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Walking the Camino in the Shadow of Belief
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Walking the Camino in the Shadow of Belief

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The Weekend Read

/ February 14, 2026

Walking the Camino in the Shadow of Belief

I trudged through Spain as a rift grew within American Catholicism. I returned home with a renewed sense and understanding of faith.

Rhian Sasseen

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A pilgrim approaches the church in the village of Hospital on the Camino de Santiago.

(Xurxo Lobato / Getty Images)

It began with the reckless flip of a coin. Heads, tails. Right, left. Forwards, backwards. “Fate,” or something stranger.

Standing on a sidewalk in Brooklyn beside a man who did not love me but who would not let me leave, I liked to play a game, one borrowed from the Situationists in Paris. I liked to take long walks. Upon reaching an intersection, I’d take a quarter from my pocket kept expressly for these purposes and flip it. Heads, we’d take a right. Tails, left.

Sometimes I’d adjust the rules: Tails would embolden me to walk backward a block while heads meant I would move forward. It kept the uneasy air between me and this man calm, lending a sense of purpose to the otherwise aimless hours we spent together, building toward nothing. With these simple goals, we were distracted, and we would not argue. I could convince myself that he was kind.

One afternoon, after I took myself out on one of these walking games, this time alone, I fantasized about what it might feel like to walk endlessly; to walk out of my day-to-day life and into a happier future. To walk for hours, long past the time I usually spent on these meanders. I was in graduate school, with a student’s schedule for the first time in over a decade, and I’d have the summer off.

A few days later, a photo taken by a stranger in Spain came up on my timeline. It depicted a stretch of something I had once heard of, back in my days of Catholic school: the Camino de Santiago. An ancient pilgrimage dating from the ninth century CE, crisscrossing Spain and ending at the cathedral of the northwestern city of Santiago de Compostela, where the remains of the apostle James supposedly lie, in the last 40 years transformed into a popular and somewhat secularized revival following an enterprising Galician priest’s idea to renovate the trails as a tourist draw.

Current Issue

March 2026 Issue

I turned the quarter over in my palm. Heads, tails. Forward, or backward?

Often, when you toss a coin in the air so as to allow Providence to make its decision, you already know which path you’re going to take.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday handed Russia a tongue-in-cheek offer to end the war between the two countries at the Munich Security Conference. 

Zelensky said during a panel discussion that he would be willing to agree to a ceasefire “for Russians if they will do elections in Russia,” prompting laughter and applause from attendees, as critics say Russian President Vladimir Putin is essentially guaranteed wins through the country’s authoritarian system. 

On a more serious note, Zelensky responded to U.S. pressure to hold elections in Ukraine. Kyiv has received intense criticism for canceling presidential elections since the war broke out in 2022, by declaring martial law. Zelensky said this week that he would be willing to hold elections, but only if a ceasefire is first declared, which he said President Donald Trump could broker. The United States has for months been leading peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, seeking to end the war as it approaches the four-year mark.

TRUMP GIVES RUSSIA AND UKRAINE JUNE DEADLINE TO END WAR: ZELENSKY

“I’m very honest. Give us two months of ceasefire. We will go to elections. That’s it,” Zelensky said. “Give us security infrastructure … President Trump can do it. Push Putin. Make ceasefire. Then our parliament will change the law, and we will go to elections.” 

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A trio of lawmakers, led by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, have undertaken a campaign to convince their colleagues to support the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, working social media and closed-door meetings to secure the votes.
The campaign has proven successful, with the cohort gaining a crucial vote from Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who announced that she would back the SAVE America Act, which recently passed the House. With Collins, Senate Republicans have at least a slim majority backing the act.
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"I support the version of the SAVE America Act that recently passed the House," Collins said in a statement first reported by the Maine Wire. "The law is clear that in this country only American citizens are eligible to vote in federal elections."
"In addition, having people provide an ID at the polls, just as they have to do before boarding an airplane, checking into a hotel, or buying an alcoholic beverage, is a simple reform that will improve the security of our federal elections and will help give people more confidence in the results," she continued.
Collins noted that she did not support the previous version of the bill, known simply as the SAVE Act, because it "would have required people to prove their citizenship every single time they cast a ballot."
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A year later, the administration pointed to a series of metrics showing the U.S. has accelerated past Biden-era data on production — while driving down energy costs that ripple through household budgets, from gas and heating to shipping and groceries.
U.S. crude oil production, for example, reached a record 13.6 million barrels per day in 2025, with the White House calling it the highest output of any country in the world. In comparison, the Biden administration took four years for production to climb from 11.3 million to 13.2 million barrels per day, a figure "Trump blew past in months," according to the White House. 
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While the U.S. has also widened its lead as the world’s top liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporter, with average LNG exports rising to 15 billion cubic feet per day in 2025, up from 11 under the Biden administration. 
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