Turkeys at Thanksgiving, Thankfulness, and Family Traditions
Plus: Don't forget the recipes for leftovers!
Happy Saturday! Overtime is for everyone. If you’re a Bulwark+ member: thank you. If you’re not, there’s no better time to subscribe to Bulwark+ than today. If you like today’s issue, you can share this newsletter with someone you think would value it.
A Practice of Thankfulness
FOR THIS YEAR’S THANKSGIVING PRAYER, a theory: Gratitude is not just a virtue that serves an important social role, but it may just be the most underappreciated and underused tool for personal wellbeing.
ICYMI: Here are links to each newsletter section so you can quickly get back to that edition you may have missed this week.
Morning Shots - Triad - Huddled Masses - Press Pass - Bulwark Goes to Hollywood - The Opposition - False Flag - The Breakdown - Receipts
🦃🚨OVERTIME🚨🦃
Happy Thanksgiving! If you need any recipes for leftovers this weekend, we’ve got you covered. For me, it was a rare full week of vacation, recreating a trip my family took 25 years ago—and it was an absolute blast. Hopefully, you didn’t have a family food fight, as friend of the newsletter Matt Labash writes about this week.
We even got to see the Pope, which was deeply moving. If you’d like to read his full remarks, I hope you will. But one short excerpt stuck with me:
Dear friends, there is a widespread sickness in the world: the lack of confidence in life. It is as if we have resigned ourselves to a negative fatalism, to renunciation. Life risks no longer representing a gift, but an unknown, almost a threat from which to protect ourselves so as not to end up disappointed. For this reason, the courage to live and to generate life, to bear witness that God is the quintessential “lover of life”, as the Book of Wisdom (11:26) affirms, is today a more urgent call than ever.
As one of the keepers of our main inbox, I see this struggle—and this hope—every day in the messages we receive. Even the most dire notes I read and respond to still cling, in one way or another, to hope: for America and for the world.
That’s why, when we do subscription pushes—like the one we ran for Black Friday yesterday—my colleagues always reiterate our access policy: we don’t want money to be the thing that stops you from reading us.
I rarely do this so directly myself, but if you missed those messages and want access yet can’t afford it, just reply to this one. We’ll work something out.
You don’t need to share a deep story with me (though you’re welcome to—I’m not your boss). But over the past week, I read hundreds of messages filled with hope. Some just a little, some a lot—but the cumulative effect was real: It renewed my own.
So this Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for all of you: the OG readers I’ve corresponded with for years, the newer folks who stayed on the free list, or those who weren’t sure if they could ask. Just last night, on my flight back to the U.S., the people sitting next to me? They’re listeners. Isn’t that something?
This community makes those kinds of moments possible. And that gives me a great deal of hope, and the only way through is (say it with me!) together.
Thank you.
This week’s discussion prompt: What’s one thing you acquired this year that you recommend to others as a potential gift? (Outside of a Bulwark+ subscription, of course…)
Tech support questions? Email members@thebulwark.com. Questions for me? Respond to this message.
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Editorial photos provided by Getty Images. For full credits, please consult the article.
Happy Thanksgiving to all The Bulwark family.
Jim thanks for this and for all you do for the Bulwark. It is heartening to get a reply from an actual person when emailing after reading one of the many newsletters. It keeps things real.