For everyone talking about the end of political solutions, here's something practical you can do. Social trust is something you build before you need it. Get to know your neighbors. Make friends. Help someone with a project. Be someone others can count on. These relationships make everyday life better and communities stronger, regardless of what happens politically. In a crisis, nobody wishes they'd spent less time building local connections.

In Christian tradition, pride is the sin Satan delights in most and uses most effectively against humanity. It is the primal revolt and the unlocked gate through which the rest of sin enters the human heart. It was pride that turned Lucifer into the devil. Scripture describes that rebellion in Isaiah 14:12-15: “How has Lucifer, that rose in the morning, fallen from heaven! He that sent orders to all the nations is crushed to the earth. But thou saidst in thine heart, I will go up to heaven, I will set my throne above the stars of heaven: I will sit on a lofty mount, on the lofty mountains toward the north: I will go up above the clouds: I will be like the Most High. But now thou shalt go down to hell, even to the foundations of the earth.” The heart of pride is plain here: a created being refusing its proper place and seeking to exalt itself to divine status. The same pattern appears in humanity’s fall. In Genesis 3:5, the serpent tempts Eve with the promise, “For God knew that in whatever day ye should eat of it your eyes would be opened, and ye would be as gods, knowing good and evil.” The temptation is not merely disobedience. It is self-exaltation. It is the desire to seize what belongs to God alone, to put the self in God’s place, and to claim the right to define good and evil on one’s own terms. For that reason, Christian teachers from the earliest centuries treated pride as the root and queen of all sin. St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Catherine of Siena all describe it this way because it disorders the right relation between creature and Creator. It puts the self where God should be. The other sins, lust, greed, wrath, envy, gluttony, and sloth, follow from that deeper revolt. C. S. Lewis expresses the point memorably in Mere Christianity: “According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride… Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil. Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.” Pride is therefore not simply one vice among others. It is the inward principle that gives rise to the rest. It is also the devil’s most effective temptation because it is subtle and self-deceiving. Other sins often produce immediate guilt, but pride can masquerade as strength, intelligence, independence, or justified superiority. A person can enjoy it while scarcely recognizing it as sin at all. That is what makes it so spiritually dangerous. It is Satanic in the most direct sense because it repeats the devil’s own rebellion. By tempting humanity with pride, Satan draws people into the same posture: refusal of dependence, resistance to submission, and the desire to rival God rather than serve Him. That is why many Christian writers, pastors, and exorcists have regarded pride as the devil’s favorite weapon. It hardens the heart against repentance, blinds the soul to grace, and makes every other sin easier to excuse. The opposite of pride is not self-hatred but humility: the truthful recognition that we are dependent on God and no greater than our fellow creatures. As St. Augustine put it, “It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels.” Within Christian moral theology, then, pride is the primal revolt through which every other sin enters the human heart.