1. East Texans mark Ash Wednesday with Ashes on the Square

Those ashes you’ll be seeing today on a few foreheads are a bold and welcome public statement about something we’re told we should be quiet about, at least publicly – religion.

Today is Ash Wednesday, and Catholics, as well as a few Protestant denominations, mark the start of Lent in a quite literal way, with ashes on the foreheads of the faithful.

It’s a relatively quiet statement in these loud and strident times. But just as we’re being told it’s unfashionable and even offensive to declare our own faiths in public, the wearing of that simple sign indicates both conviction and courage.

The pressure is on to keep quiet about one’s religion. Consequences range from simply feeling uncomfortable on a college campus, to literal martyrdom in some parts of the world. Sometimes it seems easiest and safest to just be quiet about it.

David Brooks of The New York Times gave a speech last year that accurately sums up this trend.

“Many of my Christian friends perceive a growing difference between the secular world and the Christian world, the difference between Jay-Z and Hillsong and the Jesus culture,” he said. “Many of my friends fear they are being written out of polite society because they believe in the Gospel. With that comes a psychology of an embattled minority. With that comes a defensiveness and a withdrawal, a fear, and a withdrawal into sub-culture.”

In one respect, this withdrawal from the public square by all the religious, not just Christians has been deeply harmful to society. That’s because it’s led to a rejection of the concepts of good and evil.

“This language has become absent in the secular world,” Brooks said. “The word sin is now mostly used in reference to desserts. But if you want to talk about the deepest affairs of the heart, only words like sin, soul, redemption really work. And if you don’t have those words you’re losing the tools.”

And there’s a tendency to reject even the notion of moral superiority. We saw this when President Barack Obama condemned the atrocities committed by ISIS, but couldn’t stop himself from lumping in the Crusades, the Inquisition and Jim Crow laws.

That might be historically arguable, but it’s really just a distraction, a way to avoid having to make moral judgments.

Of course, discomfort with publicly expressing one’s faith is really what’s now called a first-world problem. It’s nothing compared to what the faithful elsewhere in the world are called to do. ISIS and other groups are making martyrs of Christians and Jews.

And in many places, fear of backlash causes some Muslims to keep quiet about their own faith.

The place we must get to isn’t a religion-free public square, where simple disagreement is seen as a threat or a provocation. We must instead reach a mutual respect for differing beliefs.

We mustn’t silence others, nor accept the idea we must be silent ourselves.

We should all feel free to speak out – even if it’s only with a smudge on our foreheads.