"But the firstling of an ass thou shalt redeem with a lamb: and if thou redeem him not, then shalt thou break his neck."
Exodus 34:20
Every firstborn creature must be the Lord's, but since the ass was unclean, it could not be presented in sacrifice. What then? Should it be allowed to go free from the universal law? By no means. God admits of no exceptions. The ass is his due, but he will not accept it; he will not abate the claim, but yet he cannot be pleased with the victim. No way of escape remained but redemption--the creature must be saved by the substitution of a lamb in its place; or if not redeemed, it must die. My soul, here is a lesson for thee. That unclean animal is thyself; thou art justly the property of the Lord who made thee and preserves thee, but thou art so sinful that God will not, cannot, accept thee; and it has come to this, the Lamb of God must stand in thy stead, or thou must die eternally. Let all the world know of thy gratitude to that spotless Lamb who has already bled for thee, and so redeemed thee from the fatal curse of the law. Must it not sometimes have been a question with the Israelite which should die, the ass or the lamb? Would not the good man pause to estimate and compare? Assuredly there was no comparison between the value of the soul of man and the life of the Lord Jesus, and yet the Lamb dies, and man the ass is spared. My soul, admire the boundless love of God to thee and others of the human race. Worms are bought with the blood of the Son of the Highest! Dust and ashes redeemed with a price far above silver and gold! What a doom had been mine had not plenteous redemption been found! The breaking of the neck of the ass was but a momentary penalty, but who shall measure the wrath to come to which no limit can be imagined? Inestimably dear is the glorious Lamb who has redeemed us from such a doom.

For many who stand outside the Christian faith—or who are still weighing its claims—the doctrine of the Holy Spirit can feel like a late addition, a theological footnote invented by the early church or imposed by councils centuries after the events of the Gospels. They see the fiery descent at Pentecost, the dramatic language of the Book of Acts, and the elaborate Trinitarian formulas of later creeds, and assume the Spirit is a New Testament invention. This misunderstanding is understandable. The debate has indeed been contentious since the earliest decades of Christianity, flaring up in ancient heresies and medieval controversies alike. Yet a careful reading of the full biblical text reveals something far more profound: the Holy Spirit is present and active from the very first verses of Genesis through the last pages of Revelation. The evidence is textual, consistent, and clear.

The contention is ancient. In the fourth century, groups known as Pneumatomachians (“Spirit-fighters”) denied the full deity of the Holy Spirit, prompting the Council of Constantinople in 381 to affirm the Spirit’s equality within the Godhead. Centuries later, in the twelfth century, the humanist philosopher Peter Abelard subjected Trinitarian dogma—including the Spirit’s personhood—to rigorous rational scrutiny. A brilliant dialectician and precursor to later humanist thought, Abelard applied logic and philosophy to sacred mysteries. He associated the Father with Power, the Son with Wisdom, and the Holy Spirit with Goodness or Love, insisting that faith must be pursued through inquiry and understanding. “By doubting we come to inquiry, and by inquiry we perceive the truth,” he famously declared. Church authorities, led by Bernard of Clairvaux, condemned his works on the Trinity at councils in 1121 and 1141, viewing his rational approach as undermining traditional dogma. Abelard was no atheist; he remained a committed Christian. But his insistence that reason could illuminate even the deepest doctrines made him a lightning rod—proof that questions about the Spirit’s identity have long tested the boundaries between faith and intellect.

Yet the Bible itself does not wait for later theologians to introduce the Spirit. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew term ruach—meaning breath, wind, or spirit—appears repeatedly as the active presence of God himself. At creation, “the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2), bringing order out of chaos. The same Spirit empowers leaders: judges like Othniel and Gideon, kings like David, prophets who declare God’s word, and even craftsmen like Bezalel, filled with divine wisdom for the Tabernacle. The Spirit convicts of sin (Genesis 6:3), grieves over rebellion (Isaiah 63:10), and is personally addressed in prayer—“Do not take your Holy Spirit from me,” David pleads (Psalm 51:11). The phrase “Holy Spirit” itself appears explicitly in the Old Testament, though less frequently than in the New: in Psalm 51 and Isaiah 63, for instance, where the people’s resistance is said to have grieved God’s Holy Spirit. God even speaks in plural terms—“Let us make man in our image” (Genesis 1:26)—right in the context of the Spirit’s creative work, hinting at a complexity within the one God that later revelation would clarify.

The New Testament does not invent the Spirit; it fulfills and names what was already there. Jesus promises the coming of the Paraclete—the Advocate, Comforter, the Spirit of truth—who will dwell within believers (John 14–16). At His baptism, the Spirit descends like a dove while the Father speaks from heaven, presenting a Trinitarian moment. On the day of Pentecost, the same Spirit who hovered at creation now fills the church with power, enabling bold proclamation and the birth of a new covenant people. Paul later describes the Spirit’s ongoing work: producing fruit in character (Galatians 5:22–23), distributing gifts for the common good (1 Corinthians 12), and sealing believers for redemption (Ephesians 1:13–14). The terminology becomes more precise—“the Holy Spirit”—but the reality is the same divine Person who has been active all along.

Skeptics may still object that the Old Testament never spells out a fully developed doctrine of three co-equal Persons. Fair enough. Scripture unfolds progressively, as a story rather than a systematic textbook. The Old Testament lays the foundation; the New Testament brings the full light of Christ. Yet the textual thread is unbroken: the same God who breathed life into Adam is the same Spirit who breathes new life into the church. The actions attributed to the Spirit—creating, empowering, grieving, guiding, convicting—consistently portray a personal, divine presence, not an impersonal force.

Those still exploring faith need not fear that the doctrine was manufactured by councils or medieval scholars. The Bible itself testifies to the Spirit’s presence across both Testaments. Abelard was right in one respect: honest inquiry does not destroy faith; it can lead us deeper into it. Open the pages. Read Genesis 1 alongside John 3 and Acts 2. The wind that moved over the waters at the beginning is the same wind that still moves hearts today. The evidence has always been there—clear, compelling, and inviting anyone willing to look.

In the autumn of 1901, a self-taught anarchist named Leon Czolgosz stepped up to President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo and fired two shots into his abdomen. Czolgosz and Emma Goldman had never met. They exchanged no letters, plotted no conspiracy, and shared no secret handshake. Yet Goldman’s fiery lectures and essays—denouncing government, capitalism, and the “rulers” who oppressed the working class—had lodged in Czolgosz’s mind like shrapnel. He attended one of her speeches, absorbed the anarchist literature she championed, and later told interrogators her words helped convince him that McKinley represented the enemy. Goldman, arrested and questioned, refused to condemn the assassin outright. In her essay “The Tragedy at Buffalo,” she framed Czolgosz not as a monster but as a symptom of a diseased society.

Neither knew the other personally. Together, they helped inspire a generation of radicals to view political violence as a legitimate reply to perceived injustice. The Haymarket Affair of 1886—where four anarchists were hanged after a bombing at a labor rally Goldman saw as a travesty—had already radicalized her. Her rhetoric, in turn, radicalized others. The result was not revolution but a backlash: stricter immigration laws, expanded secret policing, and a cultural association of anarchism with terror. Rational policy—gradual reform, democratic debate, constitutional order—became the enemy.

More than a century later, the pattern repeats with eerie familiarity. We now live amid “batteries” of activist journalists and commentators whose output functions less as reporting than as ideological accelerant. Their work does not directly order violence, any more than Goldman ordered Czolgosz to shoot. Yet it cultivates a worldview in which political opponents are not mistaken but evil, not wrong but existential threats deserving whatever fate befalls them. The targets today are different, but the mechanism is the same: lone actors, marinated in grievance, acting on a steady drip of dehumanizing rhetoric.

Consider the recent record. Donald Trump survived two assassination attempts during his 2024 campaign—one in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a bullet grazed his ear, and another weeks later in Florida. Then, in September 2025, Charlie Kirk—co-founder of Turning Point USA and a vocal conservative voice—was assassinated by sniper fire while speaking at Utah Valley University. The shooter, 22-year-old Tyler James Robinson, left a note expressing his intent and acted alone. Investigators found no grand conspiracy, just a young man steeped in the online and media ecosystem that had framed Kirk and Trump as avatars of oppression, fascism, or whatever the current vocabulary of outrage demands. These were not spontaneous crimes. They were downstream of a cultural current that treats conservative figures as legitimate prey.

Who today plays Emma Goldman’s role? The archetype is no longer a single immigrant orator lecturing in union halls. It is the networked activist-journalist—podcasters, Substackers, cable commentators, and social-media influencers—who command far larger audiences than Goldman ever dreamed of. They do not call themselves anarchists; many cloak their work in the language of “social justice,” “accountability,” or “resistance.” Their output is slicker, algorithmic, and endlessly amplified. The common thread is the same moral certainty Goldman possessed: the system is irredeemable, the other side is irredeemable, and therefore any blow struck against it is, if not praiseworthy, at least understandable. They do not pull triggers, but they load the cultural magazine.

The more uncomfortable question is whether intelligence agencies—particularly the CIA and its successors—have had any hand in “mass producing” such figures. History offers precedents for skepticism. Operation Mockingbird, the Cold War-era program in which the Agency cultivated relationships with journalists to shape domestic and foreign narratives, is well-documented. The CIA has admitted to using media assets for propaganda and has never fully foresworn the practice. Yet the leap from “the Agency influenced reporters to push anti-communist stories in the 1950s” to “the Agency today engineers radical left-wing journalists to provoke right-wing assassinations” is enormous and unsupported by credible evidence. Conspiracy theorists have long filled that gap with claims of MKUltra-style mind control or “deep state” social engineering, but those narratives collapse under scrutiny. Lone actors have always existed; the internet simply supercharges their grievances faster than any government handler could. Blaming a shadowy cabal risks the same intellectual shortcut the anarchists once took: if the world is too complex and ugly to explain through ordinary human folly, malice, and ideology, then there must be a hidden director pulling strings.

Still, the lesson from Goldman and Czolgosz endures. Ideas have consequences. When journalism abandons the pursuit of truth for the manufacture of righteous fury, it does not merely “oppose rational policy”—it corrodes the very possibility of rational policy. It tells impressionable minds that debate is futile and violence is expressive. The proper response is not censorship or conspiracy-mongering. It is relentless insistence on evidence, proportion, and the distinction between disagreement and demonization. Until journalists—on every side—relearn that distinction, we should expect more Czolgoszes: isolated, radicalized, and convinced that the next shot will finally make the oppressors listen.

The tragedy is not that Goldman and Czolgosz never met. It is that their example still meets new disciples every day.

More than 3,000 years ago, a seafaring people on the eastern Mediterranean coast did something revolutionary. The Phoenicians—traders and innovators from what is now Lebanon—did not invent writing. But around 1200 BCE, they perfected a system that changed human history: the first true phonetic alphabet.

Unlike the cumbersome hieroglyphs of Egypt or the wedge-shaped cuneiform of Mesopotamia—systems with hundreds or thousands of symbols representing whole words or ideas—the Phoenician script used just 22 letters. Each stood for a single sound (a consonant, with vowels inferred by the reader). One symbol, one sound. It was simple, portable, and learnable by ordinary merchants, not just elite scribes. This phonetic breakthrough spread rapidly through trade routes, laying the foundation for the Greek alphabet (which added vowels), and eventually Latin, Arabic, and nearly every modern writing system we use today.

The Phoenicians gave us more than letters. They handed humanity the alphabetic principle—the idea that written symbols can directly represent spoken sounds. That principle is the bedrock of phonics: the explicit, systematic teaching of how letters and letter combinations map to the sounds of language.

Fast-forward to the 21st century, and that ancient insight is proving its worth in the places where it is needed most: remote and disadvantaged communities. In Australia’s Northern Territory, Western Australia, and Queensland, in rural New Zealand, and in isolated pockets of Chile and beyond, evidence-based phonics programs are transforming outcomes for Indigenous, low-income, and geographically isolated students who have long been left behind.

The data are clear and compelling. In South Australia, the rollout of mandatory phonics screening checks for Year 1 students delivered dramatic gains: non-metropolitan students improved by 22 percentage points, Aboriginal students saw similar leaps, and children from the most disadvantaged communities jumped 20 points in meeting benchmarks. In New Zealand, a program pairing systematic phonics with authentic children’s literature lifted Year 2 Māori students in poor areas to age-appropriate levels in word reading, accuracy, comprehension, and spelling—gains that traditional “whole-word” or context-guessing approaches had failed to deliver.

Randomised trials tell the same story. In a remote Chilean community, a 27-week reading and language intervention built on phonics and explicit instruction produced substantial improvements in pre-literacy skills, word reading, and vocabulary—gains that held for months afterward and partially explained better reading comprehension. In Australia, Direct Instruction literacy programs rolled out in very remote primary schools showed stronger progress in reading, writing, and spelling compared with control schools, particularly benefiting disadvantaged and minority students.

Why does this ancient method work so powerfully for today’s most vulnerable learners? Because many children in remote communities arrive at school with thinner oral language exposure, fewer books in the home, and greater linguistic diversity. Phonics does not assume background knowledge; it builds the decoding skill that lets every child crack the code independently. It turns reading from a guessing game into a reliable, empowering tool. Once children can sound out words accurately and automatically, they can focus on meaning, stories, and ideas—the very things that make reading joyful and life-changing.

Critics sometimes dismiss phonics as “drill and kill” or culturally insensitive. Yet the evidence shows the opposite: when delivered with care, in culturally responsive ways, and alongside rich read-alouds and knowledge-building, it is one of the most equitable educational interventions we have. It levels the playing field for students who cannot afford to fall further behind.

The Phoenicians democratised writing for traders and sailors who needed to record deals across cultures and languages. Today, explicit phonics is doing the same for remote classrooms: giving every child, regardless of postcode, postcode, or family income, the power to read the world for themselves.

We owe it to those ancient innovators—and to the children who will inherit their legacy—to keep this revolution alive. Policymakers, school leaders, and teacher educators must double down on the Science of Reading, ensure every teacher is trained in systematic phonics, and prioritise these proven approaches in the communities that need them most. Literacy is not a luxury. In the hands of disadvantaged students, it is the ultimate tool for opportunity.

Three millennia after the Phoenicians simplified the written word, their gift continues to unlock futures. The question is no longer whether phonics works. It is whether we have the will to deliver it where it matters most.