Thanksgiving 2025: George Washington’s 1789 Thanksgiving Proclamation

Well done, Mr President. Well done. You get it. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand (and do likewise). Your country’s existence depends on it.

By the President of the United States of America, a Proclamation.

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor– and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be– That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks–for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation–for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his Providence which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war–for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed–for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted–for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

[A]nd also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions– to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually–to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed–to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord–To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and us–and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

Go: Washington

Washington issued a proclamation on October 3, 1789, designating Thursday, November 26 as a national day of thanks. In his proclamation, Washington declared that the necessity for such a day sprung from the Almighty’s care of Americans prior to the Revolution, assistance to them in achieving independence, and help in establishing the constitutional government.

Source: George Washington’s Mount Vernon

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Thanksgiving 2025: William Bennett and John Cribb (FN): The Virtue America Forgot: Why Gratitude Still Matters for our National Character

An excellent piece that is spot on. Gratitude for our country is rapidly disappearing because teachers no longer teach it and parents, for whatever reason, fail to demand it as well as teach it to their own kids. Woe to the teachers who have abandoned their sacred task in homage to the woke. Woe to them. May they come to their senses before it is too late. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Does America need to focus more on the civic virtue of gratitude? It’s a question worth asking as we approach Thanksgiving.

We do not mean personal gratitude. Most Americans are no doubt grateful for their families and friends, the roofs over their heads, God’s creation, and the blessings we enjoy in this country.

But in our national discourse, do we publicly acknowledge those blessings enough? Do our leaders regularly express thanks for this nation’s greatness? In our schools and colleges, are we teaching young people how fortunate we are to be Americans — and the importance of gratitude for our country?There are some troubling signs. For example, a recent Axios–Generation Lab poll found that more college students have a positive view of socialism than of capitalism.

Yes, capitalism has its problems, and the anxiety of young people facing issues like student debt and high housing costs is understandable. But are we losing our appreciation for the American free enterprise system that has lifted millions out of poverty and helped countless people build better lives for themselves and their families?

Schools used to spend significant time on the story of the first Thanksgiving and how the pilgrims, having made it through the “starving time,” sat down to feast and give thanks with the American Indians who had helped them survive.Today, many schools are just as likely to skip that story, throw cold water on the first Thanksgiving tradition, or mark the season with a generic harvest celebration.It would be interesting to know how often parents hear their children say, “We learned to be thankful for our country in school today.”

Pick a college and look at its list of American history courses. You’ll likely find descriptions with words like “exploitation,” “oppression,” “imperialism,” and “exclusion.” You probably won’t find many with phrases such as “the miracle of America” or “achievements of the American spirit.”

Certainly, the United States has at times fallen short of its ideals. It has committed sins—some grievous. But for all its errors, ours is the story of a great nation that gives us much to be thankful for.

Read and reflect on it all. Then do your part, what you can, to return the civic virtue of gratitude to its proper place in our nation.

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Ted Jenkin (FN): Christmas is Gobbling up Thanksgiving, the Uniquely American Holiday

I must sadly agree and we are the poorer for it, both as individuals and families and as a nation. All the lights, cheers, presents, and eggnog will not change human nature or the evil of a sin-wracked, evil-infested world. At least Thanksgiving points us to the One who can. Would that God be gracious to us, despite our ongoing and increasing rebellion. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand—and take time to reflect on and celebrate Thanksgiving this Thursday.

OK. The pumpkin season is officially over, and now it’s Christmastime.   

Walk into any store in America right now, and you’ll think you’ve stepped into Santa’s workshop with peppermint everything, aisles of ornaments, pre-lit trees, inflatable snowmen and twinkling lights in your neighborhood that would make even Clark Griswold proud. 

But try finding a simple Thanksgiving decoration. A turkey, a harvest wreath, even a grateful-themed tablecloth, and you practically need a search warrant. Somewhere between the discount Halloween candy and the Black Friday promo aisle, Thanksgiving has vanished like a missing person. 

And it’s not your imagination. Christmas is steamrolling Thanksgiving and there are three big cultural and economic reasons why. 

…Some people will shrug and say, “Who cares? It’s just decorations.” 

But I think it’s deeper. Thanksgiving isn’t political. It’s purely American. 

Thanksgiving is the one holiday uniquely designed to make us pause, reconnect and recalibrate. There are no gifts. No costumes. No commercial agenda. It’s a 24-hour reminder that what we already have is enough, which is something we desperately need in a world that constantly tells us we’re behind. 

If we allow Thanksgiving to disappear and be replaced by 60 days of Christmas promos and artificial urgency, we will lose a holiday that strengthens the financial and emotional health of families. 

Read it all.

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162nd Anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

Today marks the 162nd anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, one of the seminal speeches in American history. Take time to read and reflect on it today and give thanks that God has raised up leaders like President Lincoln to guide our country through extraordinarily difficult times. May God continue to be merciful to us today and bless us with an extraordinary leader to guide us through these extraordinarily difficult times.

LINCOLN’S GETTYSBURG ADDRESS

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Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

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2025: Remember, Remember the 10th of November

Apologies to the Brits. From the pen of my mama, now 80 years on today. Check it out.

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One thing I thought I could do during WWII was to find out the customers of the O.P.C. [Ohio Power Company, now AEP] who had sons in the service, learn their names and ask about them when the customers paid their bills. Few checks were used back then so we were busy with cash customers. I always asked John’s Dad [my grandpa Maney] about John [my dad] and he would reply. Then, one day, he volunteered that John was on his way home! That’s why when I saw John in at Dolly’s [a now extinct local restaurant], I stopped to tell him his dad had told me he was on his way home and I wanted to thank him for all he’d done for our country–and for me. I shook his hand as my Dad had taught me, got my Coke and went to a booth to look at the Saturday Evening Post, a magazine I dearly loved for its funny cartoons. When I left to go get Betty [mom’s sister] at Thomas’ Jewelry (I’d worked there Saturday afternoons and evenings for quite awhile) John was still sitting up front on a bar stool. I stopped to show him a cartoon, he asked me if I’d like to go to the movie and I said yes after I’d told Betty I wouldn’t be walking home with her. John wasn’t really sure who I was ’til he walked me home and saw Dad’s picture. I knew he hadn’t been with a girl for over 2 years so when he was leaving I kissed him on his lips (yips as [granddaughter] Bridget used to say) and I suppose it turned out to be too much for him.

Heh. Classic mama. Miss dad and her a LOT. Remember, remember the 10th of November, a key date in Maney family history.

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Mike Kerrigan (FN): Fifty Years After Edmund Fitzgerald Claimed 29 lives, Gordon Lightfoot’s Musical Memorial Endures

A good piece with which I agree. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Monday marks the 50th anniversary of  the  sinking of the  SS Edmund  Fitzgerald, a tragedy on Lake Superior that claimed the lives of 29 men. In the days following the calamity, songwriter Gordon Lightfoot read about it in Newsweek and immediately put his God-given gifts to their highest and best use.

“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” as the maritime disaster will forever be known, was Lightfoot’s Homeric ode to the courage of the American freighter’s crew on their final, fateful voyage. The song was released in August 1976, less than a year after the shipwreck.

Lightfoot was on top of the music game when the Fitz, as “the pride of the American side” was affectionately called, was loaded with 26,000 tons of iron ore. “Sundown” had reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart in June 1974, featuring commercial hits like the title song and “Carefree Highway.” Gord, in other words, was gold.

Yet in composing this song, the Canadian troubadour did not set out to write another hit. Had that been his intention, he surely would not have written a dirge, let alone one that is over six minutes long and lacks a chorus. Moved by empathy, Lightfoot wanted to honor the valorous dead in a befitting way.   He’d found the Newsweek article from which he learned about the wreck to be insufficiently panegyrical, and so he did what true artists do: He created the beauty that he longed to hear. Over 6,000 ships have gone down in the Great Lakes. We sing of this one even today because Lightfoot so sublimely immortalized it.Of course, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” did become a hit after all, reaching No. 1 in Canada and No. 2 in the Billboard Hot 100 in the U.S. It is also perhaps Lightfoot’s best-known song and was a lifetime achievement of singular importance to him. I believe this is no accident. 

In “Mere Christianity,” C.S. Lewis wrote “Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.” Seek the higher and you get the lower: Lightfoot did precisely this. He concerned himself not with creating a hit but with creating beauty. Hit status simply was thrown in.

Once the Edmund Fitzgerald’s sinking was confirmed, the rector at Mariners’ Church in Detroit rang its bell 29 times to honor the life of each member of her crew. Of this mournful and lonely labor, Lightfoot elegiacally sang “the church bell chimed ‘till it rang 29 times” in his ballad.

Read it all.

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Cole Simmons (The American Mind): Why Columbus Matters

I agree with the thesis of this article, if not all that is contained therein. For an excellent refutation of the lies about Columbus foisted on us by the enemies of our great nation, I wholeheartedly recommend the book, Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World, by Jeff Flynn-Paul. Read it and learn the balanced truth. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand. Happy Columbus Day!

We celebrate the civilization he carried into the New World.

Today, we commemorate Christopher Columbus, the man whose daring voyage across the Atlantic in 1492 initiated the Age of Discovery that reshaped the world. Columbus’s prediction that a western route to Asia was possible was not correct in its specifics, but he did not have to be correct to change the world. His legacy is about the spirit that drove him: a spirit of exploration, courage, and leadership.

Columbus’s journey across the Atlantic was no small feat. In an era when ships were fragile and navigation rudimentary, Columbus and his crew faced uncharted waters and unpredictable storms. The dangers were not merely physical; the psychological toll of sailing in the open sea, with no guarantee of land appearing on the horizon, tested the limits of human endurance. Columbus’s men urged him to turn back, but he pressed on, navigating not only the seas but also the fragile morale of his crew.

What does it mean to celebrate such a man? As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, we raise monuments to men as well as the spirit that moved them:

Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

This spirit continues to inspire. We honor Columbus not just for what he achieved, but for the qualities that made his achievements possible.

Americans have been celebrating Columbus for a long time. The first monument to Columbus in America, the “Columbus Obelisk” in Baltimore, was erected in 1792. Baltimore Heritage reports that its great age led to it being forgotten at times. “In the 1880s, a local historian felt compelled to debunk a popular rumor that the obelisk memorialized a horse named ‘Columbus’ instead of the man.” That kind of sleepy forgetfulness, however, is impossible in today’s polarized environment.

In 2017, left-wing activists began vandalizing the obelisk. They took a sledgehammer to its base and posted a sign that read “Racism. Tear it Down.” Three years later, in 2020, Baltimore Democrats tried to rename it “The Police Violence Victims Monument,” but the mayor vetoed the city council.

Like the Columbus obelisk, Columbus Day has become a symbol of America that some wish to tear down…

…Actual human beings are far too impressive for leftist ideology, however. Imagine what it would be like for one of these complainers to meet a true 1600s Iroquois brave or Algonquin shaman.

Scholars can debate the justice of this or that event. They can examine the motivations, the pressures, what exactly happened, who did what and when, the impact and outcome, and a thousand other questions that someone genuinely interested in justice would ask. But they should consider the overarching question of our time: Is civilization a good thing? If it is, Columbus can and should be celebrated. If it is bad, he and other explorers must be maligned as destroyers of indigenous peoples.

The activists and intellectuals who hate Columbus hate the spirit of exploration and the civilization that birthed it. The people attacking him are attacking the history of the world as it is, on behalf of a history of the world that never was and never could have been.

For those of us who celebrate Columbus Day, the holiday has likewise become more important than it used to be.

Read it all.

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Victor Davis Hanson (FN): When Liberals Play Confederates. Portland’s Revolt Against America

Hanson offers a spot on analysis of what is happening in Portland, OR. Yet the problem runs much deeper than even his excellent analysis posits; it is not just a “Democrat or Left problem,” perverse and bizarre as the party has become; rather, it is a problem of the human condition that we all share. At it’s core, it is the spirit of lawlessness and chaos unleashed that have gripped this country and that stem from rebellious and sinful hearts that we inherited in and through the Fall (Genesis 1-3), and barring God’s merciful and gracious intervention on our behalf, our country his headed for (self-) destruction. This is one of the ways God’s terrible judgment plays out on nations that forsake his laws (see, e.g., Romans 1.18-32; 2 Thessalonians 2.9-12) and it is a fearsome and terrible thing to behold, especially for those involved. Pray to Christ that this does not ultimately happen to us to destroy the high ideals that made this nation great in the first place. Secularism isn’t the answer. Neither is rejection of our Judeo-Christian heritage—these two factors helped get us where we are! No, only repentance and spiritual renewal after the manner of Christ can save us, and then only through the sheer mercy and grace of God the Father. Other nations have been down this path before and it rarely if ever is pretty. Let all who love this country humble themselves and commit to regular prayer and fasting, that the Lord might be merciful to us and spare us. Lord have mercy on us. Christ have mercy on us. Lord have mercy on us. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

In blue cities across America — Portland, Oregon, especially — often violent protesters now seek to surround ICE facilities to stop federal officers from fulfilling their assigned and legal duties of arresting illegal aliens.

Some 10 million or more illegal aliens were allowed to enter the U.S. during the Joe Biden years — illegally and thus without criminal or health checks.

Neither Antifa nor liberal urban America objected to such a flagrant disregard for the law. But both are now as intent on obstructing the legal enforcement of the law as they were earlier in favor of its illegal non-enforcement.

Much less did they care about the consequences of sending millions of foreign nationals into cities and counties where they swamped social services, spiked crime, and flooded emergency rooms and schools.

ICE has repeatedly presented data that show in its first rounds of deportations, it is concentrating on removing either criminal illegal aliens or those who have already been processed with deportation orders, somewhere between 70 and 90% of all current apprehensions.

No matter.

Left-wing protesters are swarming ICE headquarters in Portland to violently oppose all deportations, even those of known criminals and those who have already exhausted efforts to remain here illegally.

…The reigning moralistic assumption is that ceding territory to terrorists, not enforcing local and state laws, and nullifying federal statutes are all small prices to pay for the larger projection of chaos and violence that can be blamed on Trump.

Such thinking entails utter indifference to any Portlanders who live near the siege and are nightly subjected to constant disruptions, harassment, and occasional violence. Do these law-abiding residents have fewer civil rights than the lawbreaking armies of the night?

In contrast, the use of federal troops to stop the siege of ICE facilities will remind the violent protesters of the left that their neo-Confederate tactics will not work, but instead subject them to arrest and federal indictments.

Bringing in federal forces to uphold the law will also protect the rights of ICE personnel and neighborhood residents to live in peace and security and have their constitutional protections secured. Not all American citizens are Portlanders, but all Portland citizens are Americans.

In other words, both Antifa and the appeasing Oregon officials are our new neo-Confederate secessionists. They feel that their states are now autonomous entities that are still entitled to federal money but not obligated to follow federal laws.

Read and reflect on it all.

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Shaun Rieley (The American Mind): Mob Violence Is Fatal to Republican Government

An excellent if longish piece. Let everyone with ears to hear, listen and understand, especially those who love this country and do not want to see it perish in vain.

When 20-year-old loner Thomas Matthew Crooks ascended a sloped roof in Butler County, Pennsylvania, and opened fire, he unleashed a torrent of cliches. Commentators and public figures avoided the term “assassination attempt,” even if the AR-15 was trained on the head of a then-former president—instead, they condemned “political violence.”

“There is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy,” former president Barack Obama said. One year later, he added the word “despicable” to his condemnation of the assassin who killed Charlie Kirk. That was an upgrade from two weeks prior, when he described the shooting at Annunciation Catholic School by a transgender individual as merely “unnecessary.”

Anyone fluent in post-9/11 rhetoric knows that political violence is the domain of terrorists and lone wolf ideologues, whose manifestos will soon be unearthed by federal investigators, deciphered by the high priests of our therapeutic age, and debated by partisans on cable TV. The attempt to reduce it to the mere atomized individual, however, is a modern novelty. From the American Revolution to the Civil War, from the 1863 draft riots to the 1968 MLK riots, from the spring of Rodney King to the summer of George Floyd, there is a long history of Americans resorting to violence to achieve political ends by way of the mob.

Since the January 6 riot that followed the 2020 election, the Left has persistently attempted to paint the Right as particularly prone to mob action. But as the online response to the murder of Charlie Kirk demonstrates—with thousands of leftists openly celebrating the gory, public assassination of a young father—the vitriol that drives mob violence is endemic to American political discourse and a perpetual threat to order.

Our Founders understood this all too well.

In August of 1786, a violent insurrection ripped through the peaceful Massachusetts countryside. After the end of the Revolutionary War, many American soldiers were caught in a vise, with debt collectors on one side and a government unable to make back pay on the other. A disgruntled former officer in the Continental Army named Daniel Shays led a violent rebellion aimed at breaking the vise at gunpoint.

“Commotions of this sort, like snow-balls, gather strength as they roll, if there is no opposition in the way to divide and crumble them,” George Washington wrote in a letter, striking a serene tone in the face of an insurrection. James Madison was less forgiving: “In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob,” he wrote in Federalist 55. Inspired by Shays’s Rebellion and seeking to rein in the excesses of democracy, lawmakers called for the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787.

If the United States Constitution was borne out of political chaos, why does the current moment strike so many as distinctly perilous? Classical political philosophy offers us a clearer answer to this question than modern psychoanalysis. The most pointed debate among philosophers throughout the centuries has centered on how to prevent mob violence and ensure that most unnatural of things: political order.

In Plato’s Republic, the work that stands at the headwaters of the Western tradition of political philosophy, Socrates argues that the only truly just society is one in which philosophers are kings and kings are philosophers. As a rule, democracy devolves into tyranny, for mob rule inevitably breeds impulsive citizens who become focused on petty pleasures. The resulting disorder eventually becomes so unbearable that a demagogue arises, promising to restore order and peace.

The classically educated Founders picked up on these ideas—mediated through Aristotle, Cicero, John Locke, and Montesquieu, among others—as they developed the structure of the new American government. The Constitution’s mixed government was explicitly designed to establish a political order that would take into consideration the sentiments and interests of the people without yielding to mob rule at the expense of order. The Founders took for granted that powerful elites would necessarily be interested in upholding the regime from which they derived their authority.

Read and reflect on it all. The Left hate our country and seek its destruction. Do not be complicit with their evil.

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WWII Nurse, Age 106, Donates Bullet from Husband’s Heart to Pearl Harbor Museum

From Fox News. What a great story! May God bless her.

A lifelong story of love and service has been brought into the public eye through a compelling donation to a World War II-related museum

At 106 years old, Alice Beck Darrow, a former nurse, knows more than most about survival. 

So did her husband, Dean Darrow. The pair met while she was caring for him at Mare Island Naval Hospital in California in 1942.  

The young sailor had survived the deadly attack on the USS West Virginia on Dec. 7, 1941. That ship was sunk by six torpedoes and two bombs, according to the National Park Service. One hundred and six people were killed in the attack. 

While Darrow survived the actual bombing, he was shot as he tried to board a rescue boat. 

He survived the surgery — and the two were married that same year. 

The bullet became a cherished object for the couple, Beck Darrow said. It was a reminder of the circumstances that brought them together. 

The couple raised four children in California and were married for nearly 50 years. 

She kept the bullet safe throughout their years together, as well as long after her husband’s passing in 1991. 

Read it all and make sure to check out the accompanying photos in the story.

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Jonathon Van Maren (TEC): “I Forgive Him”

A good piece on the extraordinary speech from Charlie Kirk’s widow for those with ears to hear and eyes to see. This is how we witness to our faith in the midst of extraordinary grief, pain, and suffering. Her Lord Jesus is surely proud. Would that our President have used his opportunity to eulogize Mr Kirk likewise, but he just cannot seem to help himself, which is truly unfortunate.

Well done, good and faithful servant.

In her thirty-minute address, Erika Kirk spoke of Charlie Kirk’s Christianity, his passion for reviving the American family, and defended the Christian vision of marriage, urging young men and women to step up and embrace their roles as husbands and wives. Her eulogy, alternatively fierce and sorrowful, gave a glimpse of what a powerhouse she may prove to be at the helm of Turning Point USA, where she succeeds her husband as CEO. Millions of Americans believe Christian marriage to be oppressive, and Christianity to be hateful. 

But when an LGBT extremist murdered one of America’s most prominent public Christians, a man who has been smeared daily since his death by the international press as a vile bigot, the miserable murderer found himself not loathed by the widow of the man he killed—but forgiven. For just a moment, at least, Kirk’s enemies have been stunned into silence. He would have been so proud of her. 

Read it all.

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History of the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross 2025

exaltation of the holy cross

After the death and resurrection of Christ, both the Jewish and Roman authorities in Jerusalem made efforts to obscure the Holy Sepulchre, Christ’s tomb in the garden near the site of His crucifixion. The earth had been mounded up over the site, and pagan temples had been built on top of it. The Cross on which Christ had died had been hidden (tradition said) by the Jewish authorities somewhere in the vicinity. According to tradition, first mentioned by Saint Cyril of Jerusalem in 348, Saint Helena, nearing the end of her life, decided under divine inspiration to travel to Jerusalem in 326 to excavate the Holy Sepulchre and attempt to locate the True Cross. A Jew by the name of Judas, aware of the tradition concerning the hiding of the Cross, led those excavating the Holy Sepulchre to the spot in which it was hidden. Three crosses were found on the spot. According to one tradition, the inscription Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum (“Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”) remained attached to the True Cross. According to a more common tradition, however, the inscription was missing, and Saint Helena and Saint Macarius, the bishop of Jerusalem, assuming that one was the True Cross and the other two belonged to the thieves crucified alongside Christ, devised an experiment to determine which was the True Cross. In one version of the latter tradition, the three crosses were taken to a woman who was near death; when she touched the True Cross, she was healed. In another, the body of a dead man was brought to the place where the three crosses were found, and laid upon each cross. The True Cross restored the dead man to life. In celebration of the discovery of the Holy Cross, Constantine ordered the construction of churches at the site of the Holy Sepulchre and on Mount Calvary. Those churches were dedicated on September 13 and 14, 335, and shortly thereafter the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross began to be celebrated on the latter date. The feast slowly spread from Jerusalem to other churches, until, by the year 720, the celebration was universal. In the early seventh century, the Persians conquered Jerusalem, and the Persian king Khosrau II captured the True Cross and took it back to Persia. After Khosrau’s defeat by Emperor Heraclius II, Khosrau’s own son had him assassinated in 628 and returned the True Cross to Heraclius. In 629, Heraclius, having initially taken the True Cross to Constantinople, decided to restore it to Jerusalem. Tradition says that he carried the Cross on his own back, but when he attempted to enter the church on Mount Calvary, a strange force stopped him. Patriarch Zacharias of Jerusalem, seeing the emperor struggling, advised him to take off his royal robes and crown and to dress in a penitential robe instead. As soon as Heraclius took Zacharias’ advice, he was able to carry the True Cross into the church. For some centuries, a second feast, the Invention of the Cross, was celebrated on May 3 in the Roman and Gallican churches, following a tradition that marked that date as the day on which Saint Helena discovered the True Cross. In Jerusalem, however, the finding of the Cross was celebrated from the beginning on September 14.

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