I'll admit it, I have been overwhelmed by the news.

Keeping up with current events lately has felt like a daunting, impossible task.

This year, it really seems like we hit the foobar of headlines.

It feels like everything around us is burning. Our house is burning down.

Think of the Catholic school shooting in Minnesota.

The Mormon church attack in Michigan,

still smoldering, drone footage of Gaza City reduced to rubble, Charlie Kirk keeling over,

and Jimmy Kimmel back on late night smirking at us like nothing happened. Maybe that feeling of

helplessness of the end of it all takes you forward to a bleak future, a climate catastrophe,

AI taking your job, digital IDs and government surveillance, a housing market collapse,

or maybe New York City turning into a Marxist fever dream.

Take your pick and enter the Rube Goldberg machine of dysfunctional dominoes falling all the way

to Armageddon.

Whether you're on the right or the left or somewhere in between, many Americans feel

politically homeless, culturally homeless, and maybe even spiritually homeless, a sense that

the future is being stolen out from under us by violence, betrayal,

by a culture that no longer shares principles or moral values, and we can't vote our way out of it.

So what do you do when your house burns down?

Let's take our eyes off the ashes for just a moment, and let me tell you a story,

a very, very old story. Long ago, there was a city called Troy. A man named Anias loved his city,

he loved his father and his ancestors and religion, he loved his son, who would inherit his homeland, and then it

all burned down.

...