your persecuted family in Nigeria needs your help today.
5/4/25 – True Christians are Africans. In the theme of catching up from last week, on Friday, we remembered Saint Athanasius – an African, a Copt, originally meaning an Egyptian, you know, from one of the world’s great ancient civilizations. Now, Copt refers to Christian Egyptians. Saint Athanasius is considered one of the great fathers of the church – the global church, the same one in which people of all colors, cultures, and backgrounds worship. He was a bishop in Alexandria, Egypt for forty-six years and is a Doctor of the Church, particularly for his insistence on Jesus’s divinity. The words in the Nicene Creed, the one Christians throughout the world no matter their denomination say, reflect his faith and immense influence on Christianity to this day.
To Africans, we say this: don’t throw away your birthright because some nonwhite liberals who choose to be conditioned by ignorant white liberals who know nothing about Christianity speak some nonsense about your identity or about the faith. You are not a Pavlovian dog. You are a child of God, and all you need to know personally is Jesus Christ.
5/4/25 – According to some supposed enlightened nonwhite liberal who has emancipated herself from “white Christianity” and found “African spirits,” all nonwhites are white people’s Pavlovian dogs. Did you know that? If you’re nonwhite, and that’s what you know, maybe you need to get some self-respect and an accurate understanding of history. No amount of “African spirits” can save you from your sad opinion of yourself and your ignorance. Happy Sunday!
5/3/25 – Another flashback because why not. It seems apropos five years later. “Therefore, the sole dependence on the state for these services is as dangerous and precarious as the nation itself. If a corrupt, depraved person rises to power, the people will be at the mercy of a failed state with no corrective measures since the constitution and the laws would simply be changed to facilitate the exploitation or subjugation of the people.
Although both church and state are vulnerable to corruption, unlike the state, the corrective measure in the church is indelible and immutable since it is the foundation of the church itself, Jesus’s teachings. The enforcement of the church’s corrective measure is its believers who would force the church to return to the correct application of the teachings. The church’s role in society was incomparably important, and it needs to remain so, as it provides an irreplaceable source of stability and goodness for the world.”
The Necessity for Christian Witness in Secular Society
5/3/25 – So many parents are obsessed with providing materially for their children. Obviously, when basic necessities, such as housing and food, aren’t met, that can negatively impact a child’s well-being and development. However, more important than anything else is having a loving, supportive family that also holds children accountable and provides them with community and spiritual connection. Most families are often too focused on ambition and accomplishment and not focused enough on the holistic development of their children. Are you spending quality time or even time with your children? Are you doing family and community activities together with them? Are you nurturing a sense of doing for others, donating and volunteering, and of responsibility to the family? Are you cultivating their beings or outsourcing your responsibilities to electronic device(s) and their teachers?
5/3/25 – From a few years ago, a belated Flashback Friday because, well, life is busy. The Tradition of the #Trending
5/1/25 – Paganism is not cool. It’s callous and cruel. It’s might makes right. Instead of obsessing on a certain person, a pagan pretending to be a follower of Jesus Christ, we suggest that you find your passions and your heart. You have to give to receive. Donate to organizations that do the Lord’s work. Donate your time, talent and treasure for other people’s well-being. You have enough. It’s not just MAGA that has lost its way. It’s Americans and the west more broadly. We’re paying for our sinfulness.
IJM
5/1/25 – Today is International Workers Day. It is also the Feast Day for St. Joseph the Worker, Jesus’s earthly father, a carpenter who taught Jesus the craft. We celebrate St. Joseph twice, as both beloved spouse and father (on March 19) and as humble worker (on May 1).
Strong families depend on parent(s) being able to provide for them and on having dignity for their labor. Caste or any other form of (institutionalized) slavery is a violation of God’s order, one that asks us to be productive and to not exploit each other. St. Joseph, international workers, indentured servants and all of us are human beings first. We are beloved by our maker and are endowed with inalienable rights granted to us by our creator. We belong to him and him alone.
On this day, let us pray that we use our gifts to serve God. Let’s also pray for all of the workers who are deprived of their basic human rights, who are treated as property and as disposable. Let us pray for all of the workers whose dignity is not respected. May they be liberated from bondage and be able to live and work in freedom and with respect for their humanity.
ECSPE Break the Chains
CSI-USA Slavery