Preaching the News will not be published on January 1. Look for the next issue on Thursday, January 8. Enjoy this week’s edition covering Christmas to Epiphany, and have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

The prologue to John’s gospel this Christmas Day stirs the heart with its promise that “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” This level of optimism is sorely needed in the Mideast at the close of a year that even by this embattled region’s standards was extreme in the level and severity of its violence and bloodshed.

Another year has passed in Syria, with no end in sight for a three-year conflict that has claimed 200,000 lives, injured a million, and displaced nearly half the population. As well, the year saw the rise of ISIS, or the Islamic State, a Sunni extremist group and self-proclaimed caliphate that stunned the world this summer with a quick sweep from western Syria into northern and central Iraq before its momentum was slowed by U.S. airstrikes.

The first Western journalist in the world to be allowed extensive access to ISIS territories in Syria and Iraq returned from the region with a warning: The group is “much stronger and much more dangerous” than anyone in the West realizes.

Jürgen Todenhöfer, 74, is a renowned German journalist and publicist who traveled through Turkey to Mosul, the largest city occupied by ISIS, after months of negotiations with the group’s leaders. Todenhöfer said his strongest impression was “that ISIS is much stronger than we think here.” He said it now has “dimensions larger than the UK” and is supported by “an almost ecstatic enthusiasm that I have never encountered in any other warzone. Each day, hundreds of willing fighters arrive from all over the world,” he said.

Valerie Amos, the U.N.’s top relief official, recently told the Security Council that she had “run out of words” to fully explain the “brutality, violence, and callous disregard for human life” witnessed in Syria today. “The parties to the conflict continue to ignore the most basic principles of humanity,” Amos said. “In many parts of Syria the level of violence has worsened, with civilians continuing to pay heavily with loss of life, serious injuries, psychological trauma, ongoing and recurring displacement, and massive damage to property and infrastructure.”

Add to this ongoing violence in Iraq and Lebanon, and the volatile state of Israeli-Palestinian relations. While Palestinians push for U.N. recognition of statehood, a seven-week battle erupted in Gaza this summer with rockets fired from Gaza into Israel and Israeli bombardment and ground fighting that killed more than 2,200 people, the vast majority of them Gazans.

Four months later, upwards of 50,000 Gazans are still homeless, many still living in the U.N. schools in which dozens were injured and killed by tank shells and missiles during the conflict. There has been virtually no reconstruction, little by way of new jobs. And the fundamental sources of resentment between the parties continues unabated.

Homily hint: Peace on earth? Not this year. Perhaps not completely in any year. But that should not stop us from hoping for it, praying for it, and working for it, locally and in far-off places. Today let us dedicate ourselves anew to serving the Prince of Peace in the coming year.

Source: Cecily Hilleary for Voice of America, The Daily Star (Dhaka), and Kim Sengkupta for The Independent (UK)