Brendan LaFave excelled academically but felt disconnected due to technology, stating, 'It just did a number on me. It caused a subtle depression.' His experience during COVID further exacerbated his feelings of isolation.
"There's a huge influx in younger people," said Brian Phelan. Specifically, guys in their 20s and 30s, who are taking a leap of faith and coming to church, like Carson Schmidt. "I feel like I've seen more of my friends be more curious about faith, and that's cool," Schmidt said.
When the person you're pretending to be gets too heavy to carry, you realize that the mask you've worn for so long has become your actual face.
Social anxiety and depression had other plans, leaving me in an ugly cycle of self-isolation and rumination. Terrified of rejection, I'd meet someone interesting during one of my English lectures and invite them out for frozen yogurt in my head.
Devon Hase states, 'People are trying desperately to fix, optimize, or escape their way out of relationship difficulty - and suffering more for the effort. Social media has made this worse! We're surrounded by images of perfect partnerships while quietly drowning in our own ordinary struggles.' This highlights the pressure couples feel in the age of social media.
On Ash Wednesday, 2026, two Roman Catholic priests and a religious sister entered an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, Illinois, to celebrate Mass with detainees inside. It might seem like a simple, routine event: a religious service to mark the start of Lent. But the Mass represented a legal win for the Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership, based in Chicago.
On the first hike, about half-way up the mountain, I reached a point where the path was too slippery, steep and scary. Even though my wonderful guide talked me through the tough parts, I finally realized I'd have to do the same thing going back downhill. So, I stopped. I sat on a moss covered rock. I enjoyed the forest flowers and tree bark and birds and ferns and more.
The building, designed by Walter Ratcliff, Jr. was declared one of the most beautiful and chaste buildings in the Bay region according to the Berkeley Daily Gazette. Heavenward pointing in its Gothic lines, the architecture, said Dr. Swartz (President of the PSR) was of the most inspiring character. Final plans call for a central tower as the crowning feature of the architectural scheme.
There's a myth in our society that real change requires force, strength, and domination. We celebrate athletes, CEOs, and politicians who crush their opponents. But history tells a different story. Lasting social change has often been triggered by humble people whose weapons were passion, principle, and an unwavering commitment to justice and the truth - not the truth we see on TV or read in print media, but rather the truth that we feel deep inside ourselves.
In the "Arabian Nights" ( The Thousand and One Nights) story collection, a young Persian queen named Scheherazade prevents the king's plans to execute her by telling a succession of stories so enthralling that the king doesn't want to miss the endings. In "The Crow and the Pitcher," one of Aesop's fables, a thirsty crow can't reach the water in a tall jug, so it drops pebbles into the jug until the water rises to its beak.
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger believed that human knowledge, at its most foundational and meaningful, is ineffable. Moreover, it requires stepping beyond what one sees as the established rules and into the realm of the unknown. Think of a master jazz musician or an elite athlete who, after facing an unpredictable moment, would find it impossible to convey precisely how and why they did what they did to deliver a peak performance.
I'll never forget the moment that changed how I think about leadership. It happened during my tenure as president of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, when I learned that one of our longtime supporters, a commercial real estate developer named Irwin, was nearing the end of his life and despairing that his contributions no longer mattered. We brought him to campus to show him otherwise.
I grew up fervently anti-religion, like Don up there. "The opiate of the masses," and all that other shit. To me, every public Christian was either a shitbag televangelist or, even worse, a politician. My favorite comedian was Sam Kinison, a former preacher who turned on his church. I didn't simply disagree with religious people, I looked down on them, like a Ricky Gervais-type would. I thought this made me more rock-and-roll or whatever.
The monks are part of a 2,300-mile pilgrimage for peace from a Buddhist temple in Fort Worth, Texas, across nine states to Washington DC. Dressed in vibrant orange robes, they have walked about 20 miles daily, eating one meal a day and practicing loving-kindness a form of mindfulness that can be thought of as a form of non-violent resistance. Their journey is a slow-moving meditation meant to embody peace, rather than argue for it.
A tweet can travel far, but it cannot spark a spontaneous conversation in the hallway. Conferences offer in-person engagement, but they are infrequent and often exclusive or too busy. Hanging a paper on your office door? That's immediate, local and quietly powerful. It is a symbolic gesture that brings your research into the physical space of the university, something rarely done in today's digital culture.
