If you’ve ever seen the clearest and bluest of the Atlantic in the Caribbean, you have a sense of what the weather has been like in Washington, D.C., in recent days. I haven’t been here in a while, but it sure welcomed me back well. I had the opportunity to see the town from a Virginia balcony with a comprehensive view. And for a bit, all I could look at was the Jefferson Memorial.

Conservative civil rights leader Robert L. Woodson Sr. died in his sleep at 89 on May 19. He wrote “The Triumphs of Joseph: How Today’s Community Healers Are Reviving Our Streets and Neighborhoods,” published in 2007, a book whose message remains timely and necessary.

Late in the week after the latest attempt on President Trump’s life, a 20-year-old boy from Billings, Montana, asked a question at a Turning Point USA event held on a college campus in Springfield, Missouri.

I once brought tears to the eyes of the new patriarch of the Chaldean Church. He’s known as Paul III now, but back in 2016 he was an archbishop, formerly of Mosul, in Iraq. He had recently been reassigned to Australia, where many an Iraqi had fled the so-called Islamic State (or “ISIS”) genocide. I said the archbishop: “Surely someone asked you if he could pretend to renounce Jesus, just for the sake of selfpreservation, to keep his family safe and all he had worked for remain in his hometown.” That’s when his eyes welled up. I really didn’t expect him to begin to cry in response to an American’s seeming cynicism. “None of them thought it would be better not to be Christian,” the archbishop told me. “We thank God for everything,” he even said to me, “because we are still alive, we still have a very strong faith. We thank God for that.”