A Word In Season Interdenominational

07/20/2026

I remember this hero.

At 3:25 PM on January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 lifted off from LaGuardia Airport in New York City.
Eighty-seven seconds later, a flock of Canada geese flew into both engines simultaneously.
The aircraft went quiet in a way that commercial aircraft are never supposed to go quiet.
Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger had been a pilot for decades — a U.S. Air Force Academy graduate who had flown F-4 Phantom jets in military service before spending years in commercial aviation accumulating the kind of deep, specific expertise that only comes from thousands of hours in the air and a genuine intellectual commitment to aviation safety. He was, at that moment, one of the most prepared people in the world for an emergency that no one is fully prepared for.
First Officer Jeffrey Skiles — flying the aircraft at the moment of the strike — immediately began working through the emergency engine restart checklist. Sullenberger took the controls.
Air traffic control offered options. Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. Back to LaGuardia. Standard emergency return procedures.
Sullenberger calculated in real time — altitude, speed, glide ratio, distance, wind — and understood in seconds what the numbers were telling him.
They couldn't make it.
Not to Teterboro. Not back to LaGuardia. Not anywhere with a runway.
He turned the Airbus A320 toward the Hudson River.
"Brace for impact."
While Skiles continued working the restart checklist — trying until the last possible moment to restore engine power — Sullenberger managed the aircraft's energy with extraordinary precision. Wings level. Speed controlled. Glide path managed. The aircraft had to hit the water at exactly the right speed and attitude — too fast and it would break apart, too slow and it would stall and fall.
At 3:29 PM — 3 minutes and 28 seconds after the bird strike — the aircraft touched the Hudson River surface in a controlled water landing that the aviation world would later describe as a textbook ditching executed under conditions that no textbook had ever been tested against at full scale.
The aircraft stayed intact.
It stayed afloat.
What happened next required a different kind of heroism. Flight attendants Doreen Welsh, Donna Dent, and Sheila Dail managed the evacuation of 150 passengers under extreme conditions — cold, injured, in partial darkness, in a sinking aircraft — with the discipline and speed that comes from training taken seriously. Passengers stood on the wings in January air over the Hudson as one of the most rapid maritime rescue operations in New York Harbor history unfolded around them: NY Waterway ferries, Coast Guard vessels, NYPD and FDNY marine units, and private boats converging from every direction within minutes.
All 155 people aboard survived.
Sullenberger was the last person off the aircraft — he walked the cabin twice to confirm no one remained before stepping onto a ferry.
It was called "The Miracle on the Hudson."
Sullenberger has spent the years since pushing back on that framing — gently but consistently. What happened on the Hudson, he has said, was not a miracle. It was the product of decades of training, study, and professional preparation meeting a crisis with everything that preparation had built.
Every simulation. Every emergency procedure reviewed and internalized. Every hour of flight experience stored somewhere useful. Every aspect of his character and competence, formed over decades, made available in 3 minutes and 28 seconds when every second required a decision.
The same is true of Skiles. Of Welsh, Dent, and Dail. Of the rescue crews. Of the engineers who designed the aircraft's emergency systems. Of the air traffic controllers who responded without hesitation.
155 people survived because multiple people did their jobs at the highest possible level simultaneously, under conditions designed to make that impossible.
Sullenberger has continued advocating for aviation safety, pilot training standards, and the professional culture that makes competence possible. He knows better than most what the difference looks like — between preparation that works and preparation that fails.
January 15, 2009.
Less than 4 minutes. A river. A decision.
And 155 people who flew to New York that afternoon and came home that night.

07/20/2026

Talk to the Family & Children Services team about fostering today.

06/14/2026

06/02/2026

She was supposed to be at her father's party.
It was the evening of October 1, 1847. The Mitchell family — William, Lydia, and their ten children — lived in the apartment above the Pacific National Bank at 80 Main Street in Nantucket, Massachusetts, where William was the head cashier. They had a number of guests downstairs. The third of the ten children — a small, sharp, twenty-nine-year-old Quaker daughter named Maria — had been polite enough to put in an appearance. Then she had quietly excused herself.
She had climbed the narrow back stairs to the roof of the bank.
She did this every night the sky was clear. She had been doing it since she was twelve. Her father had taught her how. The Mitchells had built a small observation platform on the roof of the bank, and her father had mounted his Dollond refractor — three inches in aperture, forty-six inches in focal length — on a small wooden pier facing south.
That night Maria was sweeping the area of the sky around the constellation Coma Berenices.
At ten-fifty in the evening she stopped sweeping.
There was an object in the eyepiece that should not have been there.
It was a small, blurry streak. It did not appear on her charts.
She watched it for several minutes. She made a mark in her observation notebook beside the entry for the night's date. She climbed back down to the apartment. She found her father in the parlor among his guests. She told him, quietly, what was in the eyepiece.
William Mitchell wanted to send word to the astronomers at Cambridge that night.
Maria stopped him. She wanted to be sure.
She climbed back up to the roof. She watched the object. She recorded its position. She came down. She slept three hours. She climbed back up before dawn. She watched it move.
It was a comet.
She climbed down at sunrise. She let her father send the letter.
The letter went to William Cranch Bond, the director of the Harvard College Observatory. Bond verified the discovery. The notice of priority was published in Silliman's Journal the following January under William Mitchell's name; Maria submitted her own calculation of the comet's orbit in February, formally claiming it as her discovery.
A Catholic priest at the Vatican Observatory in Rome — Father Francesco de Vico — had observed the same comet on October 3, 1847, two nights after Maria. Several other European astronomers had seen it shortly after that.
The King of Denmark had, twenty years earlier, established a small gold medal to be awarded to the first discoverer of any new comet by telescope.
The King's astronomers ruled that priority belonged to a 29-year-old American woman who had spotted the comet from the roof of a small bank on a small island in the Atlantic, two days before any European observatory had seen it.
In 1848, the gold medal of the King of Denmark was awarded to Maria Mitchell of Nantucket, Massachusetts.
She was the first American — male or female — ever to receive any medal for science.
The comet was officially designated C/1847 T1, in the modern catalogue of comets.
Most astronomers since 1847 have called it, instead, Miss Mitchell's Comet.
In 1848 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston broke its own constitution, which barred the election of women, and elected Maria Mitchell a Fellow.
The next woman elected to the Academy was elected in 1943.
Ninety-five years later.
Maria Mitchell was, in 1850, the first woman elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was, in 1865, the first female professor of astronomy at Vassar College, where she taught for the next twenty-three years and trained twenty-five women whose names later appeared in Who's Who in America. In 1869 she was elected to the American Philosophical Society — a woman in a body that had been founded in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin in 1743.
She discovered, sometime in the 1870s, that she was being paid less than several younger male professors at Vassar. She and the only other woman on the faculty drafted a petition to the trustees demanding equal pay.
They received it.
She died on June 28, 1889, at the age of seventy, at the home of her sister in Lynn, Massachusetts. She is buried beside her parents in the Prospect Hill Cemetery in Nantucket.
Her father William's three-inch Dollond refracting telescope — the small instrument she had aimed at the sky on the night of October 1, 1847, from the roof of the Pacific National Bank in Nantucket — is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.
It is approximately the same size as a long umbrella.
It found, with a 29-year-old Quaker woman's eye behind it, a comet that no one in Europe had yet seen.
It is one of the smallest objects in the museum.
It has its own catalogue number.

03/03/2026