Already, the news cycle of 2026 has tested the fraying mental health of the most patient and serene among us. How do “pilgrims of hope,” as the Jubilee Year commissioned us to be, engage with news that tempts to despair?
In December, the Associated Press published a gallery of 100 photos that defined 2025. The photos, curated by Associated Press’ photo editors Benjamin Snyder, Enric Martí and Jacqueline Larma, capture the global human condition of 2025.
I am a sucker for the turning of the year: It’s a chance to take stock, look over each month, note what has occurred, how far we’ve come. This yearly hinge from December to January naturally invites us to a kind of Examen.
Perhaps your New Year’s resolution is to give up doomscrolling, delete Instagram or unplug. All these can be helpful ways to reorient our relationship with the digital cacophony of despair all around us. The constant churn of the digital news cycle often means momentous stories are passed over too quickly, a new emergency or outrage taking up the next 24 hours.
The photographers train their lens on the wounds of the world. But perhaps hope is also frozen somewhere in the frame.
But this gallery invites us to a moment of reflection on the year that screamed into our ears and hurt our eyes over the past 365 days. These 100 photos merit more than scrolling. They invite us to stop. To sit with each exquisite composition. Stay a while. Perhaps as we “examen” them, we may find goodness to be grateful for, even in images of destruction. The photographers train their lens on the wounds of the world. But perhaps hope is also frozen somewhere in the frame.
Homo Gratia
An Examen often begins by placing ourselves in the presence of God and cultivating gratitude for the blessings God has given us. As I enter into this gallery, I am struck by humans’ ability to cultivate joy and gratitude in the midst of horror, disruption or disaster.
Water of Life
Water, like fire, brings both destruction and life. In July, Mumbai was under a “Red Alert” for floods. Photographer Rafiq Maqbool captured this image of a man jumping out of the high tides of the Arabian Sea licking at the door of his household. During a red alert, residents are advised to remain indoors, refrain from unnecessary travel and prepare for evacuation.
A man jumps as waves lash his house during high tide on the shore of the Arabian Sea in Mumbai, India, on Wednesday. #MonsoonAlert https://t.co/vbqYe5jwoR pic.twitter.com/wLvGVOiXBV
— Gulf Today (@gulftoday) June 25, 2025
The image captures the fundamental fear of flooding — our homes, our humanly constructed world is miniscule, helpless, vulnerable to the forces of nature. Our metropolises, as vast and labyrinthine as they can be from our tiny vantage point, have nothing on the ocean. We live on the edge of a vast ocean with unplumbable powers of destruction, which we depend upon for our lives.
We live by water in order to live and yet water betrays us. Photographer Ashley Landis took an image of the memorial wall in Kerrville, Texas, to honor some of the 130 victims of the Guadalupe River floods in early July. Rather than show the swollen river, the muddy aftermath, Landis focuses on the faces of the humans who lost their lives. Their photos are surrounded with colorful flowers. Each flower, each photograph asks us to stop, ponder the beauty. Don’t let it pass unnoticed.
Water itself is a thing of beauty, worthy of endless meditation, as Herman Melville writes. Across the globe, monsoon rains in Malolos, the Bulacan province of the Philippines flooded Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church — also known as Barasoain church — where Jamaica Aguilar and Jade Rick Verdillo were supposed to get married. Photographer Aaron Favila captured the water-logged wedding.
His photographs are fantastical and somewhat magical — a Borges story come to life in this ordinary couple’s nuptials. The gallery curators chose Favila’s image of Jamaica standing at the doors of the church, preparing to enter (above, second slide). Her long veil trails out behind her like a luminescent lace lily pad. In the midst of disaster, life continues, and even sparkles.
Love in War
Danyil Bashikov photographed Ukrainians taking shelter in a metro station in Kiev during a Russian missile attack
The image calls to mind the panicked images of Kiev’s citizens crowding into the underground stations in the early days of Russia’s 2022 invasion. Four years later, the war drags on. The young woman sitting on the bench seems blasé, unbothered, checking her phone, like most of the subjects in Bashikov’s photos. Only an elderly woman, sitting on a portable folding stool, hunched over, scarf tied around her head, hands clasped to her mouth in fear or prayer, suggests that this is more than a routine wait for a train. These could be commuters, except this woman’s anxiety permeates the frame, a sense of peril and a danger that perhaps has seeped into her bones. The trauma of war takes its toll — we have seen this all before.
A month later, Julia Demaree Nikhinson captured a Halloween rave in Kiev for the Associated Press.
Nikhinson captures intimate moments between couples on the rave dance floor, their faces close, the warmth of human connection emanating from the photograph. Even in war, darkness and uncertainty, joy is found.
Abundance and Lack
Finally, in the AP’s gallery, the most Technicolor, bubble-gum saturated photo is Andreea Alexandru’s eye-popping image of the best in show at Bucharest’s PetExpo dog competition.
It immediately follow’s Abdel Kareem Hana’s image of Palestinian men eating Iftar together as the sunsets during the Muslim holy season of Ramadan. They eat in a street lined on both sides by a fraction of the 61 million tons of rubble the United Nations says will take around a decade to clean up.
Despite the incomprehensible wasteland that surrounds them, the community’s Ramadan lights and flags hang above their heads. Against the dun-colored concrete, each person’s face shines with light. They are real. And as I toggle back and forth between the Galinda-colored clouds of the Bucharest dog show and the Ramadan at the end of the world, my eyes naturally turn to the third man on the left, who is looking over the photographer’s shoulder. His face is weathered, but his eyes are light. His mouth, chewing food, is pressed into a smirk — quizzical, light-hearted, ironic. The photograph becomes what the best portraits are: an introduction that leaves you at the threshold of an inner life, wanting to know more.
We pause and take stock, with gratitude, for our own abundance. The lonely tinge of the glitz and glamour versus the community of the iftar meal in the breakdown of the social contract. Our eyes gloss over the gold and tulle tutus on the dogs, the plush velour of the podium. Where is our humanity?
A Searing Fire
One year ago, the Christmas season in the United States was cut short by the disastrous fires in Los Angeles. The Pacific Palisades, just north and west of Los Angeles caught fire on January 7, 2025, along with the Eaton Fire and Kenneth Fire, burning for more than a month. 31 people died.
Ethan Swope captured the magnitude of the firestorm, driven by 90-mile-per-hour winds at some points. And he captured the intimate, personal devastation of a fire — nearly 17,000 structures were burned, more than half of them personal family homes, some with Christmas trees still inside, as Swope captures. Only 10 homes have been rebuilt, according to PBS.
Yet fire is a sign of life, not just destruction. In a photo from March, photojournalist Jehad Alshrafi captured Ali Marouf and his mother Aisha cooking on the roof of their home that had been destroyed by Israeli troops.
Several of Alshrafi’s photos capture the flame of divinity each of us carry inside of us. In the twisted spines of steel rebar, hanging in midair, the slabs of cracked concrete stacked precariously on their former sites, in the midst of this unfathomable destruction, little Ali lights a fire. The hearth has remained, even though the rest has been bombed into smithereens.
Where two or three are gathered in the name of love and nourishment, we can recognize our common humanity therein.
Where two or three are gathered in the name of love and nourishment, we can recognize our common humanity therein. It flames out like fire against the darkness that divides us: forces of alienation, the divisions of language, the differences in cultures that make us shadows to one another, hidden mysteries that evaporate in the light of our common life together. “May this fire bring warmth and hope,” an Instagram commenter writes. What better or more ancient blessing exists?
Year of Il Papa
The papacy took center stage for a great deal of 2025. Edward Berger’s film “Conclave” (2024) teed off the “Year of the Pope” when it opened in the fall of 2024 and kept the inner workings of the Vatican in the pop culture conversation as a leader of the pack throughout awards season. Pope Francis’ waning health had been reported on since 2021, so it was not necessarily a surprise when he was hospitalized in February, but the timing — shortly after opening the Jubilee Year of Hope and publishing his autobiography, “Hope,” made headlines. During his extended stay in Gemelli Hospital, the photographers captured the sea of pilgrims holding vigil for the beloved pope. When Francis died, the day after Easter, the world mourned.
At the same time, there was a keen interest in the conclave that would elect his successor. The New York Times reported a more than 3,000% jump in streaming of the film the week of April 21 — from under a million to more than 18 million viewers. The AP captures the year of two popes in three intimate images. The first, a close-up on rosaries clasped in a priest’s praying hands in St. Peter’s Square in March.
The second, a portrait of Francis rendered in light and water, projected on a fountain in Lima, Peru.
The first American pope, Pope Leo XIV, is captured by Alessandra Tarantino in an unguarded moment.
Tarantino portrays Leo on stage at the celebration for Laudato Si on October 1, 2025. Pope Leo XIV sat on stage in front of a green-shaded screen with the motto “Embrace hope.” The motto is outside the image’s frame, however. Instead, the photographer has focused in on Pope Leo’s face. His brows are knit with concern. His lips are puffed in thoughtful discontent. All is not well in the world. He sits in a penumbra of green light that seems to be emanating from above his head. All around him is darkness. Although, when zooming out, the picture is clearly quite ordinary — a dark auditorium filled with bodies and a well-lit stage for the pope, in Tarantino’s portrait, the pope sits clearly under the light of heaven breaking through the darkness of the world. Does his troubled face represent his assessment of the thickness of the shadows around him or the weight of his mission?
Leave Space for Solidarity
Throughout 2025, AP photographer Rodrigo Abd captured Argentinian retirees’ weekly Wednesday protests outside of Congress in Buenos Aires to protest President Javier Milei’s austerity plans that include cuts to their pensions and health care programs. In March, football fans joined the pensioners in their protests.
As we meditate on the uniformed bodies of police officers from Buenos Aires to Broadview Detention Facility in Chicago to Rabat, Morocco, we see a common story being told. The black-clad, often-masked, fortified bodies of these state forces meet the fragile bodies of the protestors. Delia Donn’s fragile septuagenarian body, and the vulnerable, growing bodies of young people.
In this photo, Mosa’ab Elshamy captured the youth-led protests in Morocco. In October, young people organized under the name GenZ 212 demanded better health care and protested corruption around football (soccer) and investments in stadiums rather than in education or hospitals. Over six days, the protests spread to major cities around the country to Casablanca, Tangiers. They were the largest protests in Morocco since the “Arab Spring” of 2011-2012. Three protesters were killed in clashes with security forces.
Elshamy’s photographs captures the smallness of the protesters, easily swallowed up by the bodies of the police officers. But the movement, originally organized on a Discord server, won some concrete victories — bills that promised a 16% increase in health care spending and legislation to support young people’s involvement in politics.
As we continue into this new year, let us ask God to open space in our hearts to grow in daily awareness of our suffering brothers and sisters. How can we leave space in our imagination for the stories that never reach our screens?
I had no idea the Moroccan protests were happening in October. No idea that the pensioners of Argentina were clashing with the forces of the state, even as the clergy were getting pepper-sprayed by ICE forces at Broadview ICE Facility in Chicago. But these small humans faced the same riot shields, the same black helmets, the same weaponry of the security state. Their embodied vulnerability reminds us that we are indeed, as Servant of God Dorothy Day liked to remind us, “one of another.”
So how can we leave space for this reminder even as the flood of digital news drowns our daily lives? Already, in 2026, we find our screens are filled with war, crimes against humanity and the slow drip of acquiescence to the worst of our human nature ruling the order of the day. Can this onslaught of digital horror that overwhelms our attention become, instead, an invitation for prayer?
As we mourn, rant, lament, can we cultivate that still small room inside our hearts that reminds us that we are not the only ones — there is fire in the hearts and hearths of our fellow humans all over the world.
As we continue into this new year, let us ask God to open space in our hearts to grow in daily awareness of our suffering brothers and sisters. How can we leave space in our imagination for the stories that never reach our screens? As we enter into prayer with God, we bring our own suffering, our anxieties, our worries, in union with the suffering, big and small, of our brother and sister humans throughout the world. Are there any of these news stories I find myself a part of? That my neighbors are a part of? People in my city? Where are the people living this story — is my life close to theirs? Is there suffering in my own life that I can unite with theirs? Can we stand in solidarity together as children of God in our joy, pain, frustration?
How can we cultivate the empathy of God for God’s children? As we pray for our family members, can we also include the names of Renee Nicole Good and Silverio Villegas González, killed by ICE agents? As we march in solidarity with our neighbors, can we leave space to wonder who else on this globe is marching for their rights? As we mourn, rant, lament, can we cultivate that still small room inside our hearts that reminds us that we are not the only ones — there is fire in the hearts and hearths of our fellow humans all over the world. And we can feel their warmth, even while surrounded by destruction.