Breakpoint

A 2012 headline in U.S. News and World Report asked, "Is It Time to Rate Young Adult Books for Mature Content?" According to the article, there was an increase in profanity in children's books and sexual content in young adult novels. In fact, a survey that year revealed that 55% of the readers of young adult novels were adults, not teens. A decade later, no one seems to be asking questions about graphic content in books for young people anymore. Rather, that content is being defended and promoted. Especially in fiction aimed at young adults, there is explicit content, including aggressive LGBTQ content, and themes of rape, abuse, BDSM, even incest. There seems to be a commitment, in both literature and law, to relentlessly sexualize children in aggressive and even predatory ways. In a saner world, we would call this what it really is: abuse. In our world, sane adults must do everything we can to protect children. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

A recent episode of The Daily podcast from The New York Times ominously warned, "The Mosquitoes Are Winning." Mosquitoes, believe it or not, are mankind's deadliest predators, carrying disease that result in over 219 million infections and over 400,000 deaths every year. Even that number is dramatically reduced from previous highs. Highly effective efforts to combat malaria through bed nets, vaccines, and insecticides have reduced global deaths by more than a third. Today, however, the world's deadliest insect is making a comeback. A new breed of mosquito, Anopheles stephensi known to researchers as "Steve," has adapted to evade old methods of pest control. Not only does it reproduce year-round and in water as shallow as a bottlecap, but it also lives primarily in cities rather than more rural areas. Between 2019 and 2021, global malaria deaths rose by 8%, primarily because "Steve's" range expanded from Asia into Africa. Pensées is a collection of writings from Blaise Pascal that were found and compiled after his death. It contains Pascal's astute observations about the human condition. For example, "What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe! Who will unravel this tangle?" Pascal was a brilliant mathematician who converted to Christ late in his life, a life that ended with his untimely death at just 39 years old. Many of his writings that can be found in Pensées are responses to the skeptics of his day. He especially wrote about the failure of these skeptics to grasp the human person. In one of his best-known passages, he wrote, "Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this." Had Pascal known, he may have referenced the mosquito instead of a vapor. After all, a child can swat a mosquito, but nothing has been more deadly in human terms than this little insect. Despite his young faith, Pascal brilliantly articulated humanity's value, as well as our complex relationship with the rest of the world. His words stand in contrast to both pagan thinkers, who thought of humanity as subject to the whims of capricious deities, and to the utopian idealists of his day, who believed that man would soon fully master nature. Today as well, different views of the human person emerge from different worldviews. Philosophical naturalists see human beings as animals, shaped purely by instinct and desire. Eastern pantheists think of human beings as part of the divine Oneness that includes all things. You might say that, for the atheists, humans are animals. For the New Ager, humans are gods. The truth, according to Scripture, is that we are made in the image of God but tend to act like animals. Even the smallest living things remind us of our fragility. Contrary to the promises of transhumanism, we will always be forced to reckon with human frailty, both in our mortality and our morality. Yet, our situation is not as hopeless. We alone, among all of God's creation, have the capacity to shape the world around us. The mosquito story is case in point. Malaria vaccines exist but need better methods of transportation and delivery. Better infrastructure can reduce the amount of stale, standing water, but building it requires capital supported by a robust private sector. Research and strategies that could improve things are often bogged down by government regulations. C.S. Lewis once wrote, "Mistaken for our mother, [nature] is terrifying and even abominable. But if she is only our sister—if she and we have a common Creator—if she is our sparring partner—then the situation is quite tolerable." Even more, Christians know that the end of the story is God restoring all things, "on earth as it is in heaven." Thus, as "thinking reeds," fragile and powerful, we have every reason to do our best to advance good, reduce evil, and restore God's world in whatever ways we can. This Breakpoint was co-authored by Kasey Leander. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

John Stonestreet sits down with Joel Rosenberg and Eric Patterson to discuss the war in Israel. Joel Rosenberg is the host and executive producer of THE ROSENBERG REPORT, the only weekly, prime time news and commentary show about Israel on any American news channel. It launched on October 6, 2022 and airs at 9pm eastern Thursday nights on TBN, the world's most-watched Christian TV network. Joel and his wife, Lynn, are dual U.S.-Israeli citizens and live in Jerusalem. Eric Patterson, Ph.D. serves as President of the Religious Freedom Institute. Patterson is past dean of the Robertson School of Government at Regent University and a Research Fellow at Georgetown University's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs, where he previously served full-time. Patterson has provided briefings and seminars for multiple government agencies, including France's Ministry of Defense, U.S. Department of State, U.S. Central Command, U.S. European Command, U.S. Naval War College, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, the U.S. military academies, and many others. Additional Resources The Rosenberg Report All Israel News All Arab News The Joshua Fund _______ Religious Freedom Institute A Basic Guide to the Just War Tradition by Eric Patterson _______ Breakpoint: The Atrocities of Hamas and the Reality of Evil Breakpoint: Moral Clarity and the Attack on Israel Breakpoint This Week: The Attack on Israel Breakpoint: Barbaric Norms: Hamas, Israel, and Just War Breakpoint: A Critical Error Breakpoint: The Hard Stats on Palestinian Viewpoints For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

According to the National Academy of Medicine, 17 million Americans care for an older parent, spouse, friend, or neighbor with medical limitations. It is costly, beautiful, and important work, especially as so many push to eliminate suffering by eliminating sufferers. There are, as a full-time caregiver put it recently, important lessons learned and blessings received in bearing each other's burdens: "Over the years, I have prayed many prayers for the people whom I've been entrusted to care for. But … more times than I can count, … the script has felt flipped, and it is I who walk away feeling tended, knowing I have received nurture, kindness, and patient love." Any culture in which the call to care for others lessens, and the pressure to eliminate the sufferer intensifies, becomes an impoverished culture. As theologian Stanley Hauerwas put it, "In 100 years, if Christians are known as those who do not kill their children or their elderly, we will have done well." For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Nearly 15 years ago, Uwe and Hannelore Romeike fled Germany in order to homeschool their children in the United States. Under Germany's education laws, the Romeikes were subject to severe financial penalties for attempting to homeschool. On a few occasions, police came to their home and escorted their children to school. In 2009, they moved to the U.S. and petitioned the government for asylum. They've lived here since, mainly in Morristown, Tennessee. Never formally granted asylum, they were granted indefinite deferred action status in 2014 by the Obama administration. They've since added two children, their two oldest have married U.S. citizens, and they have even welcomed a grandchild. Last month, during a "routine check-in," the Romeikes were told they had to return to Germany. According to Home School Legal Defense Association attorney Kevin Boden: "They were basically given four weeks to come back. They (were given) a report date in October. They (didn't) know what (was) going to happen in that meeting. They (didn't) know if they're going to be forced to leave. They (didn't) know if they're going to be taken into custody." Given how long the family has been in the United States and how unconcerned the Biden administration seems to be about illegal immigrants pouring across the Southern border, it's difficult to make sense of why they would be so concerned about the Romeike family status now. After a significant amount of public pressure, the INS has given the family a one-year reprieve, but their story seems part of an increasing hostility to religious refugees on the part of the U.S. government. According to a 2023 report from World Relief and Open Doors US, the number of religious refugees admitted to the U.S. has plummeted, though the number of Christians facing persecution around the world continues to climb. An estimated 360 million Christians live under threat of persecution and discrimination, an increase of 100 million in the last three years. Last year, the United States only resettled 25,465 refugees, excluding the Afghans and Ukrainians who entered the U.S. via a separate parole program. This number represents a dramatic reduction from pre-2017 levels when the U.S. resettled an average of over 80,000 people per year. And, as the World Relief and Open Doors report outlines, the number of religious (including Christian) refugees from historically dangerous parts of the world have decreased even more sharply. In 2022, refugees from Eritrea, Iran, Myanmar, and Iraq were down "85 percent, 95 percent, 92 percent and 94 percent, respectively" compared to 2016 levels. Between 2016 and 2022, refugees from Burma (including most Rohingya) declined by 62%, total Christian arrivals by 70%, and Yezidis by 100%. "America," the author concludes, "is no longer the safe haven for displaced persons that it once was." Though refugee resettlement in the U.S. slowed to a trickle during the COVID-19 pandemic, the trend goes back earlier. In 2019, I observed in a Breakpoint commentary that though the Trump administration had stalwartly defended religious liberty at home, it had shut down legal channels for religious—including Christian—refugees while trying to stop the crisis of illegal immigration. Now, America faces a heightened crisis of illegal crossings due to the Biden administration's open border policies, especially on the southern border. However, fixing that problem should not include closing off all options for religious asylum seekers. Especially since the administration promised to specifically increase the number of religious refugees but instead arranged for 472,000 Venezuelans to come work in the U.S. The strange targeting of the Romeike family, along with an unaddressed crisis of green-card applications, which could see thousands of faith leaders in the U.S. sent home after years of residency, suggests that the religious aspect of these stories may be an outsized factor. Admittedly, reversing this trend now seems impossible in light of the war between Israel and Hamas. None of the surrounding Muslim nations are opening their borders to those seeking to flee the imminent ground assault of Gaza. And large, angry, and violent immigrant populations are protesting in many Western cities in support of the atrocities committed against Israel. Though it is possible to secure our borders and to properly vet and assist refugees facing religious persecution, the system will need to be rebuilt around completely different assumptions. The current system invites mistreatment and exploitation. Encouraging the lawlessness of some while abandoning others, especially many who belong to what Paul called "the household of faith," only feeds a narrative that America is becoming a more hostile place for religion, especially Christianity. That narrative is supported by more than enough evidence already. This Breakpoint was co-authored by Kasey Leander. To help us share Breakpoint with others, leave a review on your favor

Recently on the The Deep Map podcast, Robert Nicholson, founder of the Philos Project, a Christian Middle East advocacy group, said that he finds it "amazing" that "the people who claim to love Palestinians don't know anything about them, and they're not even trying to learn." In the interview, Nicholson emphasized findings of The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. For example, over two-thirds of Palestinians reject a two-state solution. Ninety-three percent of Palestinians reject Israel's claim to the land, while 58% support armed confrontation. Even more shocking is that two-thirds (67%) of the residents of the Gaza strip support armed attacks on Israeli civilians. Along with the capacity of fallen humans to do evil, there is also the power of cultural ideology. Radical Islamic ideology, such as is held by Hamas, has shaped that region for a long time. Westerners shaped by secularism tend to think of religion as personal and private, which makes the terror carried out in Israel even harder to understand. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Jesus of Nazareth is one of those rare historical figures who nearly everyone wants to claim. You might say that just as God made us in His image, people return the favor and remake Jesus in our image. In fact, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it became academically popular to claim to know what Jesus taught while assuming the Gospel accounts, especially the miraculous parts, were not true. An assumption that was simply taken for granted is that Jesus never claimed to be God. Though the scholarly world has largely progressed past these scholars and their "scholarship," Jesus is still reimagined by many as something other than Christ. He's embraced as a political avatar or lifestyle coach, or in a role for which He was ill-suited: that of merely a "good teacher." Christians know there's more to the Jesus story. But how should we respond to false claims about Him, especially those based on little knowledge of what the Gospels actually say? A recent video in the What Would You Say? series tackled this question and offered three points to keep in mind. First, the Scriptures clearly tell us who Jesus was and what He claimed to be. "People who reject that Jesus was God have to reject some of the things that the Gospel writers claim about Jesus while accepting others. But how do we know which parts we can trust and which parts we should reject? Often, skeptics end up keeping those parts of the Gospels that describe the kind of Jesus they want to accept and end up with a Jesus they've pieced together. In other words, skeptics can be guilty of what they are assuming about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Not only is that inconsistent, but it ignores the fact that the Gospel writers have provided a reliable account of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Not only are the books full of eyewitness accounts of His life and ministry, the authors had strong incentive to rightly preserve and pass on the details they contain. … At the very least, to dismiss the Gospels up front, and assume that they could not possibly be reliable accounts, means we are left with no real sources about His life to conclude He was even a good teacher." Second, the coming and work of the Messiah were long foretold, with prophetic details that were fulfilled in the life of Jesus. "In 700 BC, the prophet Micah predicted the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem of Judea. The prophet Zechariah announced that the coming Savior would be betrayed for 30 pieces of silver. Some Psalms point to a crucifixion-like death, centuries before this became a common means of execution under the Romans. Some skeptics claim that these prophecies were read back into the Old Testament by those in power in the early Church. However, there are far too many details mentioned to be mere coincidence. The odds of one man's life matching so many of these predicted details would be astronomical. In fact, according to Professor Peter Stoner, 'The probability that Jesus of Nazareth could have fulfilled even eight such prophecies would be only 1 in 10x17th power. That's 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000.'" Finally, the Gospels record the eyewitness accounts of Jesus' ministry. One of the ways they confirm His identity as the Messiah is recording the miracles Jesus performed. "In addition to the miraculous prophetic detail, Jesus performed miracles during His earthly ministry that were attested to by eyewitnesses and recorded in the Scripture and history. Even his enemies who denied that He was the Messiah never disputed that Jesus of Nazareth performed miracles and wonders. In fact, after the crucifixion and resurrection, Peter, in the Pentecost sermon to the crowd in Jerusalem, reminded his audience that Jesus had fed 5,000 people, had restored sight to the blind, and had raised the dead to life. Peter claimed that all these miracles were done by Jesus, 'in your midst' (Acts 2:22) " Jesus wasn't just a nice guy who told stories and wanted others to be nice. He didn't come to simply "show us the way." He claimed to be the Way, the only way to God. To see this video and others like it, and to use them in classes or conversation, go to whatwouldyousay.org. This Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

The same day that Hamas militants murdered thousands of innocent men, women, and children, over 30 Harvard University student groups signed a statement of solidarity … not with the victims, but with the militants. "We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence … [T]he apartheid regime is the only one to blame," they wrote. Harvard's administration was deafeningly silent for days. Only after 500 faculty and over 3,000 university affiliates condemned the statement did leadership issue a "tepid" response, which it has since attempted to clarify. Their moral inabilities stood in contrast to even Playboy magazine, which promptly cut ties with adult film star Mia Khalifa for statements celebrating Hamas' attack. You know things are upside down in education when an adult magazine reaches the moral clarity that a preeminent institution of higher learning does not. That some student groups finally backtracked, saying they never read the statement, only exposes just how broken their moral reasoning is. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Late last month, a large majority of Members of the European Parliament (MEP) voted to pass a regulation that will protect the donation and destruction of so-called "substances of human origin" for the sake of "patient health." According to European media service Euractive, the regulation is intended to "set a framework to provide donors and patients with a future-proof and harmonised system for transplants and donations." However, a group of European Union Catholic bishops warns that the language of "substances of human origin" (or SoHOs) includes not only donated blood or tissues from adults, but also embryos and fetuses. The language is so broad, according to the bishops, not only would the donation of unwanted, artificially inseminated embryos and unfertilized cells be permitted, but also unwanted, naturally conceived preborn children prior to viability. And, because the regulation requires special steps to ensure that "genetic conditions" not be transmitted to SoHO recipients and offspring, the regulation could give researchers and practitioners license to destroy embryos with, say, Down syndrome or other disabilities diagnosed in utero. Classifying embryonic human beings as "substances of human origin" erases the fundamental difference between embryos and other human cells. Unlike a skin cell or a blood cell, a zygote of an embryo is a whole, separate, valuable human being. Ignoring or disregarding that fundamental distinction is to remove all barriers from any person, born or unborn, being considered a mere "substance of human origin." Part of what is driving the increased interest in harvesting fetal tissue and embryos for use in medical treatment is to address what's been billed as an "organ shortage crisis." Though organ donation has only been medically viable for a few decades, it is now deemed a crisis that the demand for organs far outpaces the supply. As ethically fraught as that is on its own terms, around the same time as the new European Union regulation was passed, a group of American researchers suggested that neonatal organ donation could significantly mitigate organ "shortages." That suggestion, especially in light of new regulations that categorize embryos as "substances of human origin" that can be used for medical purposes, more than opens the door to dangerous ethical ground. Even treatments purportedly pursued for medical purposes can undermine the meaning of medicine, as well as accepted standards of medical care. Ever since the ancient Greek doctor Hippocrates, doctors have taken an oath to do no harm. Medical "care" that intentionally harms any person for no medical purpose contradicts the very meaning of "care," and therefore medicine. The recent, troubling regulations from the European Union are the latest expression of an anti-humanism on the rise in Western medicine. By treating whole, separate, valuable human beings as commodities, the new regulation will harm more than it helps. Like other examples of harm that pass in the name of "medical care," whether Canadian doctors harvesting organs from medical-aid-in-dying (MAID) patients, or doctors in Denmark and Iceland claiming to eradicate Down syndrome by exterminating all children with Down syndrome in utero, or U.S. doctors perpetuating chemical, cosmetic, and surgical mutilation of minors with gender dysphoria, Western medicine increasingly serves a progressive ideological master. We may try to cover up these evils with Orwellian terminology, but the profoundly anti-human ideas at the root of what we call medicine will have consequences ... and victims. This Breakpoint was co-authored by Jared Eckert. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

"Want to Believe in Yourself?" The New York Times asked recently. The key is to "matter." In the article, "mattering" was given a psychological twist, defined as adding value to a community and being valued in return. On the one hand, this is an example of missing the point of the problem. Telling someone to choose to matter is like telling someone to make meaning out of an ultimately meaningless universe with their ultimately meaningless lives. At the same time, the author isn't wrong to imply that mattering to other people is far better than the kind of internalized self-affirmation that typically passes for therapy. Our world leads us to be inwardly focused and untethered from anything outside of our own feelings and will. We were made to find meaning outside of ourselves, which is why deep connections and relationships matter, and help us know that we matter. This is the way God designed us. We only truly know ourselves in reference to our most important relationships—first with Him, and then others. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Neil Shenvi and Pat Sawyer unpack these ideas on Critical Theory and expose them in their new book Critical Dilemma. With a gift to the Colson Center this month, you can request a copy. The authors will join us on October 26 for our next Breakpoint Forum to discuss the ideas of Critical Theory in light of some of these current headlines. The forum begins at 8 p.m. EST and will be hosted by Colson Center resident theologian Dr. Timothy D. Padgett. The forum is free, but you must register at breakpoint.org/forum. ___________ One of the more ridiculous images to make its way around social media sites in the wake of the horrific attack in Israel was a photo of four Westerners with a sign, "Queers for Palestine." There's also a Twitter page with that name. The banner photo insists, "Allah Loves Equality." Statements like these are so out of touch with reality, we can only hope that they are satire. Given what we know of Hamas, ISIS, and the Iranian regime, it's safe to assume there won't be any "pride" parades in Gaza or Ramallah anytime soon. Progressives looking for ideological sympathy among the rulers or people of Palestine are fooling themselves. A week ago, all of this would have been sadly amusing. Now, it's terrifying. Ever since the October 7 attacks, protestors across Europe, America, and Australia have denied, excused, justified, and even supported the murders, rapes, and beheadings of babies perpetrated by Hamas in Israel. It makes a kind of barbaric sense for radical Muslim groups to take such stands. It's harder to fathom why Western progressives offer such affinity for radical Islamism. After all, this is a religious ideology that is openly theocratic, misogynistic, violently anti-LGBTQ, opposed to free expression, free press, and nearly everything on the progressive agenda. The radical Islam that the far-Left wants to embrace is far worse than the morbid fantasies they hold about Christianity. On the same American college campuses where you can be silenced for refusing to say that a man is a woman, Jewish co-eds tearfully begged school officials to stop speeches of those wishing their people dead. In Philadelphia, a speaker applauded "Hamas for a job well done." At George Mason University, students chanted "They've got tanks, we've got hang gliders, glory to the resistance fighters!" Before they issued an incredibly paltry half-apology, the BLM organization chapter of Chicago tweeted an image of a Hamas killer parachuting into battle. As strange of bedfellows as they make, radical Islam and the far-Left share hatred for the Western tradition. They cannot stomach free markets, objective morality and knowledge, or the uncompromising priority of human liberty, especially religious freedom. Especially, in academic contexts, the Left's hatred is grounded in the ideological capture of our ivory towers by Critical Theory. This way of thinking reduces the complexity of human existence to pre-determined categories of oppressed versus oppressor. Based on these categories, moral virtue and moral guilt are pre-assigned. The matrix of this dynamic determines who is right and wrong. Anything done for the sake of the oppressed is just, even mass murder and rape. Anything done on behalf of the oppressor is vile, even warning civilians to get out of a war zone. In this case, all that matters is that Jews have been cast into the role of oppressor and their opponents as victims; all actions are either justified or condemned according to this simplistic schematic. In his book on the Russian Revolution, Richard Pipes described a foreshadowing of this trend: "For intellectuals of this kind, the criterion of truth was not life: they created their own reality, or rather, sur-reality, subject to verification only with reference to opinions of which they approved. ... It is only by reducing people of flesh and blood to a mere idea that one can ignore the will of the majority in the name of democracy and institute a dictatorship in the name of freedom." Decades of Western decadence have numbed us to the power of beliefs. Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have victims. That's true on college campuses and in Gaza. By rejecting objective morality as tyrannical, believers in the ideas of Critical Theory embrace tyranny as moral. Neil Shenvi and Pat Sawyer unpack these ideas and expose them in their new book Critical Dilemma. With a gift to the Colson Center this month, you can request a copy. The authors will join us on October 26 for our next Breakpoint Forum to discuss the ideas of Critical Theory in light of some of these current headlines. The forum begins at 8 p.m. EST and will be hosted by Colson Center resident theologian Dr. Timothy D. Padgett. The forum is free, but you must register at breakpoint.org/forum. This Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

The Washington Post loves to promote their reporting with the tagline, "democracy dies in darkness." But in a published hit piece last month, designed to smear Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), they intentionally put readers in the dark with half-truths and thinly veiled insinuations, pointing to the fact that a number of ADF plaintiffs are no longer in business as evidence that ADF has "fabricated" religious freedom attacks on Christian vendors who cannot serve same-sex weddings. Just because some of the cases have been pre-enforcement challenges doesn't change the fact that Alliance Defending Freedom has defended bakers, florists, photographers, and graphic artists from stiff state penalties for refusing to violate their conscience. The attack on Barronelle Stutzman lasted for more than a decade, and Jack Phillips is still being targeted by a trans-activist lawyer enabled by the state of Colorado. The Post's hit piece obscures what's at stake, who are the aggressors, and what freedom means. Missing all of that is how democracy really dies. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

The despicable and horrendous attacks by Hamas against civilians last week, including beheading children and kidnapping the elderly, seems a throwback to some distant, barbaric past of human history. We may have thought the world had long ago outgrown such barbarity, but it hasn't. In fact, as shocking as it is, the kinds of atrocities carried out by the Hamas terrorists are the norms of warfare, at least throughout most of human history. Modern notions of just war, proportionality, and distinguishing between civilians and combatants are exceptions to the kinds of warfare conducted by the Assyrians and Babylonians, ancient Greece, the Vikings, the Mongols, and the Aztecs. Massacre sites found by archaeologists in North America reveal how entire villages were slaughtered by Native Americans centuries before European contact. Similar barbarity continues today, especially in modern undeclared wars such as the Rwandan genocide, the actions of terror groups like Boko Haram, and in African civil wars. Close parallels can be seen in the horrific treatment by government actors of the Uyghurs in China, the Rohingya in Burma, and dissidents in North Korea. Such brutality should sicken us, though it is far more common in human history, even modern history, than we admit. But, if it's so horrifyingly and historically "normal," where did the world get the idea that such barbarity is so wrong? The idea that non-combatants should not be killed in war can occasionally be found in ancient discussions of warfare, typically due to pragmatic reasons such as needing peasants to work the conquered land. Christian Just War Theory, in sharp contrast, saw the protection of non-combatants as a matter of principle, not pragmatism. That principle was grounded in a view of human value unique and distinct to Christianity, that every human being is made in the image and likeness of God. Despite the Enlightenment's hostility to faith and the pervasive scientism of the nineteenth century, Christian ideas about Just War and the value of the individual retained a strong enough hold on Western culture to shape the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war. Also, Western domination ensured that countries and military officers would be held accountable for systematic violations of the Conventions as happened, for example, in the Nuremberg Trials after World War II. As long as these core ethical ideas of the Judeo-Christian tradition hold sway, they act as a check on the worst impulses of our fallen nature, impulses that quickly come to surface in time of war. Of course, war crimes and violations of human dignity still occur by Western actors and should never be accepted or tolerated. However, when barbarities are considered war crimes and violations, rather than norms, they happen far less than in cultures where that ethical tradition is missing. Last Saturday, the world saw that, in no uncertain terms, that ethical tradition is missing in large parts of the Middle East. This is especially true of Islamic nations. Outside of a few reformers, Islam rejects as idolatry the idea that humans are made in the image of God. The Hadiths, a source of Islamic authority second only to the Quran, calls for the extermination of the Jews, a fact explicitly noted in the Hamas charter. Without grounding for the value and dignity of individuals, a group can be easily defined as "other," which justifies all actions carried out against them. It's important to note that the rejection of the value of each person also means that Hamas can use their own people as pawns and agents of propaganda. Thus, Hamas places missiles and military centers in hospitals and schools, knowing that any attacks will lead to civilian casualties that can be paraded before the rest of the world. In other words, dead women and children are the intended plan, not the unexpected consequence. When attacks like what happened last Saturday occur, Israel has to target missile sites and other military targets to keep its own citizens safe. When doing so produces civilian casualties, it's tragic, but it's still an example of what Thomas Aquinas called "Double Effect." In his example, it is ethical to take the life of another person, even though that's usually sin, if it is the only way to prevent him from killing you or another person. This is the situation Israel faces. The only way to stop the attacks is to bomb important military sites and to break up the network. So, when civilians die, as an unintended but inevitable consequence, these deaths are on the heads of Hamas for intentionally placing their civilians in harm's way. Given the politics and history of the region, it is expected for many in the Middle East to cheer on Hamas' massacres while decrying any response by Israel. Their reaction is shaped by a culture, a culture that has been shaped by an Islamist worldview. On the other hand, many of those in Western nations who defended or even celebrated the massacre in Israel have been shaped

John Stonestreet and Shane Morris discuss the barbarity of the Hamas attack on civilians in Israel and the worldview that brought us such barbarity. Sections 1 and 2 - Israel and Hamas at War Breakpoint: The Atrocities of Hamas and the Reality of Evil Breakpoint: Moral Clarity and the Attack on Israel Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland Mindy Belz on Twitter] For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Princeton professor Robert P. George reports how students respond when he asks them "what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it." It's easy to look at past atrocities and think, "I never would've done that!" but that confidence is misplaced. Without some grounds for unusual moral clarity, most go along with whatever a culture declares to be right, even with things now known to be plainly wrong. Of course, this is merely a mental exercise, until last Saturday. We now face an actual crisis. Following the massacre in Israel, "protesters" across the Western world praised the slaughter, vandalized Jewish sites, and, in a particularly egregious case in Sydney, Australia, chanted "Gas the Jews." If you've wondered if you have the moral courage to stand up when it counts, this may be our chance. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

One of the most telling statistics from the General Social Survey, is that Americans are having less sex now than they did in 1980s and 1990s. Young men especially have become less sexually active. Since 2008, the share of men under 30 reporting no sex at all has nearly tripled. This stat is one of the clearest signs of what has turned into a counterintuitive but reliable pattern. The more "liberated" and "progressive" our culture becomes, the less interested in or capable of finding human partners we become. I say, "human partners," because the decline of sex and the rise of high-tech sex alternatives have gone hand-in-hand. Online pornography use, for instance, has become ubiquitous. The Institute for Family Studies reported in 2022 that a majority of men ages 30-49 say they've watched pornography in the past month. And given the connection between porn and male sexual dysfunctions, this becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. Now, another emerging alternative to real women will likely draw even more men into unreality. British freelance writer Freya India recently highlighted the phenomenon of AI girlfriends, describing an array of new apps like Replika, Intimate, and Dream Girl Builder, which offer men the chance to craft "flawless" digital partners. These apps promise AI-airbrushed pornography. Users customize body type, face shape, and hair color to "create their dream companion," that will "exceed [their] wildest desires," and can join them on "hyper-realistic voice calls." These apps offer not only simulated sex, but also the promise of companionship and emotional attention. As India writes: "Eva AI, for example, not only lets you choose the perfect face and body but customise the perfect personality, offering options like "hot, funny, bold", "shy, modest, considerate" and "smart, strict, rational". Create a girlfriend who is judgement-free! Who lets you hang out with your buddies without drama! Who laughs at all your jokes! "Control it all the way you want to," promises Eva AI. Design a girl who is "always on your side", says Replika." That last app has been downloaded more than 20 million times, and the industry seems poised to boom, with NBC reporting that "Ads for AI sex workers are flooding Instagram and TikTok." This isn't an expansion of sexual and romantic freedom or a tool that empowers people to make human connections. Rather, it is a retreat from human connection, a turning away from the very thing for which we are biologically, socially, and emotionally wired. And yet this has always been the end of the road we started on long ago, when we mixed a commitment to hyper-individualism with technology. As Sherry Turkle observed over a decade ago in her book, Alone Together, the process started with living our lives on the internet. Soon we began exploring alternative identities through social media. We crafted these identities and connections to perfection, pruning our "friends lists" to include only those people who pleased us. Before long, we came to prefer these digital relationships on our terms to the messy and often frustrating demands of in-person relationships. Now we have reached the stage at which many would rather cut out humans altogether, opting instead for "drama-free" companions who never have bad days, never grow old, always laugh at our jokes, never ask anything of us, and can be simply "paused" if it suits us. And AI technology is here to fill that demand. What's next? C.S. Lewis was among many science-fiction authors to speculate. In That Hideous Strength, the last book of his Space Trilogy, he describes corrupted inhabitants of the Moon who do not sleep with each other when they marry, but "each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty … in their dreams of lust." Perhaps AI girlfriends will eventually become robotic girlfriends, deceiving users into truly giving up on human relationships. But what insanity! We were never made for such nightmares. We were created with bodies for embodied relationships—among them the one-flesh union of marriage, through which God gives children. And at the heart of Christianity is the message that God values our embodied natures so highly that, in Christ, He assumed that nature in order to save us. Our human relationships don't need replacing. They need redemption. As our culture's retreat from humanity reaches new levels of strangeness, the task of the Church may increasingly be to call our neighbors back to being human. Few would have expected Christians to get a reputation for being the "pro-sex people," but if falling in love with a computer is the alternative, we may be well on our way. This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Recently, The Guardian published an oddly intriguing article entitled, "The Case Against Pets: Is It Time to Give Up Our Cats and Dogs?" Though arguing from the perspective of the animals, the author actually made a powerful observation about humans. As one expert who was quoted put it, The level of emotional dependence humans have on their companion animals is different from any time in the past. … Of course, there's nothing wrong with having pets. It's a way of fulfilling the creation mandate. The problem comes when pets replace people, something increasingly common in a culture in which people struggle with meaninglessness and loneliness. Blaise Pascal once wrote that "the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself." God created us first to need Him and, secondly, other people. Pets are a distant third. If we get the order of creation wrong, it just doesn't work out like He intended. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

The Soviet Union was well known for rejecting so-called "bourgeois" morality in ways that led to rejecting reality. Economically this meant squashing human self-interest in favor of state control. So, basic modern commodities like cars and plumbing could take years for the average Russian to secure. Marxist-inspired agricultural science rejected "Western" science and led to the deaths of millions as crops were planted in the dead of winter, too close together, and without pesticides in the mistaken belief that they could be "educated" to take on more beneficial traits. In the 1920s, Revolutionary Russia rejected "bourgeois" sexual morality by attacking the institution of marriage and the nuclear family. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels believed the nuclear family was, like religion, just another means of keeping the working class oppressed. According to the Marxist dialectic version of history, prehistoric humanity lived in a state of free love, and the nuclear family only emerged to protect the property rights of the rich through inheritance, keep workers content with less, and enslave women to the home. Engels, who spent a lot of time in Manchester's red-light district, was more specific than Marx in his condemnations of the family. He wrote, "[W]ith every great revolutionary movement the question of 'free love' comes to the foreground." Together, Marx and Engels attacked "bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child." In their view, family was a social construct that stood in the way of revolutionary progress. When Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they put these anti-family theories into practice. In 1918, the Soviets issued decrees "on the abolition of marriage" and "on civil partnership, children and ownership." Marriage could be declared without the involvement of the state, and divorce could be obtained just as easily. As one Russian journalist summarized, "Divorce was a matter of choice. Abortions were legalized. All of that implied a total liberation of family and sexual relations." Madame Smidovich, a leading Communist propagandist, put it this way: "To clear the family out of the accumulated dust of the ages we had to give it a good shakeup, and we did." Almost immediately, however, this experiment began to spiral the nation downward. Men across the country divorced their wives and sought new sexual encounters. The number of illegitimate children swelled by hundreds of thousands. Women with children were abandoned, while the more enterprising among them blackmailed multiple men for child support. Despite the State's decree that fathers must pay alimony to their children regardless of marital status, thousands of children were kicked to the curb because they could not—or would not—be cared for. From there, an ungovernable criminal element developed in Russia's largest cities. Given Russia's dismal economic situation, the idea that the state would care for these children proved laughable. A Russian writer of that time observed, "It was not an unusual occurrence for a boy of twenty to have had three or four wives, or for a girl of the same age to have had three or four abortions." The status of women devolved as well. As Madame Smidovich described in Pravda, the Communist newspaper: "If a man lusts after a young girl, whether she is a student, a worker, or even a school-age girl, then the girl must obey his lust; otherwise, she will be considered a bourgeois daughter, unworthy to be called a true communist." As the 1920s wore on, however, Russia's Soviet leaders were forced by reality to change course and desperately attempted to stem the tide of fatherlessness, crime, legal confusion, and economic disaster. In many ways, the Russian family never recovered. Even today, Russia's birth rate continues to plummet. As late as the 1990s, and despite decades of government propaganda encouraging population growth, one study found that in some parts of Russia, there were 770 abortions per 100 births—"by far the highest rate anywhere in the world." In 1920, on the other side of the world, G.K. Chesterton prophetically wrote that "[t]his triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilisations which disregard it." History is full of examples of societies that tamper with God's design for marriage, sex, and the family. It's no coincidence that en vogue progressive ideas today, ideas with distinct roots in cultural Marxism, also decry marriage and the family as oppressive institutions that should be reimagined and sexual morality as outdated and even harmful. These things are not mere "social constructs," however. They are laws of reality, like gravity. As Dallas Willard once observed, "We can't choose to step off the roof and then choose to not hit the ground." That's true for individuals and societies alike. This Breakpoint was co-authored by Kasey Leander. For more resources to live like

Imagine Congress was considering a bill to protect "religious liberty." Let's say the bill's author openly admitted his intention was to "allow maximum religious freedom." Maybe he says he's concerned about attempted governmental restrictions on Christian religious expression in particular. Now imagine what the reaction to such a proposal would be on "X," formerly known as Twitter. Surely this would be labeled "Christian Nationalism." Congress would be accused of trying to establish a theocracy. What if I told you that bill was real, and that it was called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and that it was introduced by one Democratic Representative Chuck Schumer and signed into law by President Bill Clinton 30 years ago next month? It's remarkable how quickly and dramatically the Overton Window has shifted in 30 years. It's important to remember that RFRA was widely supported and uncontroversial up until about five minutes ago. Christians shouldn't be ashamed or bullied into believing that the right to live out our faith is asking too much. The truth remains: Everyone benefits when the government respects "maximum religious freedom." For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Two significant academic scandals from the past year underscore why the new book Critical Dilemma, written by Drs. Neil Shenvi and Pat Sawyer, is so timely and important. In my view, this book offers the definitive critique of critical theory from a Christian worldview. You can receive a copy for a gift to the Colson Center this month. (Just go to colsoncenter.org/October). Eric Stewart, a former professor in the highly rated criminology department at Florida State University, is the principal author of a paper that concluded that, as Black and Latino populations increased, so did the public's demand for more discriminatory sentencing. After the paper was published, his co-author Justin Pickett, a professor at the University of Albany, noticed problems with the data: "Pickett found that their sample size somehow had increased from 500 to over 1,000 respondents, the counties polled had decreased from 326 to 91, and the data was altered to the point of mathematical impossibility." When Pickett approached Stewart with his concerns, he replied with evasive answers and would not share the complete data set. In Pickett's analysis of the data from the first set of 500, the results did not support the conclusion that an increasing Black or Latino population is linked to more severe sentencing. If anything, the initial results pointed to the opposite conclusion. Also in the original survey, unanswered questions left blank had been filled in with "imputed values," presumably by Stewart. Both the journal that originally published the paper and Florida State University were reluctant to retract the paper or to take action against Stewart. However, the university's hand was forced by the discovery of five other papers by Stewart that were also based on falsified data. Once that came to light, Stewart abruptly left his $190,000 position at the university. Perhaps Professor Stewart faked data for grants or due to the pressure to publish. Perhaps he was convinced his theories were correct and too important to be proven wrong. Whatever the case, the data was falsified in support of ideas central to Critical Race Theory, and the consequences were more than merely academic. It's hard not to believe that his studies have been used to shape policy when he's garnered over $3.5 million in grant funding from taxpayer-funded organizations. The more recent scandal involves Ibram X. Kendi's Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. Kendi authored How to Be an Antiracist, a book that shot to the top of The New York Times bestseller list and remained there for nearly a year. Boston University launched a center dedicated to Kendi's ideas and hired him to head it. By the end of 2021, the center had collected over $45 million in funding. Despite that funding, the center recently laid off about half its staff due to significant budgetary problems. A few initiatives had been launched, but the center produced minimal research. Staffers accused the center of a dysfunctional work environment and mismanagement. Unlike the leaders of the Black Lives Matter organization, Kendi has not been accused of misappropriating donations, though he commands extraordinarily high speaking fees. This seems to be a case of an academic superstar put in charge of a center, who lays out ambitious goals, but is not competent to run it. Clearly, Kendi wasn't properly vetted by the university or by donors. The corporations that donated clearly ignored an argument central to Kendi's antiracism, that capitalism is oppressive and should be dismantled. Each incident underscores both the pervasive influence of Critical Theory on academic culture and its flaws as a theory. Like all ideas, Critical Theory and its offshoots (Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, Queer Theory, and others) have consequences. Like all bad ideas, it has victims. For the sake of truth and out of love for our neighbors, Christians must be prepared to push back against these bad ideas. This requires understanding these ideas and responding to them with competence and grace for the people who hold them. Critical Dilemma: The Rise of Critical Theories and Social Justice Ideology is such a crucial resource right now. Authors Shenvi and Sawyer take seriously the worldview behind various versions of Critical Theory, identify each version's central ideas, and define key terms such as "intersectionality," "antiracism," "privilege," "wokeness," "heteronormativity," and others. They trace the history of these ideas and offer a thorough response from a Christian worldview. As our way of saying thank you for a gift to the Colson Center this month, you can receive a copy of Critical Dilemma by Drs. Neil Shenvi and Pat Sawyer. To request a copy, go to colsoncenter.org/October. This Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Glenn Sunshine. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

A Texas professor has filed a lawsuit after he was allegedly fired for teaching that a person's sex is determined by chromosomes. Dr. Johnson Varkey said the administration at St. Philip's College, a community college, told him several students made complaints about his "unacceptable religious preaching" in his biology class. It's unclear exactly what they considered "religious" about his lesson: Was it when he said the word "male" corresponds to XY chromosomes and the word "female" corresponds to XX? Or that the perpetuation of humanity (and any species) requires sexual reproduction between men and women—because same-sex relationships are, by nature, sterile? I'm old enough to remember when the allegation was that Christianity is anti-science. If the new charge is that basic science is Christian, well, you won't get much argument from Christians. This is God's world, after all, which is why astronomer Johannes Kepler once described scientific study as "thinking God's thoughts after Him." All the same, the next time you're at your doctor's office, make sure that he has a higher view of basic biology than the St. Philip's College administration. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

On Saturday morning, October 7, in a highly coordinated attack on Israel, the Islamic terrorist group Hamas fired thousands of rockets, overwhelming the nation's Iron Dome defense system, and sent hundreds of heavily armed militants, breaching the border. In addition to soldiers at military outposts, civilians, including women and children, were also targeted, in neighborhoods, at bus stops, and at public events. By the end of the day, at least 900 Israelis had been killed and 100 kidnapped, making it the worst day of slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. Images and videos poured in from the attack, documenting atrocities that are difficult to stomach. Though some have likened this to 9/11, as Joel Rosenberg pointed out, for Israel's population of fewer than 10 million, 900 killed is equivalent to a mass casualty event of 30,000 Americans. In response, the Israeli government quickly declared a state of war, calling up over 300,000 reservists and laying the groundwork for a final battle to destroy the terrorist group that has long vowed to drive the Jews into the sea. Now, as an American fleet moves in and more evidence suggests the attacks were supported by Russian ally Iran, things could get dicey quickly. Hamas didn't simply attack Israeli military units or take out strategic targets. They mutilated the bodies of Jewish soldiers, killed entire families, kidnapped children and the elderly, and sexually assaulted women and girls before either killing them or carting them back to Gaza as trophies. One of the kidnapped is a survivor of the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews. The site of the largest slaughter was a music festival, where some 5,000 people gathered for what was billed as "a journey of unity and love." Nearly 300 were killed, and women were raped next to the bodies of their friends. Hamas didn't just commit atrocities: they filmed and broadcast them. Hannah Arendt, the brilliant Jewish philosopher of the twentieth century, introduced what she called the "banality of evil," that moral horrors like the Holocaust aren't caused by monsters but by ordinary people. What the world witnessed Saturday might be called the "reality of evil." What's been exposed since is the broken ability of our world to think in moral categories about even the most horrendous of evils. A peril of prosperity is the illusion that peace and affluence are normal and natural parts of life, rather than a blessed anomaly of history. Not only is our economic situation a relatively new phenomenon, but as Tom Holland and Glen Scrivener have compellingly argued, our expectations of human rights and dignity are recent and owed to Christianity's influence on the world. In other words, what shocked the world on October 7 would've been an ordinary experience for many humans throughout history. And yet, evil remains an ordinary experience of humanity after Eden. Calling it healthcare or medical-aid-in-dying or population control or sexual freedom doesn't make killing, exploitation, or abuse any less evil—only more sterilized. Other reactions to the attack on Israel have revealed that it is possible to become morally upside down, calling evil good and vice-versa. As expected, radical Islamic regimes around the world celebrated. Radicalized Muslim and leftist groups, conveniently safe in the tolerant West they despise, justified or even praised what happened. Many Western political leaders were clear in their condemnation of Hamas, but others obfuscated. Former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn refused to condemn Hamas, while Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib used the attacks to call for the U.S. to cut aid to Israel. If you wonder what kids are learning in university, 31 Harvard student groups jointly affirmed their support, not of Israel, but of Hamas. Thankfully, louder voices are expressing shock, sorrow, and solidarity on behalf of Israel. In a move that may have had Hitler rolling over in his grave, Berlin's famous Brandenburg Gate was illuminated with the Star of David. Some Arab countries newly at peace with Israel expressed sympathy, and in a remarkable display, some Iranian soccer fans apparently shouted down an attempt to celebrate Hamas. In moments like these, postmodern ideals that imply no truth is true and moral claims are only naked grabs of power are exposed. Disney may be committed to the idea that every villain has a justifying backstory, and that there's no black and white, only gray. But this vision fails the test of the real world. The only explanation for anyone who excuses, justifies, or celebrates Hamas' actions on October 7 is that they have been taken captive, either by Islamic extremism or by the Critical Theory mood, in which the oppressed and oppressors have already been decided. Two more aspects of evil, taught within a Christian worldview, are evident here as well. First, not all evils are equal. As someone rightly claimed, saying that "both sides are wrong" is like saying "Mordor is evil, but F

Recently, a reporter with The Free Press attended something called "Secular Sabbath," a Los Angeles-based club that meets occasionally to connect with a loosely defined "higher power." At this Secular Sabbath, people hung out in a sauna, meditated, and colored pictures. Human beings were made to worship, whether they know it or not. At a time when church attendance is plummeting, people are still looking for God, even if in all the wrong places. One of the Secular Sabbath-keepers stated plainly that she "[doesn't] want anyone to tell [her] the quality of God," but rather "wants that to be [her own] experience." Worship, however, doesn't work that way. If there is a God outside of ourselves worthy of our wonder, He gets to set the terms. We don't get to tell Him who we want Him to be and then feel like we've had a sacred experience. The false god of our age is inside, not outside. This is tragic and sad, since God is so much more than anything we could ever dream up. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Today marks the 770th anniversary of the death of Robert Grosseteste who, though from a humble background, rose to importance as a church statesman, theologian, educator, and eventually bishop of Lincoln, England. Among the few details known about Grosseteste's education and early career is that he was educated in a cathedral school, possibly at Hereford. He showed such promise in the liberal arts, canon law, and medicine that, in 1192, he was recommended for a position with William de Vere, the bishop of Hereford for whom Grosseteste worked until de Vere's death in 1198. In 1225, Grosseteste was given a benefice in the diocese of Lincoln. In 1229, he became an archdeacon at Leicester and a canon of the cathedral at Lincoln. A serious illness in 1232 convinced him that God was angry that he held multiple offices, so he resigned his post as archdeacon and kept the job as canon. Also in 1229, Grosseteste began teaching theology at the Franciscan convent in the relatively new University of Oxford. His teaching would become a major influence on Franciscan theology. In 1235, Grosseteste was elected bishop, and he became heavily involved in ecclesiastical politics, particularly in combatting clerical corruption. In 1250, a conflict with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Boniface of Savoy, landed Grosseteste before Pope Innocent IV. Now at about 80, he lectured Innocent about problems in the Church and laid the blame squarely at the feet of the papacy. Grosseteste's most important work was as a theologian and teacher. His theological treatises and teaching shaped Franciscan thought and laid the foundation for theology at Oxford. His work on ecclesiology would be a major influence on the English Reformer John Wycliffe about a century after Grosseteste's death. If all of that wasn't enough, Grosseteste also had a major impact on medieval science, specifically in developing an early version of the scientific method. He argued that when studying the natural world, one should begin with observations of particulars. Based on these observations, one formulates universal laws that govern the particulars. These laws can then be used to make predictions that can in turn be tested through observation. That methodology would continue to shape studies of the natural world into the seventeenth century and the beginnings of the scientific revolution. Grosseteste argued that because the natural sciences are based on mathematics, math is the highest of the sciences. This became a fundamental principle in medieval natural philosophy and carried over to the founders of modern science. Following St. Augustine, Grosseteste argued that we only know truth through illumination. Just as we cannot see a body unless it has light shining on it, the mind cannot comprehend truth unless the divine light of the logos, Jesus Christ, illuminates it. Thus, all knowledge, for Christian and non-Christian alike, is mediated by Christ. For Grosseteste, understanding light had much greater significance than its application to epistemology. Grosseteste's entire cosmology as well as his understanding of the relationship between soul and body was built on light as the first element of creation. With a particular interest in optics, he often worked with lenses, spherical glass bowls filled with water, and other tools to explore the behavior of light. In the process, he made significant advances in optics that soon led to the development of eyeglasses. Some scholars today even suggest that he had a very modern understanding of how color works, even centuries before Isaac Newton would demonstrate the visible spectrum in white light. Grosseteste, in his work, married philosophical and theological reflection, mysticism, and observation and experimentation to produce the kind of highly integrated vision of the world so foreign to how we think today. His groundbreaking work in scientific methodology, in mathematizing natural philosophy, and the specific conclusions he reached about optics were important advancements that had a profound influence on theology and natural philosophy for the next several centuries. Given today's tendency toward overspecialized fields of academic study, Grosseteste's vision that Christ mediates all knowledge is more relevant than ever. This Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Glenn Sunshine. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

John and Maria discuss the hotly debated conference at Andy Stanley's North Point Community Church. How is boredom affecting American education? And science is facing a lack of trust over a series of questionable studies. - Recommendations - Lighthouse Voices: The Genesis of Gender with Dr. Abigail Favale Micah Mattix on Substack Section 1 - North Point Church's "Unconditional" Conference Andy Stanley's "Unconditional" Contradiction Andy Stanley's Unconditional Conference: Deep Dive Response A Sober Response of Gospel Importance Section 2 - Leisure and Liberality Leisure and Liberality "Why Boredom Matters" by Kevin Hood Gary Section 3 - The Crisis of Trust in Science The Crisis of Trust in Science The Band of Debunkers Busting Bad Scientists Section 4 - Reflecting on Lighthouse Voices with Abigail Favale Lighthouse Voices: Dr. Abigail Favale For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Recently, historian Joel Kotkin argued in Quillette magazine that History has moved to the front line of social conflict, but rarely has it been so poorly understood and sketchily taught. After decades of declining interest, only 13 percent of eighth graders achieve proficiency in the subject today. … When I show my students a picture of Lenin, barely one-in-ten of them recognize it. Students saturated by information technology have less encouragement to study the past and, in their classrooms, history is frequently weaponized, glossed over, or ignored. This is another reason that this moment is a golden moment for Christian education. Christians revolutionized education through monastic schools, cathedral-based universities, and Protestant ideals of knowledge and learning. We also have a faith grounded in historical events and a proper understanding of the human condition, a condition that transcends time and place. Therefore, history is something that we can both study and learn from. In today's world, that's a revolutionary idea... For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Far from being an otherworldly religion, Christianity teaches both the importance and goodness of life in this world. In fact, from Jesus' healing ministry to the work of modern missionary doctors, a consistent feature of the work of the Church in the world has been to care for the sick and needy, and not just point them to the life to come. The early Church understood Jesus' ministry to be a paradigm for their own work. So, just as Jesus set believers free from their bondage to sin, early Christians purchased slaves specifically to free them. Whereas Jesus used miraculous power to heal people from physical effects of the Fall, Christians used more ordinary tools to care for the sick and disabled. These activities are not merely good deeds in themselves but serve to advance the Kingdom. Though the Gospel is a message and must be proclaimed, the early Church saw works of mercy and preaching of the Gospel as two sides of the same coin. The first major epidemic faced by the Church was the Antonine Plague (A.D. 166-189). In fear of their lives, the Romans threw the sick out of their homes to die in the streets. Galen, the most prominent physician of the age, knew he could neither heal its victims nor protect himself. So, he fled Rome to stay at his country estate. Recognizing that all persons were made in the image of God and that Jesus came to make all things new, body and soul, many Christians ran the other direction. They fought the Fall by tending to the sick, at risk (and often at the cost) of their own lives. Since even basic nursing care can make a significant difference during an epidemic, Christian action saved lives. Their courage and self-sacrifice contributed to the rapid growth of Christianity. For example, when Irenaeus arrived in Lyon from Asia Minor, there were very few Christians. By the time the plague ended, there were 200,000 believers in Lyon. The Plague of Cyprian, which took place the following century, was named after the bishop of Carthage who documented the epidemic. Dionysius of Alexandria, also a bishop, described what happened this way: At the first onset of the disease, they pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them into the roads before they were dead and treating unburied corpses as dirt… But, he continued… Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ. From the earliest centuries, Christians embraced the medical theories and practices of the day. Contrary to stereotypes, the early Church did not attribute illness to demons, though they did recognize demonization as a real phenomenon. The real difference between Christians and physicians of the day was the willingness to risk death in order to treat the sick, convinced that if they died it would only mean a transition to a better life. The physicians, on the other hand, fled. Christians also founded the first hospitals in history. By the late fourth century, there were hospitals in both the eastern and western halves of the empire. By the Central Middle Ages, hospitals and leprosaria (leprosy hospitals) could be found throughout most of the Christian world. When universities began granting medical degrees during the period, church-affiliated institutions continued to provide much of the care. By the 18th century, the medical field had become increasingly professionalized and separate from the clergy. Though monasteries still provided care for the poor, and nursing was almost entirely in the hands of sisters and nuns, professional physicians increasingly handled medical issues for those who could afford to pay. Clergy attended to the dying and contributed to discussions of medical ethics but had few other responsibilities for the sick. However, medicine was an integral part of the modern mission movement of the 19th century. Because Christianity has always affirmed the importance of the body, hospitals soon followed wherever missionaries went. This is another way the Church has been essential throughout history. This Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Glenn Sunshine. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org This Breakpoint was originally published on August 17, 2022.

Ireland only legalized abortion in 2018. At the time, a three-day waiting period between an initial consultation and the actual procedure was established, designed to help women considering abortion think through the implications of the life-altering (and life-ending) procedure. Five years later, pro-abortion advocates are pushing for its repeal, which may be because it has been so effective. As Right to Life UK reports, in 2022, 2,600 women in Ireland had babies instead of abortions after a three-day waiting period. In a country of only five million people, where there were just over 8,000 total abortions in that same time period, that's a more than significant number of lives saved. Because abortion depends on selective ignorance, laws can make a real difference. When people are forced to confront the humanity of the unborn, and women are given time to process this decision, more choose life. That might be why so many abortion advocates work hard to keep the procedure in darkness. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Last year, Pew Research reported that only 29% of Americans now are willing to say they have a "great deal of confidence" in medical scientists to act in the best interests of the public. That represents an 11% decline since 2020. This dramatic drop is both significant, given the historic importance of medical research in shaping public opinion, and understandable, given a growing crisis in the reliability of scientific research overall. A year ago, in a Breakpoint commentary, we described this crisis. For example, according to an analysis by University of California behavioral economists, the least reliable scientific studies are most likely to be cited by other scientists. After a review of 20,000 published papers, these researchers suggested in an article for the journal Science, that doubtful findings are cited more often because they're "interesting." And now, the problem has led some scientists to "moonlight" as detectives, combing through the scientific literature to sniff out fraud, negligence, and mistakes. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal described one such sleuthing trio. Joe Simmons, Leif Nelson, and Uri Simonsohn run a website called Data Colada, which is dedicated to "debunking published studies built on faulty or fraudulent data." According to the article, these scientists are able to recognize suspicious patterns in scientific papers, such as cherry-picked data, small sample sizes, bad math, or just results that make no sense. In a sense, these moonlighters are doing the kind of work that scientists should be doing as a normal part of their work. However, the scientific enterprise is plagued by what has been called a "replication crisis." In essence, findings are too often published without anyone confirming the results with other experiments. This became common knowledge in 2016 when the journal Nature reported that "more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments." Thanks in large part to the efforts of sleuths like Data Colada, "[a]t least 5,500 faulty papers were retracted in 2022, compared with (only) 119 in 2002." All the debunking has led to embarrassing resignations, including the former president of Stanford University, as well as "upended careers and retaliatory lawsuits." And this is probably just the beginning. According to The Wall Street Journal report, of the nearly 800 papers one researcher reported in the last decade, "only a third had been corrected or retracted five years later." Of course, human fallenness is behind this mess. That may sound like an oversimplification, but it's significant considering the myth of the objective scientist always following wherever the evidence leads. In addition to faulty and fraudulent results being more "interesting," there are material incentives to fudge research. Pumping out papers "can yield jobs, grants, speaking engagements and seats on corporate advisory boards." This "pushes researchers to chase unique and interesting findings, sometimes at the expense of truth." And yet, as The Wall Street Journal piece described, scientific fraud has real-world costs: Flawed social-science research can lead to faulty corporate decisions about consumer behavior or misguided government rules and policies. Errant medical research risks harm to patients. Researchers in all fields can waste years and millions of dollars in grants trying to advance what turn out to be fraudulent findings. More fundamentally, scientific "authority" is often wielded as a cudgel to end all political, social, and cultural debates. On everything from evolution to abortion, pandemics to climate change, gender to gay adoptions, the "science is settled" line is frequently invoked, and people actually believe it. The more science is sold as unassailable but then corrupted by politics and personal ambition, the more its rightful authority will be compromised. That would be a real tragedy, given how vital a tool it is for discovering truth and how much it reveals about the world we live in and the kind of creatures we are. Scientists like those at Data Colada who hope to restore integrity to the scientific enterprise must hold their peers accountable. In the process, they are calling our attention back to the human element in science. It can never be, strictly speaking, an objective enterprise. After all, it is humans who are looking through those microscopes, conducting the research, and writing those papers. Even when not intentionally dishonest, humans err. That should be enough to raise our Spidey senses whenever a scientific finding is sold as if it is a pronouncement from God. Good science requires not just a sharp mind but also moral integrity, or what C.S. Lewis called "the chest" in The Abolition of Man. In this sense, the very existence of science depends on areas of knowledge that cannot be placed in a test tube: ethics, philosophy, even religi

Under a military blockade since December of last year, Armenian residents of the Nagorno-Karabakh region have been deprived of food, fuel, and medicine by neighboring Azerbaijan. After an Azerbaijani military offensive killed 200 and the provisional government of Nagorno-Karabakh disarmed, the exit route to neighboring Armenia was clogged with 28,000 refugees trying to escape. Azerbaijani officials have long threatened Armenians with veiled threats of violence that watchdogs warn are genocidal. Armenia is the world's oldest Christian nation. Azerbaijan has shown a commitment not only to kicking Armenians out of a land they have lived on for thousands of years, but also to erasing all evidence of their existence—destroying cemeteries, landmarks, and churches. Armenia was backed by Russia, which makes U.S. involvement complex, but that seems fickle at best. Pray for the lives of Armenian Christians, and ask God to bring peace quickly to this troubled part of the world. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

For the last few weeks, all eyes, at least evangelical eyes, have been locked on Atlanta. When North Point Community Church announced the "Unconditional" conference, held this past weekend, many noted that two of the speakers were men "married" to other men. Many of the rest were on the record as "affirming" same-sex relationships, recognizing LGBTQ as legitimate categories of human identity, and describing their work as hoping to convert Christians to their ideas about sex, identity, and marriage. Would this conference mark Andy Stanley's final departure from historic Christian teaching on human sexuality? Stanley, who is among America's most prominent pastors, defended the conference and choice of speakers due to the focus of the event. In his Sunday sermon, he responded to the criticism, stating that this conference was not about the theology of human sexuality, or even about talking someone out of an LGBTQ identity. Rather, he said, it was aimed at "parents of LGBTQ+ children and ministry leaders looking to discover ways to support parents and LGBTQ+ children;" in other words, parents who had already tried (and failed) to talk their children out of these identities and now only wished to stay in relationship with them. Even if the conference was intentionally designed to not address the questions of the morality of same-sex relationships and alternate sexual identities, as apologist and "Unconditional" conference attendee Alan Shlemon noted, it answered these questions "by virtue of who they platformed, their resources, their recommendations. It's a confusing message at best, and at worst it's ... saying that homosexual sex would be permissible, (and) satisfying transgender ideations would be permissible. (To hear more of Shlemon's perspective, watch his interview with fellow apologist professor Sean McDowell here.) On Sunday, Stanley maintained that the conference successfully met its stated goal without implying any kind of moral or theological shift. This is possible because of something Stanley has said both about this conference and about the overall work of the Church. Introducing in another context the work of "Unconditional" conference speakers Greg and Lynn McDonald, founders of "Embracing the Journey," Stanley stated the following: "This is the reality for those of us who are in ministry. ... We're dealing with real people and real relationships. ... It is not political for me. ... It is relational, because we are in ministry, and because we've learned to distinguish between theology and ministry, we can figure this out." This is, I think, Stanley's primary and most problematic contention: that pastoral ministry can be, and really must be, "unhitched" from theology. With this presumption, Stanley has continued to insist that North Point remains committed to biblical teaching about sex as only for marriage and about marriage as only for a man and a woman. At the same time, though he has never publicly and officially come out as "affirming" of homosexuality, Stanley has consistently described it as something that simply is, something that is part of people's lives and not something that we should expect to change or be changed. He has praised the faith of people who, though they have embraced an "alternative lifestyle," still wish to be connected to the Church, including the "married" men who presented at the "Unconditional" conference. He has also described gay marriage as a reasonable alternative if singleness is "not sustainable," and both he and conference materials consistently used the identifiers of "gay," "gay Christian," and "LGBTQ+" to refer to those who struggle with same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria. Neither Scripture nor the teaching of the church throughout millennia of Christian theology is nearly as ambiguous about such matters. The Bible is clear about God's design and intentions for His image bearers, male and female, the marital union, sexual desires, and relational and sexual sins. The conference, as if this teaching were not clear, claimed to offer "a quieter middle" in a world that demands we "choose sides." On Sunday, Stanley claimed that this matched the ministry of Jesus who "drew circles instead of lines," drawing people in rather than keeping them out. Jesus' pastoral practice was, of course, unparalleled. He often surprised people by drawing them to Himself. In other words, He drew circles. But He also drew lines. For example, after drawing in the woman caught in adultery, He sent her off with a clear line. When questioned about divorce, Jesus pointed to the lines drawn in creation, of male and female and permanence. Of course, Paul drew lines, too, especially on issues of sexual morality to the church at Corinth. In the nineteenth century, theological liberals, attempting to defend Christianity against cultural disdain for the supernatural, unhitched the practical results of Christianity in people's lives from the truths about Who Christ is and what He accompli

The Titanic went down over 100 years ago, and the world remains fascinated by its story and its passengers. John Harper, a Scottish evangelist headed to preach in Chicago, was one such passenger who ended up witnessing in the moments before his death. Dr. Erwin Lutzer of Moody Church described his story, "Harper, knowing he could not survive long in the icy water, took off his life jacket and threw it to another person with the words, 'You need this more than I do!' Moments later, Harper disappeared beneath the water. Four years later, when there was a reunion of the survivors of the Titanic, the man to whom Harper had witnessed told the story of his rescue and gave a testimony of his conversion recorded in a tract, I was John Harper's Last Convert." We don't always see the impact of faithfulness and obedience, but as Lutzer concludes, "A hundred years after (Harper's) death, we are still benefitting from the lasting effects of those final moments before he sank into the ocean." For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Christians who work in politics to end legalized abortion do so because innocent lives are at stake. That would be enough cause in and of itself. However, abortion isn't just one of the many issues that we should care about. In many ways, abortion, perhaps more than any other single issue, symbolizes our society's core beliefs. Simply put, Christian societies do not kill their smallest, most vulnerable members. Pagan societies, on the other hand, do. In a fascinating recent essay published at First Things, Louise Perry argued that the fight over abortion is really about whether we will remain, in any real sense, a Christian society, or we will re-paganize to the beliefs and values of pre-Christian times. Perry, author of the recent book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, isn't a Christian, though she admits she finds Christianity attractive. Her academic journey seems to have become a spiritual journey, one that has led to a recognition that many of her secular and humanist values are, in fact, remnants of a Christian morality that remade the world. Perry opened her article by citing Scottish poet Hollie McNish, who wrote that archaeologists know they've found a Greek or Roman brothel when they unearth "a pit of newborn babies' bones." Hearing this poem gave Perry the same "painful, squeezing, swooping sensation" she first felt when hearing a graphic description of abortion. She realized something pro-lifers have long argued: Abortion is really a form of legalized infanticide and not so different from the baby-killing of the ancient world. Though Perry is still pro-choice in certain cases, she's clearly uneasy about it. This is in part because she's a mom, and because she sees how abortion and infanticide exist on a "continuum" that includes other ancient practices like slavery, the sexual exploitation of women and children, and general disregard for the weak and poor. Historically, only one group of people objected to these things. As Perry wrote: "The supremely strange thing about Christianity in anthropological terms is that it takes a topsy-turvy attitude toward weakness and strength. To put it crudely, most cultures look at the powerful and the wealthy and assume that they must be doing something right to have attained such might. The poor are poor because of some failing of their own, whether in this life or the last. The smallness and feebleness of women and children is a sign that they must be commanded by men. The suffering of slaves is not an argument against slavery, but an argument against allowing oneself to be enslaved." Into this predatory, power-centric pagan world stepped Christ, who defeated the powerful through submission to death—"even death on a cross." After Christ's resurrection, His followers began insisting on the innate and equal value of all human beings and began condemning practices like infanticide. Christians, of course, have not always lived up to these ideas, but they were unique in holding them. As authors like Tom Holland have argued, these Christian ideals didn't vanish with the rise of secular humanism. Western progressives owe their moral instincts to protect the weak and vulnerable to the Christian revolution, even if they scoff at the idea of the Christian God. And therein lies Perry's problem. There is no group weaker or more vulnerable than unborn babies. Yet these are precisely the victims that feminists and secular progressives insist we must ignore to advance sexual freedom. We have all seen how much the rhetoric is heating up, both against those who work to save preborn lives and now for the legal extension of so-called "medical aid in dying" to children with disabilities. This is why, Perry concludes, "The legal status of abortion … represents the bleeding edge of dechristianization." Stepping decisively away from the influence of Christianity will bring back an "older, darker" set of values in which the strong exploit the weak and no one objects. Such a world would truly be, once again, pagan. At least some non-Christian writers seem to realize that in this world, women, the poor, and other vulnerable classes would not fare well. Historically speaking, equality, human rights, and protection of the weak aren't "self-evident." They're part of a distinctly Christian heritage shaped by a distinctly Christian vision of the world. As the values of our pagan past grow more influential and pervasive, progressives should take note. A society built on babies' bones won't long respect the rights of anyone except the powerful. For that, you need Christ. This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave a review on your favorite podcast app. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

In an article at The Guardian, theater director Abbey Wright described talking with 10,000 children and teenagers about the impact of pornography on their lives. She was careful not to tell young children more than they knew, asking them simply, "What is bad about the internet?" Still, she was shocked how many described pornography finding them. Children as young as six recalled popups and ads placed in otherwise innocent content. Some were shown porn by friends or siblings. Yet many parents remain naïve about what their kids are seeing. One teenager offered this reality check: "If you put a phone in a child's hand, you are putting porn in a child's hand." There's more to the fight for the souls of our kids than keeping phones and tablets away from unsupervised children, but there is not less. The average age of porn exposure is 12, and the availability of internet browsing devices is the most reliable predictor that a child will be exposed. Don't take the risk. It's not worth their innocence or wellbeing. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Fourteen-year-old Sage Blair had already been through a lot by the time she was legally adopted by her grandparents. When she entered high school, she began to experiment, as many of her friends were, with her "gender identity." All the while, the school deliberately withheld information from her adoptive parents. Sage was encouraged to adopt the name "Draco," claim male pronouns, and use the boys' bathroom. Only after Sage was physically assaulted by a group of boys in the bathroom did her parents find out what was happening. Sage ran away. After connecting with an online "friend," she was drugged, trafficked, and sexually exploited. Nine days later, she was located by the FBI in Baltimore. Testifying before a House subcommittee in Virginia, Michele Blair remembered the drive to pick up her daughter, only to find out that she and her husband had been summoned before a Maryland judge for their refusing to support their daughter's transition. "They didn't even tell Sage that we came for her. … We finally enter the courtroom, and Sage appears on a huge Zoom screen from a prison cell. She looks tiny and broken, and I cry out, 'I love you, Sage!' Sage responds, 'I love you too, Nana!'" Sage's state-appointed attorney rebuked Michele, saying "She is he, and his name is Draco, not Sage." The judge then accused the Blairs of emotional and physical abuse, though, in Michele's words, "We just learned she claim[ed] to be trans and were willing to use any name and pronouns to bring her home. My husband was so tearful, he kept forgetting the new pronouns. So, the judge had the bailiff remove him from the courtroom. I was pleading for my child to be returned and treated for her unspeakable trauma. Judge Kershaw told me if I used the word trauma again, he would throw me out too." Judge Kershaw withheld custody from Sage's parents for over two months. During that time, Sage was transferred to a state facility for boys where, again, she was sexually abused. She ran away again and, once again, became a victim of human trafficking. When she resurfaced months later, in Texas, she was returned to Virginia where she spent more months in a court-appointed mental health clinic. The counselors at this center pushed her toward a double mastectomy as a solution for her mental health issues. Nearly a year after the ordeal began, Sage was allowed to come home. Her parents were vindicated after a months-long state inquiry concluded that there was no evidence of abuse on their part. For Sage, however, the damage was done. Now with the loving support of her parents and having desisted from her trans identity, she still suffers from severe anxiety, panic attacks, and medical issues resulting from all she has suffered. The most damning part of Sage's story is how tragically predictable all of it was once the state chose to ignore decades of research, the entire weight of human experience, common sense, and the rights of parents to their children. In no way should it be said that Sage "fell through the cracks." When dealing with ideologies that deny reality, failures are features, not glitches. Still, Sage's example is about as plain as any of how trans ideology destroys our most essential relationships: of a child to her body, of a child to her parents, of a family to the wider community, of a judge to justice, of citizens to state authorities. When legal authorities embrace bad ideas, the consequences are all the more devastating for the victims. For Christians exhausted by the "culture war," unsure of whether we engage in politics, and wishing only to "stay in our lane" of proclaiming the Gospel, Sage's story speaks. Every generation of Christians who have faced conflict within a pagan cultural context has had to protect children. Our pagan moment is no different. We will answer before God about whether we remained silent or dared to speak on behalf of children like Sage and parents who face incredible opposition like hers did. May we be known for our love, expressed by a courage that challenges evils like Sage faced, until they are a thing of the past. This Breakpoint was co-authored by Kasey Leander. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

John and Maria talk about Tuesday's Breakpoint Forum on Christian Nationalism and the latest examples of America turning its back on Christian refugees. - Recommendations - Colson Center National Conference 2024 in Arlington, TX! Section 1 - Breakpoint's Forum on Christian Nationalism Breakpoint Forum: Unmasking Christian Nationalism Section 2 - America's Refugee Policy "German Homeschoolers Face Deportation After 15 Years in the U.S." "Admit Christian Refugees" "Closed Doors: Persecuted Christians and the U.S. Refugee Resettlement and Asylum Processes" "Help Armenian Christian Refugees as they Flee Nagorno-Karabakh" Section 3 - Stories of the Week "What Does it Mean to have a Courageous Faith?" "Tolkien, Eliot, and the Power of Story" For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

In December 1938, British stockbroker Nicholas Winton canceled a ski vacation and instead traveled to Prague. There, as the German military began its occupation of Czechoslovakia, he worked with friends to save the lives of 669 Jewish children. When he returned to London, Winton raised money to purchase train tickets and passports, and cut through red tape so that the children could be placed in foster care once they reached Great Britain. According to his daughter's account, Winton never knew what happened to the children and never believed he'd done something heroic ... until 1988, when Winton was invited to sit in the studio audience of the television show That's Life. On air, he learned that the people sitting around him were children he had saved, along with their children and grandchildren. This January, a new biopic of Winton's efforts, titled One Life, will hit theaters, starring Anthony Hopkins. His story is a powerful reminder that faithfulness, not heroics, can change the destinies of thousands. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

In September, most U.S. states released their public school "report cards." These reports are intended to evaluate for parents, community leaders, and policymakers the quality of education being offered across the state. By federal law, report cards must measure academic performance and graduation rates. Of course, these assessments are only helpful if they make sense. Many don't. For example, Ohio's Department of Education, following a few other states, recently stopped using letter grades on its statewide school report cards. Among the reasons is that lawmakers thought that an "F" just sounded too harsh. Now, the Ohio school report card is based on a "star" system. However, like real stars that seem to float in midair, the star system is based on a made-up and confusing "point" system. According to the chart that "explains" the scores, 4.5 stars may be equal to 4.125 points but not lower than 3.625 points. U.S. schools were struggling before the pandemic, and they haven't gotten much better. The White House recently sounded the alarm about the chronic absenteeism in public schools, something that skyrocketed during the pandemic and has not significantly improved since, and its strong correlation to worsening math and reading scores across the country. Only 32% of American fourth graders are considered "proficient" in reading. Still, unless a problem is properly understood, it cannot be helpfully addressed. State report cards should be helpful in diagnosing the crises facing public education, but they aren't. In fact, they seem almost intentionally unhelpful. For example, last year's report card for Ohio rated almost 90% of school districts as "meeting state standards." However, the same report card, if you know where to click, reported that almost 40% of Ohio's third graders are not proficient in reading. Ohio's school report card doesn't exactly evaluate student competencies in academic subjects at all. Three out of five stars instead marks (1) progress from the previous year's report card, (indicating that a terrible year was followed by a merely bad year), (2) a "closing the gap" for minority populations (which also could be an indication of an incremental gain rather than success), and (3) overall graduation rates, which includes "joining the military" or becoming an apprentice. In other words, not actually passing required exams. Partly to blame is a shift in how we think about education across the board; a shift that trickled down from institutions of higher learning to now infect public schools. As T.S. Eliot observed, every philosophy of education emerges from a philosophy of humanity. In our context, educators spend an inordinate amount of their preparation on educational theory and pedagogy. This has shifted the focus of their preparation from the what and the why to the how. The result is a generation of teachers fully up on the "social and emotional dynamics of learning" but who nevertheless fail to teach their second graders basic phonics. Recently in First Things, R.R. Reno described these "depressing results" out of Baltimore City public schools: "In a number of schools, not a single student was doing math at grade level. In the system overall, only 7 percent of third through eighth graders were proficient. Meanwhile, at the July convention of the National Education Association, delegates committed the organization to working against legislation that limits LGBT propaganda in school. The kids can't do long division, but rest assured, they're fully catechized in the finer points of sexual liberation, learning to say 'birthing parent' and 'non-birthing parent' rather than 'mother' and 'father.'" Of course, there are many admirable teachers in both public and private schools across America, teachers who are concerned about what matters most and who are skilled at passing this on to the next generation. What we're talking about here is a systematic problem, a crisis in public education that runs deep. Obscuring the problem to protect institutions whose administrators view an "F" as sounding too harsh won't help. Rather, education will need to be rethought at a worldview level. If human beings are made in the image of God, then to know is to know the mind of the Creator. From this solid ground, ancient Christians gave the world the concept of universal education. If God has revealed Himself and wants to be known, and not just by the elite or the rich or the clergy, real knowledge is possible. And kids should be treated as knowers, not as social experiments, mini political activists, or trusted authorities on everything from gender to climate change. The White House's press release on chronic absenteeism ended with the assertion that, "the road to recovery runs through the classroom." Obviously, kids will need to show up if they are to learn, but what happens when they do show up matters more. Specifically, the what and the why, not just the where and the how. For more resources to live like a Ch

The Christian Post recently reported that the Bank of America closed the accounts of Indigenous Advance Ministries, a Christian nonprofit whose goal is discipleship and business training for young Ugandans. The bank denies closing the accounts based on the ministry's religious beliefs, claiming it instead closed them because of the kind of debt-collection business it has in Uganda. Still, Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Jeremy Tedesco points out that, under an Obama-era policy, many large banks have leveraged risk tolerance policies to "box out disfavored but legal business operations." Often, that means conservative and Christian groups. There are unknowns involved in this case, but debanking is a very real threat to religious organizations. There are too many examples for all of them to be coincidences. Some institutions will even refuse to allow charitable gifts to be made to some groups through a donor-advised fund. Consider where you bank, and how those institutions treat Christian organizations, churches, mission groups, and nonprofits. There are other options. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Attempt to instruct a group of 12-year-old kids about the importance of duty, honor, perseverance, and friendship by means of a lecture, and the most likely result will be glazed eyes and tuned-out ears. If instead of a lecture, however, the lesson began with, "There once was a tiny creature called a Hobbit, whose name was Frodo. He had hairy feet and a magic ring, and whenever he put that ring on his finger, he'd disappear. But each time he put the ring on, the Ring exercised a dark power over him and attracted the attention of the Dark Lord Sauron." That story, the plot of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, is more likely to capture the attention and the imagination of kids, as it has tens of millions before them. And, along the way, they'd learn about duty, honor, perseverance, and friendship. This is the power of great stories. The best stories are not merely well told, they also wrestle with ultimate ideas. Tolkien remains popular today because his stories stand the test of time. They stand the test of time because they engage with us at the deepest levels of the human condition. More than 2,000 years ago, Damon of Athens wrote, "Give me the songs of a people, and I care not who writes its laws." Christian musician and novelist Andrew Peterson has said, "If you want someone to hear the truth, you should tell them the truth. But if you want someone to LOVE the truth, you should tell them a story." The power of storytelling should come as no surprise to Christians. After all, Jesus told lots of stories. So have Christians throughout history. Tolkien and T.S. Eliot were two writers from the last century who exemplify the importance of stories. Because of the success of the Lord of the Rings films, Tolkien is better known today than Eliot, but Eliot stands shoulder to shoulder with Tolkien in terms of literary output and genius. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men," concludes with these better known, haunting lines: "This is the way the world ends / not with a bang but a whimper." Eliot's melancholy poem "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock," which is still read by most college students, captures the despair of modern man facing this broken world without God. In many ways, Eliot was that modern man, isolated, spiritually lost, despairing. A decade or so after he wrote "Prufrock," Eliot's life and art was transformed when he converted to Christ. He went on to write magnificent religious poetry, such as "Ash Wednesday" and The Four Quartets. For a time, his work even crossed over into pop culture. For example, his book of whimsical verse, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, became the smash-hit Broadway musical Cats. Chuck Colson often said that "politics is downstream from culture." That isn't always the case, but it often is. This is why great storytellers and poets like Tolkien and Eliot continue to have such an impact on hearts and minds. Their work goes on to inspire. In fact, a simple way Christians can impact culture is by simply sharing good stories with those around us. We may not be a Tolkien or an Eliot, but we can know and recommend their works. And we can tell the real-life stories of Christian heroes like William Wilberforce and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, of the incredible conversions of St. Augustine and Chuck Colson, and of the work of the Christian heroes of today who love God and neighbor by feeding the hungry and clothing the naked while enduring hardships and persecution. We should share these stories because like all good stories do, they ultimately point hearts and imaginations to the Greatest Story of All. This Breakpoint was originally published 1.3.17. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Abortion advocates are often dismissive on the question of fetal pain, but a recent article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics brought together pro-abortion and pro-life experts to clarify what we know about what the preborn feel: "We consider the possibility that the mere experience of pain, without the capacity for self-reflection, is morally significant. We believe that fetal pain does not have to be equivalent to a mature adult human experience to matter morally." According to research, preborn babies as early as 7.5 weeks will move to avoid unpleasant sensations, emit stress hormones, and experience an increase in heart rate and cerebral blood flow. As bioethicist Dr. Bridget Thrill concluded, "Denial of fetal pain capacity beginning in the first trimester, potentially as early as 8–12 weeks gestation, is no longer tenable." Babies have also been observed attempting to escape procedures designed to kill them. We always should have known better, but we can't say we don't know anymore. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Not long ago, most non-Christians treated pornography as a harmless expression of sexual freedom. For half a century, Hugh Hefner's Playboy philosophy dominated, teaching people to wink at porn use. Children discovering a relative's "stash" became a popular trope in TV and film and was played off for laughs. In the digital age, distribution and access became easier and instant, and the content grew darker. Finally, more people are admitting that, though it was never harmless, this content now poses a life-altering danger to those who stumble across it—especially children. In 2021, singer-songwriter Billie Eilish confessed to being one of those children harmed by pornography. In an interview, Eilish described her first encounter at age 11: "I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn," she said. The things she saw on screen gave her nightmares and led to her "not saying no" to things she should have refused in her own relationships. Eilish was hardly a voice crying in the wilderness. In the wake of our collective reckoning with abuse and addiction, it has become clear that most children are introduced to sex through pornography, and the porn they're encountering is like nothing previous generations knew. Even if you don't count what is being forced on them in elementary school classrooms, what they are being exposed to is extreme, degrading, and, in many cases, criminal. For example, mainstream, left-leaning publications such as The Atlantic and The New York Times have recently featured essays grappling with the explosion of online pornography featuring children, and how devilishly difficult it is to separate this illegal content from what many view as the acceptable, consensual kind. Those who still attempt to tame or domesticate pornography need to wake up to the devastation it has inflicted on kids and teens. A good start would be to listen to what children and teens have to say about it. Recently, theater director Abbey Wright at The Guardian, wrote about her project discussing this topic with 10,000 children and young adults. These kids, some as young as six, described a reality nothing like that one scene in Home Alone. "I was exposed to porn before I'd had a proper sexual experience," one young man said. "[I]t is like a self-fulfilling prophecy. You see something, and you re-enact it. That's what I like because that's what I did. That's what I did because that's what I saw." The average age at which kids are first exposed to pornography is now 12, and there are plenty of outliers. According to Wright, parents can be naïve about this fact: "Whenever I mention to the parent of a child that age that many six-year-olds have seen pornography, they say: 'Oh, my child hasn't.'" In what might be the most haunting line of the article, one teenager simply scoffed at that assumption: "If you put a phone in a child's hand, you are putting porn in a child's hand." Girls and young women described how warped their expectations and the expectations of boys about what's normal in a relationship are because of this content. "Young women told us about the pressure they felt from pornography. ... 'These porn women do it, so why won't you?'" A young man from London summed it up this way, "I think pornography is a bit soul-sucking. …People can't do anything else. I don't want to get to a point where I feel like I'm not me any more." "Destroyed my brain," "soul-sucking," "I'm not me any more." Are we listening? Porn in any form is a radical distortion of God's design for human relationships, especially in how we are to treat each other. It's an attempt to force the transcendent into an immanent box and to pretend that something God intended as meaningful can be made meaningless. It cannot. Any time something sacred is mocked and the image of God in all involved is denied, there will be victims. Now, a generation of young people are voicing sorrow and regret because of what we defended as "freedom" and "harmless fun." This was true when Hefner mainstreamed porn in the 1950s. It is even more true today. The internet and smartphones have merely cultivated this hideousness for what it is. We must keep unsupervised devices out of unsupervised young hands. Do it. As a society, we must end this systematic assault on young eyes. Now that so many seem to be finally "getting it," maybe the opportunity is here. To learn how you can join that cause, check out the terrific work of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

According to Cara Buckley with The New York Times, a growing number of "tiny forests" are appearing across urban areas in the U.S. In addition to absorbing carbon dioxide, reducing water runoff, and providing homes for wildlife, "[T]iny forests can help lower temperatures in places where pavement, buildings and concrete surfaces absorb and retain heat from the sun." The concept was pioneered by Japanese ecologist Akira Miyawaki and suggests that people are the best stewards of nature. What the world needs is not some return to vast, unspoiled "wilderness" by massively reducing the human population, as so many suggest. Instead, we need more of this: creating space for people to use their ingenuity, resources, and innovation to increase creation's fruitfulness. Our screens and concrete jungles disconnect us from God's creation, while bad ideas about "nature" and the environment treat humans as its biggest problem. But humans were created to care for the rest of creation. In fact, only humans can. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Given our need for courage, this year, we've centered the entire Colson Center National Conference around the theme of Courageous Faith. Please plan by saving the date and registering today. The conference is May 30-June 2 at the Loews Hotel in Arlington, Texas. To learn more, go to colsonconference.org. ______ In 2020, January Littlejohn's daughter came home confused about her sexual identity after three of her close friends at school began identifying as transgender. Littlejohn, herself a licensed mental health counselor, did her best to support her daughter, opening the door to conversation and seeking out a mental health counselor. But as she relates, the real surprise came later: "When school started, my daughter got into the car and said, "Mom, I had a meeting today at school and they asked me which restroom I wanted to use." … What we learned that the school had done was socially transitioned our daughter without our notification or consent. And then they did something particularly nefarious: They asked our daughter what name they should call her when speaking to her parents, and that was to effectively deceive parents that these gender support transition plans had ever taken place." Along with thousands of parents across the U.S. and Europe, Littlejohn found herself in a battle for her child's life. Parents of kids struggling with gender dysphoria are often completely alone, braving attacks from schools, counselors, medical professionals, and other parents. They even face the possibility of being legally separated from their kids unless they go along. Too many acquiesce. But Littlejohn chose a different path. In her words, "We know and love our children more than anyone in the world. We would die for our children 10 times over. So, the school has no right to then make critical decisions with minor children without parental involvement." In 2021, Littlejohn and her husband filed a lawsuit against her county's school board for encouraging their daughter's transition without parental permission. She is now a parental advocate at Do No Harm, a nonprofit that aims to return healthcare to evidence-based practices and medicine to its original purpose of healing, ensuring to not isolate parents in the process. You can listen to her full story on their website, donoharmmedicine.org. This story is just one of many reminders of the kind of courage Christians will need. As C.S. Lewis said, "Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality." I think we've hit a cultural moment where many of us will face that testing point at a new level. It's where the rubber hits the road in finding out where our faith really is. Given our need for courage, this year, we've centered the entire Colson Center National Conference around the theme of Courageous Faith. Too many Christians have a privatized understanding of faith, believing it is enough to keep our heads down and avoid controversy at all costs. In some circles, controversy itself is a sign that we're doing something wrong. But this is not the life or kind of opposition that Jesus warned us about. We need to remember that doing the right thing is seldom popular and never easy. From William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect to Egyptian Coptic martyrs kneeling on a Libyan beach, the commitment to a Gospel faith that impacts every part of life is going to cost us something. Courage is the commitment to both speak and live the truth about God, the world, people, and His plan for redemption—no matter what the consequences are for us. Without it, we'll end up with a shriveled and ineffective faith, one that has no power to impact the wider world. Most importantly, courage doesn't just happen. Courage is a virtue, and virtues have to be cultivated. Our next annual conference is all about what it takes to cultivate courage. You'll be connected with likeminded believers who, just like you, are committed to living out their faith courageously in our time and place. Together, we can step into that same trajectory as that list of heroes in the book of Hebrews. We will be able to, as the author of Hebrews describes, spur one another on to "love and good works." The lineup of speakers this year shows the same courage in the public square. From palliative care physician Dr. Margaret Cottle to apologist Sean McDowell to U.K. Anglican deacon Father Calvin Robinson, each of these individuals has demonstrated living out their faith in the public square while still treating others with decency and respect. We will host an optional Worldview Intensive Thursday night on courageous citizenship, an important emphasis for the coming election year. On Saturday night, we'll present the 2024 Wilberforce Award to someone who exemplifies the same courage, principles, and passion exemplified by the great William Wilberforce. Please plan by saving the date and registering today. The conference is May 30-June 2 at t

In a recent video that went viral, a 60-year-old New York trash thrifter shared how he makes a living reselling and recycling trash in the Big Apple. From bottles alone, he makes $400 to $800 a week, plus another $1000 from things he resells. He's found gold, cash, diamonds, and Cartier watches ... all in the trash. But his best find was Jesus Christ. As the interview goes on, the man shares how after being involved in human trafficking and drug markets, he lost everything—his wife, his kids, and 10 years of his life in prison. In 1993, three ladies from the Bronx came to his prison to preach the Gospel. It was then that he met the Lord and gave his life to Him. Just as this man now repurposes trash, the Lord repurposed this man, trashed by sin and shame, for His glory. "I don't deserve it," he said, "but I thank God for his grace." For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Recently, the U.S. Senate held a closed-door meeting with the biggest names from the world of big tech, such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. Senate leadership informed the media that the purpose of the meeting was to have a conversation about how the federal government could "encourage" the development of artificial intelligence while also mitigating its "risks." Given that focus, it's more interesting who wasn't invited than who was: no ethicists, philosophers, or theologians, nor really anyone outside the highly specialized tech sector. For a meeting meant to explore the future direction of AI and the ethics necessary to guide it, nearly everyone in that room had a vested financial interest in its continued growth and expansion. Thirty years ago, in his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, cultural critic Neil Postman described how technology was radically reshaping our understanding of life and the world, both as individuals and societies. Too often when it comes to new technologies, we so mix "can" and "should" that we convince ourselves if we can do a thing, we should. The shift toward a technocratic society redefines our understanding of knowledge. Technical knowledge takes priority over all else. In other words, the how is revered over the what and the why. In the process, things are stripped of their essential meaning. The distinction between what we can do and what we are for is lost. Technocratism also comes with a heavy dose of "chronological snobbery," the idea that our innovations and inventions make us better than our ancestors, even in a moral sense. Another feature of a technocratic age is hyper-specialization. In higher education, students are encouraged to pursue increasingly detailed areas of study. The result is those who can do, but most have not truly wrestled with whether they should. Downstream is one of the corruptions of primary education, in which elementary and secondary teachers spend a disproportionate amount of their preparation on education theory and pedagogy rather than on the subject areas they need to know. In other words, they study the how far more than the what and the why. Of course, those who are researching, inventing, and developing AI should be invited to important meetings about AI. However, questioning the risks, dangers, or even potential benefits of AI requires answering deeper questions first–questions outside the realm of strict science: What is the goal of our technologies? What should be our goal? What is off limits and why? What is our operating definition of the good that we are pursuing through technology? Where is the uncrossable line between healing and enhancement, and what are the other proper limits of our technologies? What are people? What technocratic challenges have we faced in the past, and what can we learn? The questions we commit ourselves to answering will shape our list of invites, among other things. The presidential years of George W. Bush are mostly defined by his handling of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and subsequent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. However, he also faced a specific challenge of our technocratic age. How he handled it is a model for the technocratic challenges of today. A central issue of Bush's second presidential campaign was embryonic stem cell research. Democratic vice-presidential candidate John Edwards promised that if John Kerry became president, "people like [actor] Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again." Bush strongly opposed the creation of any new stem cell lines that required the destruction of human life, including embryos. His ethical clarity was due in part to remarkable work done by the President's Council on Bioethics to develop an ethical framework for promising technologies. In fact, their work led to an incredible volume of stories, poetry, fables, history, essays, and Scripture. Published two years into Bush's first term, Being Human is unparalleled in its historical and ideological depth and breadth. Chaired by renowned bioethicist Leon Kass, the Council consisted of scientists, medical professionals, legal scholars, ethicists, and philosophers. The title Being Human points to the kinds of what and why questions that concerned the Council, before dealing with the how. Historically, President Bush's position on embryo-destructive research has been thoroughly vindicated. The additional funding committed to research into adult and induced pluripotent stem cells produced amazing medical breakthroughs. But none of the promises of embryonic stem cell therapies ever materialized, even after his Oval Office successor reversed Bush's policies, rebuilt the Council around only scientists and medical researchers, and released enormous funding for embryo-destructive research. Of course, had the utopian predictions about ESC materialized, the killing of some humans to benefit others would still have been morally reprehensible. Ends do not justif

John Stonestreet talks to Greg Koukl, the author of the new book Street Smarts, about effective ways to engage an increasingly hostile culture. This month, for a gift of any amount to the Colson Center, we will send you a copy of Greg Koukl's book Street Smarts. To receive a copy of Street Smarts: Using Questions to Answer Christianity's Toughest Challenges, visit colsoncenter.org/September. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Based on media reports, you might think the ocean is basically dead from pollution. But rumors of the ocean's demise are greatly exaggerated. Recently, a colleague from Florida received an email from a Christian mom: My son Christopher, 11, used to be super interested in SCUBA diving. But this morning he revealed that he thinks there's no point because the oceans are full of trash and there's nothing beautiful to see anymore. So, my colleague, who loves to SCUBA dive, sent underwater photos of sharks, fish, and coral reefs. Apparently, Christopher has changed his mind. There are real environmental problems we ought not minimize, but one of the mistakes of modern environmentalism is a relentless doom and gloom that treats humans as a parasite and disease. This attitude only discourages future generations from caring or, in this case, even looking. Humans were created to steward God's world. When we see what He's given us, the response tends to be gratitude and hope, not gloom and doom. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Research consistently shows that young people who wait until after the wedding have a better chance for a stable, fulfilling, happy marriage. They also do not have to worry about sexually transmitted diseases and unplanned pregnancies. Though this does not fit with contemporary assumptions about human beings, obedience to the Lord's loving plan always works best, and brings incalculable benefits into our lives. While we may or may not hear this kind of moral clarity in church, it's been quite a while since the government has admitted the negative consequences of unmarried sex, particularly for teenagers. However, a 2016 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated clearly that young people who are virgins register much higher in nearly all health-related behaviors than those who are sexually active. These behaviors included everything from using seat belts to avoiding drug abuse, eating a healthy diet, going to the doctor, exercising, and avoiding riding with a driver who's been drinking. In addition, one finding that the media did not mention at the time is that while sexually inactive teens are healthiest, sexually active homosexual and bisexual teens fared significantly worse than their sexually active heterosexual peers. At the time, the CDC conveyed the blockbuster conclusions of their report as drily and bureaucratically as possible: "Significant health disparities exist." A summary of the CDC study provided by Focus on the Family clarified just how significant these disparities are. First, smoking. The study found that sexually active heterosexual teens were 3,300% more likely to smoke tobacco products daily than their virgin counterparts. "Same-sex/bisexual-active" teens were 9,500% more likely to smoke daily than the virgins. Second, drug abuse. The study found that sexually active heterosexual teens were 500% more likely to have ever injected a non-prescription drug than the virgins, while a whopping 2,333% of the "same-sex/bisexual-active" teens were more likely than the virgins to have done so. Now, as Focus noted at the time, correlation is not causation. The research did not prove that abstinence causes other healthy habits. However, the very fact that the CDC noted a relationship between sexual behavior and other habits is more than a little significant. Though the CDC would never put it this way, the summary offered by Focus on the Family was clear and succinct: "The sexual choices and values our young people hold have real-life consequences far beyond sexuality itself." Parents who care about the health and well-being of their children should especially take note of this data and have confidence that they can make a difference for their child. Researcher Mark Regnerus highlighted in his book Forbidden Fruit that the intensity of teens' religious beliefs is more important when it comes to sexual activity than exactly what religious beliefs they claim. The first thing, then, for parents to care about is our kids' faith. A strong, informed, and vital relationship with Jesus will help them resist the kinds of temptation and peer pressure—sexual and otherwise—that assault them every day at school and online. In other words, worldview matters. The CDC report demonstrates there are consequences for a secular worldview that sees bodies as something we "own," something external to who we are, something we use (or abuse) depending on our desires, our will, or our "identity." The Christian worldview, in sharp contrast, teaches that our bodies are integral to who we are, both in how humans were created and in that Christ took on flesh to make all things new. The extent that we and our kids truly embrace this will determine how we treat our bodies and the bodies of others. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org This Breakpoint was revised from one originally published on December 9, 2016.

After a military junta seized power in 2021, the Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar has seen an escalation of violence, ethnic conflict, and religious persecution. With a long history of internal conflict, observers have long hoped for democratic reform and increased freedoms. That now seems more improbable than ever. The country's ruling junta is waging war against an opposition government consisting of multiple ethnic groups. Civilians are caught in the crossfire, and the religious—especially Christians—are convenient targets. Though the brutality of Myanmar's government is not restricted to only Christians, they have endured a heavy share of the violence. In the western state of Chin, the junta military has destroyed over 85 churches by arson, ground artillery, and even air strikes. Please pray for our brothers and sisters in Myanmar, that God would bring courage and swift and just resolution to this conflict. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org