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Happy Friday friends,

And a thousand thanks to everyone who joined us in the shadow of Wrigley Field last night for our Chicago dive bar live show.

I was more than my usual level of anxious, this being a hometown event and all. And, it was kind of my birthday, and while I’m not actually turning 7, that’s about the last time I threw myself a party and I still had a child’s horror that no one would come.

But, as I should have known, it was a blast.

One of the great benefits of having my particular brand of pessimism in this particular gig is that, even though I should know better, I am always joyfully surprised by how real and how really incredible is the community of people The Pillar has turned into.

When JD and I started this thing five years ago with a pair of laptops and small overdraft, we had the real belief that the Church needed serious and seriously faithful investigative journalism; that love for the institution and the hierarchy wasn’t incompatible with a commitment to the truth and to the nobility

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