Breakpoint

Handmaid's Tale author Margaret Atwood became a feminist icon for her dystopian novel in which women are enslaved for the purpose of childbearing. Her writing is both the basis for a hit Hulu series and the unofficial mascot of the #MeToo movement. Recently, Atwood retweeted an op-ed criticizing the use of phrases like "pregnant person" instead of "woman." "Why can't we say 'woman' anymore?" the article's author asked. And the backlash to Atwood's retweet was swift and vicious. Opinion pieces in USA Today and the Independent called her everything from "misguided" to "transphobic." She was compared with Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling, who has consistently rejected the trans narrative, and each of these onetime progressive heroines are now labeled a "TERF," or "trans-exclusionary radical feminist." This conflict between the "F" and the "T" in the acronym is real. The feminism of Rowling and Atwood assumes that women are real and are oppressed by men. But those in the camp of T claim that "woman" is a self-identifying construct, which men can fairly appropriate. So what's coming in this narrative? Will feminism eventually be edited to exclude women?

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis described faith as "the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods." His is a crucial observation for a world that often pits reason against faith. Lewis understood that faith must always be guarded against the assaults of changing emotion. Lewis powerfully illustrated this point in The Silver Chair, the fourth book of The Chronicles of Narnia series. The story opens with Jill Pole, a typical English schoolgirl, being called suddenly (and even more strangely than anyone before her) into Narnia. Aslan, the Great Lion, gives her the task of rescuing Prince Rilian, son of Caspian, who had been missing for ten years. To help her, Aslan gives Jill signs to recite and remember, along with this dire warning: "Here on the mountain, the air is clear … as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind." Jill learns quickly just how true his warning is. Eventually, having left the surface of Narnia and descended to the depths of the underworld, she, Eustace Scrubb, and Puddleglum the Marshwiggle find Narnia's lost prince. He's so deeply enchanted by the Witch's dark magic that he can no longer tell madness from reality, truth from lies. It's only in the full grasp of his "madness," which actually turns out to be his moments of lucidity, that the prince unknowingly invokes the final sign given to Jill: he calls on the name of Aslan. In that moment, Lewis masterfully portrays the fog of doubt and deception. Under the Witch's enchantment, it's not clear who is a friend and who is an enemy. In fact, the three adventurers feel sure that the prince will attack them the moment he is free, but as Puddleglum reminds them in a moment of powerful courage, they've sworn to obey the words of Aslan. Only that better commitment, which might be called the right ordering of their loves, sees them through. They cut Rilian loose and break the Silver Chair, destroying the power of the Witch's curse. Lewis, of course, knew what it was to struggle with doubt. "Now that I am a Christian," he wrote, 'I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist, I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable." That's why faith mattered to Lewis: it grounds us in reality, even in the face of danger or uncertainty. Today, a generation of young people are debilitated by feelings of meaninglessness, doubt, and depression. They consistently hear that their feelings are their best and highest guide; they're encouraged to look inside and follow their hearts. Aslan's advice is better: "Remember the signs." In other words, only by looking to fixed, sure reference points outside of ourselves, can we orient and know the way forward. When the Witch returns to the cave, attempting to deceive Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum again, she offers us a dialogue that could substitute for modern textbooks on epistemology. "What is the sun?" the Witch asks the children, who have been underground for so long, all they have is a vague memory of things like Aslan, the sun, and the overworld. "It's like a lamp," one offers. But the Witch laughs this off. "Your sun is a dream, and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp." In other words, "the lamp is the real thing; the sun is [just] a children's story." Materialism offers the same argument. Because the idea of God helped us survive, goes the argument, people came to believe in him as real. But all we're doing is taking concrete things around us and inventing fairy stories about their origins. Just as the sun can be forgotten in a subterranean kingdom, Christians can sometimes feel as if there is no immediate proof of God's existence. GK Chesterton addressed this default appeal to materialism. "As an explanation of the world, [it] has a sort of insane simplicity… we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out." Materialism's explanation for love, goodness, evil, and personhood is comprehensive, but ultimately guts these things of any real substance. Likewise, in The Silver Chair, the sun, Narnia, and Aslan are real: in fact, they're the most real things of all. It's the Witch's kingdom that is the shallow copy. In the end, only Puddleglum the Marshwiggle can hold on to the truth, which leads him to stomp out the fire and break the Witch's spell for good. The solution to doubt is, then, according to Lewis, faith. Not blind belief, but a commitment informed by reason, goodness, and imagination. What God has told us in the light of day and which we then know to be true, we should not doubt in the middle of our darkest night. The only way forward is to, in the words of Aslan, "Remember the signs!"

Last week, Guatemala became the latest nation to sign the Geneva Consensus Declaration, the 35th nation to proclaim that human rights extend to unborn children. The declaration rebuffs today's Western imperialism: exporting abortion in the name of so-called "women's rights." When nations like Guatemala sign the Geneva Consensus Declaration, they're committing to fight pressure from the U.S. and other wealthy Western nations pushing them to legalize and publicly fund abortion. The Geneva Consensus Declaration was created by U.S. officials in the Trump administration. It came with little media fanfare and the day President Biden took office, his administration disavowed it and scrubbed it from the Health & Human Services website. Weeks later, the Biden administration announced it would launch new initiatives pressuring the global community to call abortion a "human right." The Geneva Consensus Declaration is worth celebrating, not only because it will protect women and babies, but because it poses a real threat to the ideological colonialism attempted by Western nations like the U.S. If it didn't threaten this ideology, the President wouldn't be nearly so concerned.

"The Big Quit." is not just a shift in the employment of millions, it's an expression of our culture-wide search for purpose. According to The Washington Post, "a record 4.3 million people — about 2.9 percent of the nation's workforce — quit [their jobs] in August." And, Gallup polling suggests that nearly half of working Americans are actively considering finding a new job. What's driving this trend away from work? It seems to be a perfect storm with many factors. Clearly, the pandemic has reshuffled priorities across society. Back in April, Forbes magazine's Keir Weimer suggested,"How we work has changed forever." A bit of hyperbole perhaps, but he's touching on something obvious and important. More than half of respondents from one survey said they would trade compensation for workplace flexibility. Having worked from home throughout the last year, they are hesitant to give up the time with friends and family, the luxury of not commuting, and a more home-centered vocational life. At the same time, working in certain industries is more difficult. For example, in the food industry, there are a "staggering 1.2 million jobs unfilled… right when customers are crushing through the doors, ready to eat, drink and finally socialize." Many point to the increased hours required, the unemployment benefits which exceed even increased compensation, and the stress of maintaining COVID-related policies in the workplace. And as more employees leave this industry, remaining workers with their hands even more full. Even so, the biggest reason for workers leaving work could be because they can. Between government stimulus policies, rising home values, and money saved during COVID, many Americans are simply, to borrow words from David Leonhart of the New York Times, "flush with cash." This is exactly the opportunity they've been waiting for to make a change. Still, as important as the economic factors are, they do not tell the whole story. As more than a few observers have pointed out, "the Great Resignation" isn't just a search for a better job. What we are witnessing is part of our culture's search for deeper meaning. Studies suggest that rising rates of "burnout," such as exhaustion, stress, and overall dissatisfaction across workplace sectors, are leading workers to quit. Columnist Whizy Kim of Refinery29 puts it this way: "[We] want to believe that our jobs can not only provide financial stability, but also emotional and spiritual nourishment... In a time of increasing secularism, work remains our steadfast religion. Burnout hits when our work fails to live up to expectations of it." Surveys show that Americans work more hours than any other industrialized nation. That becomes an incredibly important factor when work is not seen as meaningful, i.e., not part of something bigger than ourselves. In certain extreme cases, work takes the place of God. We look to it as the source to fill our emotional, vocational, and relational needs. That's unsustainable. To the extent that the so-called "Great Resignation" is a cultural reset, it can be a good thing. On the other hand, it will not be unless it is a reset of more than work hours, policies, and minimum wage. It has to be a reset of our understanding of what work is for, something that would require rethinking what humans are for. Any search for a perfect, all-fulfilling job will be fruitless. Rather than rethink their search, some are opting out of work altogether. This is a mistake, not just because savings eventually run out and bills inevitably pile up, but because we were created, in part, for work. Work existed before the fall, and is therefore inherently connected with our worship and dignity as image-bearers. To be clear, work is not our full identity, but it is inseparable from who we were created to be. Even knowing this can help eliminate the stress of where to work; it's easier to make rational choices when one's entire sense of self doesn't hang in the balance. And yet, because our work is one way that we worship God, it's meaningful even when mundane. It's worthy of our highest efforts when, in mirroring our Creator, we bring order out of chaos, provide for our fellow creatures, and cultivate His creation. Especially in this cultural moment, how Christians work is part of our witness. Christians can demonstrate God's goodness by the joy and vibrancy we bring to our vocation. We can show His love, concern, and provision for people by how we manage people in love and service. We can dignify God's design for human beings in how we work and in how we rest. All told, it could be that "The Big Quit" is, for Christians, an even bigger opportunity to begin.

John and Shane answer a listener who asks how we get past the erroneous "new" definition of racism (prejudice + power), and address old racism (prejudice based on pigmentation), when anti-racism and CRT doesn't allow "whites" to participate to the discussion? The pair also discusses how the unity and differences in the definitions of a Christian and biblical worldview before answering a challenge to population control in impoverished or resource-scarce countries.

In 2019, Templeton Prize winner Marco Gleiser made waves when he said that "atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method." In his view, atheism is a "categorical statement of belief," and doesn't depend on evidence as much as assumptions. This, of course, clashes with claims of the so-called "New Atheism," that science has officially debunked God as an explanation for the universe. Gleiser is an agnostic, and thinks scientists shouldn't close off the possibility of God. This accomplished scientist is saying something very important: atheism is not science's default position. On the other hand, it's important to note that science is not completely silent on the God question either, which is why generations of scientists have been drawn to a belief in the Creator precisely because of what they noticed in the universe they were observing. To put it another way, atheism isn't inconsistent with the scientific method just because it's a "categorial belief," but because it denies the order, complexity, and intentionality that point to God-centered conclusions.

As the "Big Quit" happens across America, the Christian vision of work could be more relevant and impactful than ever. Which, as history attests, is saying quite a lot. Physical labor was devalued in the ancient world. The exception, in classical Greece and the early days of the Roman Republic, was farming, which was considered the proper pursuit of citizens. All other labor was viewed as demeaning. In the later days of the Republic, as plantation agriculture replaced small farms, the work of farming was also seen as demeaning and relegated to slaves. By the time of the Roman Empire, all physical labor was only thought proper for slaves and lower classes. Though the foundation of the empire's wealth, the upper classes believed that production was beneath them. Their attention, or so they thought, belonged in the more "refined" areas of life, such as the arts and philosophy. Of course, the biblical view of work is completely different. Scripture frames work as a good thing, an essential part of what it means to be human. Because God created us to work, at least in part, it's inherently connected to our worship and dignity. Put differently, work is not the result of the fall. It was, however, tainted by Adam's sin. God's created purposes for humanity, to fill and form His world through work, would now feature pain and frustration. Aspects of human work were twisted from dignity to drudgery. Human efforts to cultivate the earth, designed by God to be part of the joy of imaging Him, became sources of frustration, pain, sweat, and sorrow. Because of the uniqueness of the Biblical framework, even the early Christians approached work with a very different view than their pagan neighbors did. They thought of work as good but marred by sin. So, for example, in monastic communities, monks were expected to do physical labor, if for no other reason than to grow their food. In his Rule for Monastic Life, St. Benedict of Nursia (480-547) insisted that monks should work both to fulfill the biblical mandate that God gave Adam, and to encourage humility in a world that thought of work as demeaning. Within a full understanding of the Biblical story, from Creation to New Creation, Christians came to understand the Gospel as Christ redeeming us of sin as well as all of its effects. In addition to forgiveness of sin and security of eternity, salvation also included the redemption of anything infected by sin. This included work, which led Christians to attempt to restore work away from "toil" and back to the kind of meaningful labor God intended. So, in the middle ages, many monasteries became centers of technological innovation, focused on making work more significant. A prime example is the waterwheel. Although the Romans knew about waterwheels, they rarely made use of them. After all, why invest in an expensive machine when you have unlimited slave labor? The monks had a different view of human value and the value of work which inspired them to develop ways of using the waterwheel to mechanize production. Initially, waterwheels were likely used for grinding grain. This required converting the vertical rotation of the wheel into horizontal rotation for the millstones, which the monks accomplished through a system of wooden gears and wheels. Later, the waterwheel was adapted for a wide range of other applications including powering bellows in forges, operating trip hammers in smithies, sawing lumber, and fulling cloth. Soon, even secular communities began to invest in building mills. While some might say secular communities adopted water wheels for economic impact, the economy in Rome was very specialized. Therefore, the Romans did not deploy waterwheels. What made communities adopt these and other technologies was likely the influence of the Christian idea of work, as it moved out from the monasteries to penetrate and shape the culture. Many more inventions were developed during the Roman and Middle Ages, stimulating economic activity and making work more efficient and meaningful. These developments were inspired by the idea that Jesus' work in redemption meant restoration was possible in all areas of life, including reversing the curse of the Garden. Though other countries had innovative technologies, some far more advanced than the West, the West's use and employment of technology was unique. According to Indian philosopher Vishal Mangalwadi, the West used technologies to make the work of the common person easier and to aid in production, rather than to cater to the elites. In our current cultural moment, many see work as frustrating, unrewarding, an dnot worth it (that is, as toil). So, in our cultural moment, Christians have an incredible, better vision of work to offer the larger world. We've also got a history to tell, of how a vision of human dignity and innovation became a blessing across economic and class lines. Just as in the past, the Christian view can move our imaginations about work beyond drudgery, to a renewed

Security guards and local police were at a loss about how to deal with the gang violence that was rampant in a Shreveport school, where detention and even arrests weren't enough to curb the violence. So a group of dads stepped up, committing to being present at the school every day. Now there hasn't been a fight in over a month, andow kids say they love going to school. They call themselves "Dads on Duty," replete with sweatpants, gas station coffee, and dad jokes worth rolling your eyes at. They fist bump students in hallways, providing a fathering gauntlet that is deterring fights and decreasing gang activity. "Not everybody has a father figure at home – or a male, period, in their life," one of the dads told CBS News. Clearly, this crisis in Shreveport required more than good intentions. It required fathers, because God created dads to do just this kind of thing. I love how these dads took stock of the cultural moment and acted on four simple questions: What good can we celebrate, what is missing that we can offer, what is broken that we can fix, and what evil needs to be opposed?

Among the prominent buzzwords in Christian social media are variations of the word "deconstruction." The word has been used to describe the deconversions of Kevin Max (from DC Talk) and Joshua Harris (of I Kissed Dating Goodbye fame), the soul searching of Derek Webb, and the theological revisionings of Jen Hatmaker and Rob Bell. When used descriptively, it helpfully describes something that has become a common feature of evangelical celebrity-ism. Increasingly, however, the term "deconstruction" is being used prescriptively: recommended to believers, especially those questioning what they've grown up with, as the courageous thing to do. This recommendation lands somewhere between unhelpful and dangerous. It's one thing to describe doubting, questioning and, ultimately, shifting faith commitments as "deconstruction." It's another to prescribe it as the means of coming to terms with the unpopular truth claims of Christianity or the baggage of a Christian upbringing. Simply put, the word "deconstruction" itself carries too much worldview baggage to be helpful. To be clear, Scripture (especially the Psalms) not only creates plenty of space for doubting and questioning, but makes it clear that God meets us in our questions and doubts. If all that is meant by deconstruction is asking tough questions about God or faith, that's a normal part of the Christian life and need not mean deconversion. Or, if it is used to refer to untangling politics or other elements of American culture that have been corruptively bundled with Christian identity, deconstruction may simply mean discernment. At the same time, deconstruction is not the best term for either of these contexts, especially given the much better words available. Conversion, reform, and renewal are words provided in Scripture and church history to keep God's people squarely within a Christian vision of truth: that truth is revealed, not constructed, and objective, not subjective. More importantly, because God takes on Himself the burden of making truth known (and does not author confusion), real knowledge about God and self is possible. At the risk of committing an etymological fallacy, "deconstruction" carries too much of the philosophical baggage of postmodernism, particularly the denial that truth can truly be known. It carries the assumption of permanent doubt, and the culture-wide skepticism of authority. That's why, when applied to Christian faith, so much deconstruction has to do with severing the links between the Church and Jesus, Christianity and Jesus, moral teaching and Jesus, and (especially) the Bible and Jesus… as if the Church isn't His Bride, Christianity isn't His worldview, morality isn't His teaching, and the Bible isn't His Word. That's why, when applied to Christian faith, so often deconstruction means taking apart the faith and keeping only the palatable (like Jesus' love and compassion), while discarding the difficult (like sin and penal substitutionary atonement). Deconstructing faith rarely ends at rejecting corruption or jettisoning historical baggage, and instead culminates in the integration of what is culturally acceptable into an entirely new faith. Dropped along the way are essential doctrines of Christianity (like the deity and exclusivity of Christ or the authority of His Word), or ethics (especially those having to do with sexuality and abortion). Shaped as it is by a commitment to skepticism, "deconstruction" presumes that truth is an illusion and knowledge is impossible. On the other hand, words like "reform" and "renewal" point us back to things once held but now lost. We remember what our memory lost, retake what we once held, revisit places we've been before. Reform and renewal assume that faith and knowledge are rooted in something outside of ourselves. The New Testament is full of appeals by the Apostles to recover the truth once believed and the faith once loved. The Old Testament prophets continually called for people to restore the right worship and ethics they'd received at Sinai. "De-" words, on the other hand, are very different from "re-" words. Deconstruction is about tearing down, never building up; it's about rejecting, not returning; moving away from, not towards anything or Anyone. Francis Schaeffer, among others, offered and embodied a better way in his own life and ministry. He took seriously the questions of those disillusioned and skeptical, and wrestled deeply with the challenges to Christian faith that were contemporary to his time and place. Along the way, he found that it was possible to give good and sufficient reasons for the Christian worldview. He offered "honest answers to honest questions," guiding those with doubts and wounds toward Christ: the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The question of whether or not we live in a world in which it is possible to truly know Truth and its Author makes all the difference for those struggling through existential crises. Describing deconstruction is, tragically,

There's something poetic about sending the famous Captain Kirk from Star Trek to space, for real, and his emotional response after touching back down was priceless. As he told Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, "I hope I never recover from this. I hope I can maintain what I feel now… I don't want to lose it." Here's a 90-year-old in childlike wonder, experiencing that almost spiritual part of space travel reflected by many astronauts throughout history. Often called the "overview effect," space tends to raise deep longings for significance. Pioneers of travel by plane probably thought that it could never bore anyone. But, it does, like anything that becomes normal. Maybe it's because the only thing that can permanently ground our sense of wonder is God Himself, who put eternity in human hearts and placed us in an incredibly created universe that ultimately points us to Himself. The only thing BIG enough to sustain our wonder.

Whenever I struggle to understand C.S. Lewis's nonfiction work, I find it helpful to go to Narnia. For example, so many of the concepts Lewis introduced in Mere Christianity are found in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Throughout each of the Narnia books, Aslan, the Pevensie children, and other characters embody many of the ideas he explored in his nonfiction. Another example is The Abolition of Man, a book critically important for our cultural moment. In the book's opening essay, "Men without Chests," Lewis thoroughly critiques modern education which, Lewis says, fills students' heads with knowledge and their bellies with passion, but does nothing to cultivate the chest. This idea from Lewis is based on something Aristotle taught, that the head is the seat of human reason and the belly is the seat of passion. Good citizens, Aristotle believed, are those whose heads govern their bellies. When someone is ruled by their passions, they are unstable. Aristotle thought that humans could govern their bellies through the formation of good habits. There's certainly a lot of truth to that. But anyone who has ever been in a real conflict between head and gut knows that, typically, the gut wins. Even more, our reason becomes merely instrumental to justify whatever it is we want. My friend Michael Miller, a senior fellow at the Acton Institute, once described the belly as an 800-pound gorilla constantly demanding, "Feed me, feed me, I want. I want, feed me, feed me." The head, on the other hand, is more like an 80-pound professor with a bowtie. Who's going to win the conflict between a massive gorilla and a tiny professor? The gorilla…every time. This is what C.S. Lewis was critiquing in his essay "Men Without Chests." A person will only function well if they are bolstered by a strong "chest," or virtue. Only a well-formed moral will, which cares for virtuous things, can overrule and ultimately govern the belly. For a story version of this opening essay of The Abolition of Man, see The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. This book has one of the best opening lines: "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." Eustace is the boy without a chest, as readers soon discover. He's a spoiled brat; as Lewis goes on to describe, he attended schools that filled his head with knowledge and his belly with passion, but did nothing to cultivate his chest. A thematic undercurrent in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is how Eustace developed a chest. Spoiler alert: it had a lot to do with his relationship with Reepicheep, one of Narnia's smallest characters. The mouse, a perennial favorite character in all of Narnia, had much moral courage. He had, to borrow Lewis' phrase, a chest. "Men Without Chests" is just one reason that The Abolition of Man is such an important book for understanding our current cultural moment. Lewis's analysis of culture in this book is more relevant now than ever. It is a must-read for any and every Christian. Recently, Dr. Michael Ward, one of the foremost C.S. Lewis scholars on the planet, a researcher from the University of Oxford, and a visiting professor at Houston Baptist University, has written a companion guide to the Abolition of Man. The guide is called After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man. In this book, Dr. Ward takes readers on a chapter by chapter, essay by essay journey through the most important ideas in The Abolition of Man. Because the analysis in this book is so critical to understanding our cultural moment, the Colson Center will send a copy of both The Abolition of Man and After Humanity: A Guide to the Abolition of Man as our thank you for a gift of any amount to the Colson Center this month. In fact, anyone who gives this month will also be able to join an exclusive set of video introductions from Dr. Ward and a live webinar to discuss the key concepts in the book. This special opportunity to study one of Lewis's most important books, guided by one of the world's top Lewis scholars, is only for friends of the Colson Center. Visit www.breakpoint.org/october to give a gift to the Colson Center and get your copies, along with access to the live webinar and prerecorded introductory videos.

Maria is joined on BreakPoint This Week by Edward Whelan, a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and holds EPPC's Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies. The two discuss the oral arguments that started in the Supreme Court this month. Ed provides an overview of the court, why Christians should care, and explains some of the finer points of the inner-workings on the Court. He also discusses the most direct challenge to Roe v. Wade that we've seen reach the court, while also sharing some structure to how the court may handle a second amendment case, potential vaccine mandates, and other cases that are being presented.

Is it Narnia? Of course it isn't. But it's good. C. S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man has been called his most difficult work. It's a short but dense argument about how modern education and culture are removing our capacity for virtue and destroying what makes us human. "Abolition" is a must-read—especially in our cultural moment. And a new companion volume by Michael Ward called After Humanity can help you understand Lewis' message and its background. For instance, did you know that Lewis almost died in the trenches of World War I when he got hit with shrapnel? Ward notes how this near-death experience forever shaped the way Lewis thought about morality. And it left him with a haunting question: "Is it noble to die for your country?" Many in his day claimed moral judgments were just feelings. But Lewis knew that without morality, human beings act less than human. Now more than ever, it's a message we need to hear. Visit breakpoint.org and we'll tell you how you can get a copy of Michael Ward's outstanding new book, After Humanity.

After more than 35 years of various versions of what has come to be called "the one-child policy," which experts estimate cost the country between 200 and 400 million lives, China is attempting an about-face. In 2015, the government officially ended the one-child policy and allowed couples to have up to two children in some circumstances. In May of this year, that number was increased to three. Now, as of September, Chinese leaders have officially started discouraging "non-medical" abortions. Make no mistake: abortion is wrong. Preborn lives are human lives - and they're always worth protecting. However, that's not why China cares or is changing its policy. Instead, this seems to be about China's looming demographic crisis. The 2020 census revealed that China's fertility rate is the lowest since they started recording it in the 1950s. An aging population means fewer workers and more retirees. Decades of sex-selective abortions mean China is facing a disproportionate shortage of young women. The question is whether the country has entered an irreversible population decline. It's a serious crisis - but it's also one that the Chinese Communist Party created. In the late 1970s, reacting to fears of overpopulation and its impact on the state-planned economy, China went to extreme - often Orwellian - lengths to limit the number of children each woman could have. Now Chinese officials need to increase the fertility rate by any means necessary, or face the real possibility of economic disaster. This kind of policy whiplash creates its own cruel ironies. One is that a state which has forced hundreds of millions of abortions is now advising women about its negative health impacts. Chinese state media describes abortion as "very harmful" and argues it could cause "serious psychological disorders" for unmarried women. Given how recently the state was forcing Chinese women into abortions, it's hard to feel like the state's concern is genuine. After all, there's a human cost to these policies. One Chinese mother told the story of having to choose between aborting her second child or paying a 200,000 yuan fine - $31,250 in US dollars. She and her husband couldn't raise the money, and their preborn child was aborted. Two months later, Beijing rescinded the 0ne- child Policy. Their baby would have been born the following Spring. The ironies extend to China's Uyghur Muslims. A core element of China's genocide of this ethnic group is the practices of forced abortion and sterilization. Even as China seeks to boost fertility in some regions, there is little hope that forced abortions among Uyghur Muslim women will be stopped. The Chinese vision of a disposable population runs deep. In 1957, Chinese dictator Mao Zedong was asked whether he feared a nuclear attack on his country. "What if they killed 300 million of us?" he replied. "We would still have many people left." Chairman Mao's answer to that question may be different today, but the worldview underlying his answer wouldn't be. One commentator on Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter, put it this way: "The female body has become a tool. When (the state) wants you to bear a child, you must do it at all cost. When (the state) doesn't want it, you're not allowed to give birth even at the risk of death." It's not just the female body that's become a tool in China, it's every single person who's reduced to a tool of the state. Within such a system, there is neither respect for human life nor for the autonomy of Chinese women. In June, my colleague Roberto Rivera and I wondered if forced procreation might be China's logical next step. That doesn't seem nearly as far-fetched now as it did then. The bottom line is that no matter what the Chinese Communist Party does, whatever policies they enact, people are people. They aren't a means to an end that is the state; they are the end, and the state should be thought of as the means. That goes for unborn children, that goes for mothers, that goes for everyone. Human lives should not be contingent on the whims of the state, either to end them or to "spare" them. It is the purpose of a truly just government to protect people's God-given rights. America's founders, for all their flaws, enshrined this principle into law. They believed that people weren't products of the state but were endowed with "inalienable rights" by their Creator, rights that pre-existed the state. Of course, that should make Westerners ask whether we're living up to that belief. China might be sacrificing - or saving - preborn children for the good of the state, but we often do the same thing on the altar of individual preference. Nevertheless, China's attempt to restrict abortion does save lives, even if for all the wrong reasons. A worldview that elevates the state's role at all costs will inevitably bulldoze sound economic principles, the sanctity of life, and the fundamental rights of people again and again. The pendulum may swing, but the abuses will continue.

Admiral Rachel Levine, a man who identifies as a transgender woman, was commissioned into the U.S. Public Health Service's Commissioned Corps. Officials called Levine's promotion "historic" because, they assured everyone, Levine was the first female four-star admiral in the Commissioned Corps. When something like this is announced the way it was - surrounded by fanfare and reporters constantly reminding us that this is a woman - it's not cynical to wonder whether the job was earned by qualification or just a PR campaign. But it is unsettling to consider that the administration might promote someone more for the photo op than their abilities. And it's frankly condescending to the Admiral, though he didn't seem to see it that way. This feels a lot less like a culture that's soberly "following the science" and a lot more like a culture heading "through the looking glass."

Today is what some call "the professional sports equinox," the one night of the year where the NBA, NHL, MLB, and the NFL all have games. For sports fans, it's like Christmas, Easter, Labor Day, and the Fourth of July all rolled into one. And, because of the new culture-wide push for sports gambling, Friday morning may bring quite the hangover. Between the non-stop commercials for DraftKings and FanDuel, and news segments on ESPN like Scott Van Pelt's "Winners" (where the SportsCenter host not only discusses who he thinks will win but also what's known as "the points spread"), we've clearly entered a new era in athletics. Sports gambling is now a national pastime that rivals the games themselves. Betting on sports is, of course, nothing new, but the story of its growth and acceptance is a perfect example of how culture changes. More than two dozen states have legalized sports betting in recent years, and more are lining up. What once was relegated to physical establishments in seedier parts of town is now available, via technology, on everyone's personal screens. No one has to place a bet, but the more it's normalized, the more people will. The growth of sports betting has already changed how we talk about sports. Just a few years ago, ESPN prohibited any mention of gambling on any of its shows. Now, entire segments are devoted to it, and no one is mad at Pete Rose anymore. It's changing the way we watch sports, too. A survey in 2018 found that 43 percent of all men ages 25 to 34 who watch sports on TV place at least one bet every week. That number is probably higher now since 2020 was a record-breaking year for sports betting. And online, gamblers can quickly bet on almost any aspect of the game, from final scores to individual plays to how long the National Anthem will last at the Super Bowl. Even before it was made digitally omnipresent, sports gambling proved damaging to the integrity of sports. A few years ago, 15 percent of professional tennis players reported knowledge of tennis matches being fixed. Earlier this month, an investigation into the 2016 summer Olympics found that nearly a dozen boxing matches had been fixed during the games. In 2007, a now-infamous NBA referee went to prison after the FBI found him deliberately influencing the outcomes of games on which he, a compulsive gambler, had placed bets. Now that so much of our culture is saturated by sports gambling, it's not difficult to imagine more players, more coaches, and more referees altering their performance to change outcomes, if only ever-so-slightly. To be clear, though sports betting will likely ruin plenty of bank accounts, lives, and locker rooms, it isn't significant enough to ruin America. It is, however, an expression of cultural undercurrents that can and will -- in particular, our growing inability to delay gratification in order to live for the future. Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, among others, distinguished between those societies that were sensate, or living for the immediate gratification of the senses, and those that were ideational, those that lived for higher ideals. Ideational societies had a future. Sensate societies would eventually exhaust themselves in the constant pursuit of immediate gratification. Sports betting companies entice with the constant promise of a low-quality dopamine rush, whether from taking a financial risk or securing an elusive financial win. The possibility of the rush is available on every play. You don't have to wait three hours to see which team wins, because you can be invested in every individual play. And, all of this is happening within a culture largely devoid of big ideas about the meaning or purpose of life. What truths are there anymore that we collectively find to be "self-evident," other than our living from impulse and desire? What is there to point us to a narrative bigger than the immediate moment? Instead, the lie implied and perpetuated as sports gambling expands is that those who bet on sports could win big. But, of course, gambling empires aren't built on winners. You know the old adage: "The house always wins"? The internet hasn't changed that. Ubiquitous sports betting only complicates already dangerous dilemmas of modern society like smartphone addictions and rampant consumerism. Together, they all reflect that we are a culture trapped in the moment, unwilling and unable to delay gratification. This isn't just a recipe for more gambling addiction, it's a recipe for normalizing prolonged adolescence and self-indulgence, and that's not a recipe for a sustainable future.

John and Shane answer a concerned mother's question on how to engage her children who are questioning their faith. She notes that they have all sought counseling, specifically asking John for clarity on the practice of Cognitive Behavior Therapy. John and Shane then field two questions regarding Christians in the public square. Specifically, one listener asks if Christian men should pull back from their church involvement to be more involved in local politics. Another listener asks how Christians should respond to mandates being issued from the government.

John and Shane answer a concerned mother's question on how to engage her children who are questioning their faith. She notes that they have all sought counseling, specifically asking John for clarity on the practice of Cognitive Behavior Therapy. John and Shane then field two questions regarding Christians in the public square. Specifically, one listener asks if Christian men should pull back from their church involvement to be more involved in local politics. Another listener asks how Christians should respond to mandates being issued from the government.

Last Sunday, kidnappers abducted 17 Christian missionaries, including five children, in Haiti. The American missionaries are part of a Mennonite group called Christian Aid Ministries, which has been working in Haiti for years. This time, they were building an orphanage in a town east of Port-au-Prince. Haiti has been ensnared in near-total political and social chaos for decades, as the country's people suffer under inept and corrupt governments, crushing poverty, natural disasters, and increasingly brazen and violent gangs. When news breaks of a shocking abduction like this, it prompts an honest question: why would a group of Mennonite missionaries from rural Ohio - why would anyone - keep going back to a place like Haiti? There's only one answer compelling enough to make sense: because Jesus rose from the dead, the Gospel is real, and Christ has called us to be His hands and feet to even the most vulnerable. Please join us in praying for the safe return of these courageous brothers and sisters, and for the suffering people of Haiti.

Over the next five years, the seven installments of C.S. Lewis's "The Chronicles of Narnia" will turn seventy. Generations of children have found delight in stepping through the wardrobe door to this mythical world, filled with magic, meaning, and a whole cast of fantastic characters. Still, in the end, the appeal of the Chronicles comes back to a single character. Aslan, the Great Lion, who calls the children into Narnia, plays the central role in each adventure. It's not exactly correct to call Aslan an "allegory" of Jesus, since Lewis disliked allegory. He thought it was poor writing, in fact. Lewis might prefer that we instead think of Aslan as Christ transposed into a Narnian key, a Creator and Lord fit for a world primarily inhabited by talking animals. Throughout The Chronicles, Aslan often emphasizes that he really is a lion and not an illusion or symbol. "Touch me," he tells one character in The Horse and His Boy. "Smell me. Here are my paws, here is my tail, these are my whiskers. I am a true Beast." True to Lewis' genius and his love of myth, Aslan's purpose in calling children from our world into Narnia is the same as Lewis' purpose in writing the Chronicles. Through the Great Lion, Lewis gives us a glimpse of the character of the Savior and King he called "myth become fact," and whom Scripture calls "the Lion of Judah." Two moments in the Narnia series are particular favorites of my colleague Shane Morris, and illustrate Aslan's mission with particular clarity. One takes place during the third Chronicle (the fifth in publication order), The Horse and His Boy. Shasta, the main character, has ridden through the night and is lost in the mountains. Having grown up in a foreign country and just returned to Narnia, he doesn't realize he is royalty. After running and riding for his life for so long, he's tired and discouraged, and concludes that he must be the unluckiest boy alive. Suddenly, a great Voice confronts him out of the darkness, and asks to know his sorrows. A very frightened Shasta, not knowing what else to do, relays how he and his companions fled from their captors across the desert, how fear and danger have stalked them at every turn, and how he's been threatened by at least four lions. "There was only one lion," replies the Voice. "But he was swift of foot." Aslan reveals that he was the lion, and that his intervention at these crucial moments saved the boy's life, as well as the lives of his fellow travelers and his native kingdom. What Shasta saw as bad luck was Aslan's providential paw guiding him through danger toward his rightful throne, and even introducing him to his future wife. The second scene takes place at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace have just come to the edge of the world after months at sea. The rest of the characters have gone home or paddled into Aslan's Country, and the three children are left alone. They encounter Aslan on a grassy shore, who's taken the form of a lamb and invites them to breakfast. There, he tells the children that it's time for them to go home and, for Edmund and Lucy, there will be no returning to Narnia. They don't take the news well. "It isn't Narnia, you know," cries Lucy. "It's you. We shan't meet you there. And how are we to live, never meeting you?" "But you shall meet me, dear one," Aslan replies. "But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there." Like Jesus revealing Himself to His disciples at the breaking of bread, here Lewis has Aslan shed the disguise to allow readers to fully recognize him. When Aslan reveals his role in Shasta's story, it brings to mind how Jesus, on the road to Emmaus, revealed to His disciples everything concerning Himself in the Law and Prophets. It's no wonder that, like those disciples, many who have met Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia have also felt their hearts burning within them. Seventy years on, C.S. Lewis's stories deserve every bit of their status as classics, filled as they are with spiritual treasures for young and old alike. But the lion's share of the credit goes to Aslan. In him we meet a character too good to be just a story. And, like Lucy, we long to know his true name—not in spite of the mane and tail, but because of them.

"Remember the signs." In C. S. Lewis' Narnian chronicle "The Silver Chair," Aslan tasks Eustace and Jill with finding a lost prince. To guide them he gives them a list of instructions—or signs—for them to commit to memory. Their success depends on it. Lewis made all of his tales from Narnia, including this quest, an allegory about the Christian life. Christ-followers are to seek the lost as part of joining God's great story to restore all things. But we're useless in this task if we don't remember the guidance God gives us in His Word. This story from "The Silver Chair" should encourage us all to encourage our kids to memorize Scripture. But how about you? Colossians 3:16 talks about the Word of Christ dwelling in us richly. Well, is it? Is it more and more? As we learn from Jill Pole, it's not too late to remember the signs, and to obey them.

A few weeks ago, Gabriel Gipe, a high school AP Government teacher in Sacramento, was suspended for encouraging his students to take up far Left activism. When students complained about the Antifa flag he'd hung up in his classroom, he dismissed their concerns and suggested that only fascists would be bothered by it. He also offered extra credit to students who attended radical political rallies. And, in an ironic and a-historical twist, this avowed anti-fascist also posted a photo online of himself with a Communist "hammer and sickle" emblem tattooed across his chest. According to one report, he often used "stamps with images of Josef Stalin, Fidel Castro and Kim Jung Un" to grade papers, and a poster of Mao Zedong was hung on his classroom wall. Apparently, this wasn't just his way of being edgy or provocative. In a video published by Project Veritas, Mr. Gipe was recorded saying, "I have 180 days to turn them into revolutionaries." Local parents were understandably enraged that their child's teacher praised history's worst villains, but while calling out his flawed thinking, some of his critics missed something essential about education. One mother said,: "I'm all for freedom of speech. I'm not going to deny that, but when you are a teacher, your job is academics. You are not here for morals, values, political views—anything like that is not welcome in the school unless it's a private school." Of course, no parent should tolerate such a historically devastating worldview being foisted on students, but it is a mistake to think that education without "morals, values, (and) political views" is possible. Or, for that matter, even desirable. It's not. Stripping morals from education—or, more accurately, attempting to strip morals from education—is a dangerous idea with dangerous consequences. Chuck Colson repeatedly highlighted this, especially in light of the financial scandals of the late 1980s and early 2000s. He spoke often of "a crisis of character" and the "inescapable consequence of neglecting moral training." This is also the central focus of the essay "Men Without Chests," the opening essay in one of C.S. Lewis's most important books, The Abolition of Man. Lewis clearly saw that years of attempts to de-moralize education would not give us a world without vice, but a world without virtue. And, he closed, we would wonder how it could ever have happened in our enlightened age: In a sort of ghastly simplicity, we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful. Fast forward a few decades and here we are. When communism-loving and Critical-Race-Theory-advancing teachers work to indoctrinate children (even while denying it), they are simply stepping into a vacuum left long ago by those trying to make education amoral. They may be wrong to promote those particular values and moral framework, but they're right that education as inescapably an act of moral formation. S. Elliot reflected on this years ago in an essay about the purpose of education: If we see a new and mysterious machine, I think that the first question we ask is, 'What is that machine for?' … If we define education, we are led to ask, 'What is Man?' and if we define the purpose of education, we are committed to the question, 'What is Man for?' Every definition of the purpose of education, therefore, implies some concealed, or rather implicit philosophy or theology. Assuming that kids go to school only to acquire data is to assume that kids are mere computers made of flesh. With all due respect to this very concerned mother and Winnie the Pooh, education is about more than how to make "Twy-stymes" and "ABCs," or knowing where Brazil is. Here's how Neil Postman put it: Modern secular education is failing not because it doesn't teach who Ginger Rogers, Norman Mailer and a thousand other people are but because it has no moral, social, or intellectual center. The curriculum is not, in fact, a "course of study" at all but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects. It does not even put forward a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person, unless it is a person who possesses "skills." In other words, a person with no commitment and no point of view but with plenty of marketable skills. So, to summarize: Elliot taught us that a values-free education is impossible. Lewis predicted that the attempt at a values-free education would produce people not able to make moral decisions. Postman pointed out that education needs a moral center, or it's not an education at all. Educating for "skill acquisition" doesn't actually prepare students for life. And now, into the morals void, sundried progressive causes are promoting the ideologies that gave fascism to the world, in the name of being anti-fascists. We should've seen it coming. But, we didn't, and here we are, facing incredible chal

You may have heard that Eastern story about the six blind men who encounter an elephant. The first touches its side and says, "An elephant is like a wall." Another one touches the trunk and says, "No, an elephant is like a snake." The third touches its tusk and says, "An elephant is like a spear." Another one touches the leg and says, "An elephant is like a tree." Another one touches an ear. "No, an elephant," he says, "is like a fan." And then touching the tail, the sixth one says, "You're all wrong. An elephant is like a rope." And who was right? Everyone, we're told. Just like everyone is right in their own view about God. But in reality, none of the men were right about the elephant. And as Trevin Wax at the Gospel Coalition points out, the parable contradicts the very point it's trying to make, by assuming that the one telling the parable sees the whole elephant. This story is just another claim to be right and everyone else being wrong.

If you've followed Breakpoint over the last month you've heard me say more than once that I think The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis could be the most important book for our cultural moment. It's one of those remarkably prophetic works that is increasingly applicable to the cultural moment in which we live. When The Abolition of Man was written, Lewis was uncovering the ways the modern world was logically inconsistent: ideas planted were not bearing the fruit that many moderns hoped they would. I believe the same is true in this generation, as well. For that reason, I think it's important to understand the observations Lewis was making when he wrote The Abolition of Man. We are so excited to provide an opportunity to study Lewis' book in-depth. This month we want to send you a copy of The Abolition of Man, as well as a copy of the brand new book After Humanity: A Guide to C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, written by one of the world's top C. S. Lewis scholars, Dr. Michael Ward. Dr. Ward is a senior research fellow at Blackfriars Hall at the University of Oxford, and also a professor of Apologetics at Houston Baptist University, in Texas. He's authored several books on C. S. Lewis, but this is his first in-depth study guide. For a gift of any amount to the Colson Center this month, we'll send you a copy of both The Abolition of Man and Ward's guide, After Humanity. Earlier this week, Dr. Ward spoke with my colleague, Shane Morris, about the inconsistencies of modern culture and the similar realities Lewis observed. They talked about the sorts of ideas the world is planting in the cultural soil and what the harvest now looks like. Here's a segment of that conversation: However much we may wish to be surgeons, chopping up nature to suit our own desires, we must stop at some point. That is to say, we must stop before we chop ourselves up. And that's why, you know, you reach this position of logical incoherence. He (C.S. Lewis) talks about the famous case of the Irishman who discovered that a certain kind of stove would heat his house with only half the amount of fuel. And he concluded that if he got two stoves of the same kind, he could heat his house with no fuel at all. It's that kind of logical incoherence: ...because we have such a linear imagination, we think that if we keep taking the same series of steps over and onwards, into the broad, sunlit uplands of the future, that we can go on indefinitely. But there is one step which is incommensurate with all the previous steps. We begin to treat ourselves as raw material, mere nature to be chopped up to suit our own desires. Science is a good thing, but science pushed to dehumanizing extremes is obviously not a good thing; and likewise, seeing through things, penetrating the veil of falsity, seeing through propaganda, understanding false peace, false consciousness, all that kind of penetration is good. But you see through things in order to see something through them. You see through the window in order to see the garden. But if the garden was transparent, like the window, what would you see through the garden? The world will become invisible. But a world in which everything is invisible is a world where effectively you are all blind. That's why he [C.S. Lewis] finishes with that famously negative statement, "To see through all things is the same as not to see." In other words, humility is really the answer. We mustn't think that we can master ourselves in the same way that we might rightly choose to master almost everything else. To get a copy of Dr. Ward's After Humanity: A Guide to C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, as well as a copy of C.S. Lewis's classic book, The Abolition of Man, visit www.breakpoint.org/october. Also, Dr. Ward has graciously provided exclusive video introductions of each chapter of The Abolition of Man as well as a live webinar in November, which will be accessible to every person who gives to the Colson Center during the month of October. Join us in this study by making a donation of any amount to the Colson Center at www.breakpoint.org/october.

John and Maria reflect on Chuck Colson's legacy that endures at the Colson Center, and is also powerfully visible in Prison Fellowship and the Angel Tree ministry. Maria then asks John for clarity on the situation unfolding in Loudon County. There are allegations that the school board in Loudon County failed to act in responding to abuse by a student identifying as a transgender girl. To close, John unpacks the inner workings of the euthanasia movement through the story of a woman in Columbia who is battling ALS. Columbia recently provided provision for terminally ill people to receive euthanasia, but this woman's disease doesn't qualify her for the procedure. John also discusses the faithfulness of her grandmother and how aging and dying with dignity is more whole in a Christian worldview.

A little over forty years ago, Soviet dissident and literary giant Aleksander Solzhenitsyn delivered a thunderbolt of a commencement address at Harvard University. Survivor of the Soviet GULAG, a fierce opponent of communism, Solzhenitsyn stunned his elite audience as he took aim at the disastrous social and worldview trends happening in the West. He bemoaned that Western societies had given "destructive and irresponsible freedom . . . boundless space." By which he meant license, what Chuck Colson called freedom without virtue. Then he went after the Western appetite for "decadent art." Finally, he argued, no healthy society or culture lacks great statesmen. Solzhenitsyn was prophetic. But sad to say, the West has largely ignored his voice. Irresponsible freedom? Check. Decadence? Check. Now go through your mental checklist and see how many great statesmen or stateswomen you can name these days. Come to BreakPoint.org for more on Solzhenitsyn's stunning address, including a BreakPoint commentary.

The world is a better place because of what Jesus did in the life of Chuck Colson, the founder and namesake of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Though many in younger generations aren't as familiar with Chuck's Born Again story, his legacy is one we are proud of and committed to stewarding for the glory of God. Tomorrow, October 16, would have been Chuck Colson's 90th birthday. His legacy continues, not only in the ongoing work of the Colson Center, but also the continuation of Prison Fellowship, especially the Angel Tree ministry. Here's why that ministry is so important, direct from our founder, Chuck Colson: There are few things that thrill me more at Christmas time than Angel Tree! When I went to prison [in 1974], my greatest concern was not for myself, but for my family. I and other inmates anguished over ways to show our families we still loved them. That's why, when Prison Fellowship staffer and ex-bank-robber Mary Kay Beard began Angel Tree [in 1982], I knew immediately that we could reach those families who suffer so much at Christmas. Since that beginning, Angel Tree has brought the message of Christ's love to millions of prisoners' children through volunteers who deliver gifts to them on behalf of their incarcerated parents. Every year, Patty and I bring gifts to one or two of these children. For me, it just wouldn't seem like Christmas without Angel Tree. The same is true for a young man named Robert. At 10, Robert watched his dad handcuffed and driven away to prison. To keep the family afloat, Robert's mom packed up and moved them from their comfortable home in the country to a gang-ridden urban neighborhood. As she struggled to put bread on the table, she warned her children that Christmas might not look like much that first year without their dad. On Christmas morning, Robert woke up to find a bare room and his mother crying on the couch. He went over to her and wrapped his arms around her. He told her that he did not mind that they didn't have any gifts; that they were not all that important. But her tears were tears of joy. She told Robert to go look out on their front porch. There he saw gifts piled high, some with labels with his dad's name on them. They were Angel Tree gifts, given by volunteers from a local church. But Robert did not know that at the time. All he knew was that his dad loved him and remembered him. Robert and his family began attending the church that had been so generous. And when Robert's father was released from prison, he began attending the church as well. Over the next few years, Robert dabbled in gang activity and even dropped out of high school, but through it all, the church was there supporting his family and reminding him of Christ's love. Robert became a committed believer and eventually signed on as the youth pastor of that same church. And every year, he and his wife sign up to purchase gifts for Angel Tree children. Doesn't that give you a marvelous picture of what the Advent season is really all about? God entered into our darkness with light in the form of His Son, Jesus Christ. And that light, the Light of the world, changes us and enables us to spread the light to others. That was Chuck Colson, sharing about Angel Tree, a ministry dear to his heart. In remembrance of Chuck's 90th birthday tomorrow, would you consider participating in the ministry of Angel Tree? To learn more, please visit www.angeltree.org.

Last week, Olympic silver medalist Elinor Barker revealed she's expecting a baby and was, in fact, pregnant while cycling on the British women's team in Tokyo. Barker's happy announcement comes in the wake of an amicus brief signed by 500 female athletes, asking the Supreme Court to keep abortion legal because without it, they argue, women athletes wouldn't be able to reach their full potential. Barker joins a growing group of women with winning records who make the claims in the amicus brief seem, well, false. In announcing her pregnancy on social media, Barker thanked other athletes who are also moms. "Because of these women and many others," she wrote, "I didn't doubt the future of my career for one second." Whose testimony seems more compelling: 500 women claiming it can't be done, or a woman who's not only tried, but succeeded? The deeper question is what takes more courage: earning a silver medal in cycling while pregnant, or signing an amicus brief?

Remember the three weeks of lockdown in order to "flatten the curve?" A year-and-a-half later, after life put on hold— delayed graduations, conferences, wedding celebrations, and even funerals—coming out of this society-wide limbo has many feeling downright giddy. Writing recently in the New York Times, Soumya Karlamangla described how, when the pandemic rules began to loosen, she experienced "a small burst of joy." Every return to some old, familiar activity, from hugging people to getting haircuts to wandering the aisles of grocery stores, became "almost wondrous" to her. At least for a while... But then, she admits, the feelings began to fade. Now, Karlamangla has some advice for people looking to preserve that "post-lockdown feeling": practicing the lost art of gratitude. "Once a day, stop and appreciate what you're able to do now that you weren't last year. You can make a mental note, tell your partner, text your friend or write it down in a journal. The method doesn't matter, as long as you're making a deliberate effort to acknowledge that things have improved." She cites scientific evidence of the physical and mental health benefits of cultivating gratitude, including better sleep and higher levels of happiness. "Feeling thankful for the little pleasures in our lives," she concludes, "can add up to make us happier people overall." Precisely because the pandemic was so disruptive to normal life, our emergence from it provides incredible opportunities for embracing this kind of gratitude. Reading this helpful and encouraging piece reminded me of a particular phase in the history of business books when authors were telling employers and employees they could find meaning in their work by thinking of it as a calling, rather than mere employment. The problem with that advice was if we truly are called to work (and I think we are) who is calling us? Many of these books failed to address that important detail. In the same way, if we are to be grateful (and we are), to whom should we be grateful, exactly? Karlamangla never specifies, but with Thanksgiving on the horizon, along with all of the seasonal talk of counting blessings and being thankful for friends, family, and good health, it's worth thinking about. After all, we are years into the trend of spending the day after "giving thanks," trampling security guards for iPhones, toys, and flat-screen TVs. Maybe thanking no one in particular isn't really gratitude. Scripture is clear about who deserves our gratitude. In the first chapter of his epistle, James writes, "Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows." God deserves our final gratitude... not the universe or the government or our "inner light." Even the good gifts of other people's time and help and love point, ultimately, to God. And, of course, God doesn't owe us any of these good gifts, nor could we ever deserve them. As Paul told the men of Athens at the Areopagus, God "is not served by human hands, as if He needed anything. Rather, He himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else." Paul's statement might have come as a surprise to Greek ears. In his book, Gratitude: An Intellectual History, Peter Leithart describes how, in the ancient mind, gratitude was like a circle. If you received a gift, you had an obligation to return the favor. For much of the Greek world, this was how politics worked—a system of favors and repayments we today might describe as "bribery." By introducing the idea of gratitude to a Giver so generous that no one could ever repay their debt, argues Leithart, Christianity radically altered this cycle. Gratitude, it turns out, really can change the world. Yes, practicing gratitude is extremely good for humans, even those who don't believe in God. For that reason alone, we can hope that Times readers take Karlamangla's advice seriously. But for Christians, gratitude is no mere mental health strategy. It's a profound way of telling the truth: to ourselves, to others, and to the whole world.

A mother writes in saying, "to my daughter, (Ed Oxford's ideas) is a perfect example of how to have it both ways," looking at the modern issue of homosexuality for Christians. Oxford's idea is that homosexuality was translated as "child-abuser" and other things prior to the 1980s. After the 1980s the translation changed because the issue became more prevalent in culture. A mother writes in to have an understanding of how to respond. Following that, another listener asks if we should use plural pronouns to define God. John and Shane expound on a recent BreakPoint commentary, providing a foundation to not only refer to God but to also speak confidently in our current cultural moment. To close, a writer shares an experience she had in a Bible study. The leader mentioned a "mixed-orientation" marriage. The Listener knew the term was problematic, but struggled to identify what it was about the term that made it untrue. John and Shane explore the definition and explain the worldview underpinnings that highlight the image of God and the details surrounding gender and identity terminology that shouldn't be compromised. -- Resources -- The Moral Vision of the New Testament Richard B. Hayes | Harperone | 1996 The Bible and Homosexual Practice Robert A.J. Gagnon | Abingdon Press | 2002 Does the Bible Say Gays are an "Abomination"? Sean McDowell | Youtube | September 27, 2021 God's not "They": Divine Pronouns Matter John Stonestreet & Tim Padgett | BreakPoint | October 4, 2021

According to the Associated Press, African scientists have developed the first malaria vaccine, and the World Health Organization has approved it. This is huge. Malaria is one of the deadliest scourges of tropical environments; it still takes the lives of more than 400,000 people each year, many of whom are children living in Africa's poorest regions. Our very ability to achieve medical breakthroughs like this points to our God-given design and role in the created world. God didn't place Adam in the Garden of Eden to lounge about, but to work. Human beings were to "tend the Garden." Since the fall, our calling has included using our God-given abilities to push back against death and disease, frustration and toil. In an atheistic worldview, a disease like malaria isn't something wrong, just something that is. And if humans are mere animals, not image-bearers, we are basically victims of the natural world, not stewards. It turns out atheism just isn't big enough to explain all that humans can do.

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature," wrote Karl Marx, "...the opium of the people." Decades of often painful historical experience has proven his observation both right and wrong. Believing in God does ease pain and suffering of faithful followers, but he was wrong in thinking that religion, especially Christianity, leaves them with nowhere else to go from there. A recent article in The Economist put it this way: "Religious belief really does seem to draw the sting of poverty." Although there is a correlation between poverty and decreased mental health, the article highlighted German sociologist Dr. Jana Berkessel's recent findings that religion significantly mitigates this effect. A variety of similar studies confirm this. Regular attendance at religious services consistently correlates with longer life spans, stronger immune systems, and lower blood pressure, as well as decreased anxiety, depression, and suicide. Kids raised in religious households have a lower incidence of drug addiction, delinquency, and incarceration. They're more likely to graduate high school. In short, the nearly unanimous scientific consensus is that religious belief is good for you. Of course, Marx's point was that these benefits only serve to keep people content in their chains, and to keep them distracted so much by the next world that they do nothing to change this one. Many critics today take the critique even further. Religion, especially Christianity, has not only been used to pacify people in their oppression, but is the very source of it. Of course, the charge that Christianity has been co-opted, corrupted, and weaponized to justify all kinds of abuse, conquest, and enslavement, is undeniable. At the same time, it's also undeniable that Christianity has been a global force for the kinds of goods now so pervasive, it's hard to even imagine the world without them. Many of the rights and principles we consider to be naturally occurring features of the world only came to be by the influence of Christianity. In the ancient pagan world, violence, rape, infant exposure, and prostitution were rules, not exceptions. Almost immediately, Christianity began to revolutionize pagan ethics, particularly in its view of the poor and the outcast. Roman Emperor Julian famously wrote that when the "impious Galileans support not only their poor, but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us." To a world with no reason to believe in the equality of all people, Christianity taught that "there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all." This belief was grounded in the Christian view of the human person, which had no parallel in the ancient world and which created an explosion of literacy, social mobility, and human rights that we now take for granted in the modern world. Christianity's unique contributions in humanizing the modern world is yet another reason to not simply lump all "religious beliefs" into the one blanket category. All religions are simply not the same, not in substance nor impact. Economist Robin Grier, for example, conducted a cross-national survey of 63 formerly European colonies. She found that, across the board, Protestant Christianity, in particular, was "positively and significantly correlated with real GDP growth," and that "the level of Protestantism is significantly related to real per capita income levels." A National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper found that only certain religious beliefs—notably beliefs about heaven, hell, and an afterlife—are linked with economic growth. In other words, it's not just about having a "religion," but about what your religion teaches. Consider Africa. A recent paper from NBER analyzed educational outcomes among religious children. Though Africa is becoming increasingly religious across the board, the paper found that in many countries, "primary school completion for Christians was more than double that of Muslims or Africans adhering to local religions." Christian communities far outpace others when it comes to intergenerational educational growth. Writing in 1843, Karl Marx couldn't have anticipated how thoroughly science would analyze his claims about religion. He'd likely have been among the modern theorists surprised that the world is becoming more religious, not less. As one writer with The Brookings Institute put it, "While weak state structures collapse and aid agencies switch priorities, one group of actors persist against all odds: religious institutions." Of course, this isn't why anyone should believe the truth claims of Christianity. They should be believed if they are true. At the same time, the fact that Christian belief has been an educational, social, and economic ladder for millions suggests these beliefs ought to be taken seriously.

Last month, 26-year-old Heidi Crowter lost a legal case against the British government, in which she claimed that UK abortion laws unjustly discriminate against people with Down syndrome. Most abortions are legal in the UK only before 24 weeks, with an exception in cases of "physical or mental abnormalities" that would leave the baby "seriously handicapped." This includes children with Down Syndrome, who can be terminated right up to the moment of birth. Heidi and 40,000 other UK citizens with Down syndrome, object. And they should. In some European nations, as many as 96 percent of children with the condition are aborted. Last week, an article in the UK Telegraph asked, "Could this be the last generation of Down's syndrome children?" As Heidi put it after the court's decision, "We face discrimination every day at schools, in the workplace, and in society. Thanks to the verdict, the judges have upheld discrimination in the womb, too." For all the talk of equality these days, entire classes of people are being eliminated. Followers of Christ need to defend these image-bearers.

In a recent article in The Atlantic, Emma Green writes that "a third or more of Americans younger than 45 either don't have children or expect to have fewer [children]." This is, of course, not really new news. Birth rates have been falling for years, for various reasons. What's notable in Green's article is the somewhat new reason younger Americans claim they are choosing childlessness: because they are "worried about climate change." Well-known figures including politician Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, entertainer Miley Cyrus, and royal family member turned Hollywood celebrity Prince Harry have all publicly expressed their so-called "climate anxiety" and concluded that fewer kids is better. In Britain, a new movement of women has launched a "birth strike," refusing to have children until the climate crisis ends. "Climate anxiety" assumes three things. First, it assumes that climate change is happening, which seems to be clear enough. Second, it assumes that the way the climate is changing is not only remarkable, but also catastrophic. This is far less certain, given the limits of what we know about the history of past climate changes. Third, and even less clear, is the assumption that climate change in our time is human-caused. Even if each of these assumptions is granted, refusing to have children in response raises the obvious question of whether fewer kids would actually solve the problem. Many experts say, "Don't buy it." While it's true that each new human being brings a certain amount of carbon emissions into the world, even some scientists concerned about catastrophic climate change think that "reducing population is not the way that we're going to solve the climate crisis." On the contrary, dramatic social and economic consequences result once the fertility rate drops below replacement levels, as has happened across most of the Western world. Far from having too many kids, most Western nations have been in a population decline for so long, they've reached crisis levels where, among other things, there won't be enough working adults to support an aging population. Many of our wrong-headed reactions to "climate anxiety" are rooted, it seems, in Paul Ehrlich's infamous and disastrous predictions in The Population Bomb. Back in 1968, Ehrlich declared that, due to overpopulation, ""the battle to feed all of humanity is over," and humanity lost. Hundreds of millions of people, he wrongly predicted, would starve to death in the next few decades. Ehrilch was not only wrong, he was dead wrong. In the words of Smithsonian Magazine's Charles C. Mann, the book created "an anti-population-growth crusade that led to human rights abuses around the world," including China's one-child policy and forced sterilizations in countries like Mexico, Bolivia, and Indonesia. Like all bad ideas, Ehrlich's had victims. Ehrlich's worst idea is that people were the problem to be solved. Instead, since his predictions were made, even as the population continued to grow, rates of starvation-level poverty around the world plummeted. As it turned out, people were the solution. Scientists, farmers, and policymakers did what people do: they innovated, created, imagined, and solved problems. So, instead of an apocalypse, the late 20th century saw a revolution in agriculture and the most significant decline in world hunger in human history. Perhaps, we should apply that historical knowledge to today's crises. What if the kids and their carbon outputs aren't the problem to be solved, but instead the very ones to solve whatever climate change problems we face? This is already happening in some ways. Though far less than in 1600, there are billions more trees today than 100 years ago. The North American Forest Commission reports that annual tree forest growth in 2020 was 380 percent greater than in 1920, with no signs of slowing down. Imagine if the generation of 1920 had simply stopped having children! This is not to say that trees are the answer to climate change, or that humanity can solve every problem. Among the effects of sin is the human ability to harm the world, even on a dramatic scale. At the same time, God created humans with an incredible capacity to steward the world, and adapt as necessary to survive and thrive. Christianity offers something climate-anxious secularism doesn't and, in fact, can't. The Christian worldview tells us what human beings are, and what they are for. We're not random products of a cosmic lottery with margins so thin that we put our own future existence at risk simply by existing. We have purpose and capacity that a secularist framework cannot explain. Any philosophy that treats children like consumer goods must be rejected. Children are not just something we order when we feel like it, and cancel if we don't. Every child is a brand new portrait of the God Who created and continues to oversee this world. God hasn't given up on the world, and neither should we. In fact, especially in uncertain times, Chri

A new treatment for depression is undergoing clinical trials at Johns Hopkins. Early results suggest that the two doses of the active ingredient psilocybin, a main ingredient of the hallucinogenic drug known as "magic mushrooms," significantly reduced symptoms of major depression in adults. Some of our most effective treatments come from unorthodox sources. The heart drug Wayfarin, for example, was originally derived from rat poison. Aspirin is taken from willow trees. So, we shouldn't rule out psilocybin's valid medical uses too quickly. On the other hand, covering up symptoms of depression isn't really treating it, much less curing it. Mental illness can have chemical, psychological, physiological, relational, and spiritual causes, or even all of the above. Manipulating brain chemistry is a shortcut that can miss the bigger picture of who we are and what healing looks like. We cannot medicate away our need for purpose, belonging, love, or forgiveness. The best treatments will always see people in the fullness of who they are, made in the image and likeness of God.

Increasingly, when confronted with a person who experiences gender dysphoria, doctors and psychologists are allowed to offer only one diagnosis: the patient is transgender. As recently as a few years ago, this was a mental disorder diagnosis, and steps would be taken to align the mind with the body. Today, it's just the opposite. Gender dysphoria means being born in the wrong body, and treatment is to align the body with the mind. This is the expected diagnosis and path of treatment even when the patient is a child. All voices, even the most qualified voices, that dare to be critical of this way of treating gender dysphoria are silenced. No dissent is allowed. Dr. Allan Josephson is the former head of child and adolescent psychology at the University of Louisville. In 2019, he was effectively fired for participating on a Heritage Foundation panel where he questioned gender transition for minors. With the help of the Alliance Defending Freedom, Dr. Josephson is suing the university, but his situation highlights the experience of other scientists who reject current transgender medicine as premature and irresponsible. One critic, who served as an expert witness in Josephson's case is Dr. James Cantor, a Canadian clinical psychologist with a history of taking unpopular stands. Following a new "policy statement" by the American Academy of Pediatrics regarding gender transition in minors, Dr. Cantor published a "fact check" calling out what he saw as the Academy's "systematic misrepresentation" of the medical literature. "Not only did AAP fail to provide compelling evidence" for claiming that gender-dysphoric minors should be immediately and unquestioningly transitioned, Dr. Cantor argued, but "AAP's recommendations are despite the existing evidence." To be clear, Dr. Cantor is no religious fundamentalist. He describes himself as a gay atheist who isn't afraid "to barbecue sacred cows." Like Josephson, he too has faced backlash for challenging the dominant transgender narrative, specifically from a scientific perspective. Last year, Cantor was booted from an online forum of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality for questioning the case for gender transition of minors. He resigned in protest, concluding that the Society had "ceased to be a scientific organization." Dr. Cantor is reacting to what he thinks is a breakdown of the scientific process and a substitution of ideology for evidence. He described this breakdown recently in an interview on the Upstream podcast with my colleague Shane Morris: "We're no longer allowed to discuss the issue itself. And in this case, [it is] the solid science that over and over again is getting silenced because it's not matching up with what makes people feel good." Cantor understands that, after puberty, around 80 percent of gender dysphoric children spontaneously revert to identifying with their biological sex. He also notes that despite all of the false certainty proclaimed about the condition, transgender identity itself is still poorly understood. In many cases, Cantor believes, it is almost certainly the result of other mental health issues not being treated, like borderline personality disorder. Because of this, he especially opposes the common practice of threatening parents of gender dysphoric children with the possibility of suicide, calling it "essentially emotional manipulation." In the conversation with Shane, Dr. Cantor compared the way gender dysphoria is dominating the mental health conversation, particularly when it comes to children, with the 1980s and 90s, when a craze over repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse swept the field. It was eventually rejected as pseudoscience, but not before it wrecked countless lives and families. In fact, Cantor thinks that the demographics of people who thought they had been abused as children are "very similar" to patients now being held up in support of childhood gender transition. "That era," warns Cantor, "did not end well…And here we go again. We didn't learn a thing." Because science advances based on self-correction, criticism, and dissent are vital for fixing bad theories and identifying mistaken assumptions. On the transgender issue, more than any other right now, dissenting voices are silenced. Though such scientific malpractice is reversible, for those whose identities, lives, and very bodies are now being experimented on, much of the damage will be permanent.

John and Maria begin their discussion reflecting on Facebook. They share their experience and the heightened fear around the Facebook outage of 2021. Maria then asks John to reflect on two BreakPoints that he offered this week. The first BreakPoint John revisits was on Jeff Bezos's work to manipulate cells in an effort to live longer, and potentially forever. Maria and John then revisit a piece on Grandparents, both sharing special stories of their relationships with their grandparents. John highlights the special role grandparents have in culture, and offers a unique opportunity for inspiration and training through The Legacy Coalition. Maria then asks John's insight on the federal government's budget deliberations. John provides a worldview framework for why we struggle to understand the rise in national debt and the conflict surrounding the budget. Then Maria asks John to offer a Christian perspective on the issues the federal government is engaging in local school boards and why our mitigating institutions seem dull and fragile right now. -- Stories Referenced in the Show -- Everyone Wants to Live Forever Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is among a group of billionaires looking for the secret to immortality. Bezos funds Altos Labs, a startup pursuing breakthroughs in biological reprogramming technology. The ambitious new field has already seen some promising, not to mention terrifying, results in animal testing. Biological reprogramming technology attempts to revert cells to an embryonic state. If successful, this could unlock the potential to "rejuvenate" organs, perhaps entire bodies."BreakPoint>> The Unique and Crucial Calling to Grandparents Grandparents are among the most recent group of people to be labeled "toxic" in our culture. Even before the pandemic, more and more parents of adult children are victims of what has been called "relational minimalism." It's a brutal reality for many.BreakPoint>> Congress passed a bill to fund the government into December. But questions remain over the debt ceiling and Biden's agenda The US government went into Thursday embroiled in a game of three-dimensional chess with time running out and trillions of dollars at stake. The first dimension was a must-do: fund the government by midnight to avoid it shutting down. In a typical shutdown, hundreds of thousands of federal employees stop getting paid and many stop working; some services are suspended and numerous national attractions and national parks temporarily close. The second dimension is an even bigger must-do: raise the national debt ceiling, an artificially imposed borrowing limit, before an estimated deadline of 18 October. Failure to pay its bills would see the US default for the first time in history. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has warned that the effects would be "cataclysmic" and cost 6m jobs. The third dimension is not quite a must but it feels that way to Joe Biden and Democrats: pass a $1tn bipartisan infrastructure bill and a $3.5tn partisan package that expands social services and tackles the climate crisis. Both are stalled by divisions between Democratic centrists and progressives, along with Republican eagerness to deny Biden a win The Guardian>> Plan would give every Ohio K-12 student a voucher to attend private school It's called the backpack scholarship program, and it would direct the state treasurer to create "education savings accounts" for any student who wanted one starting in the summer of 2023. The accounts would be filled with either $5,500 (K-8 grade) or $7,500 (9-12 grade) in state dollars annually and could be used to pay for things like private school tuition, homeschool supplies, after-school care, advanced placement testing fees or educational therapies. MSN>> FBI and Justice Department will help protect school employees amid uptick in violence over COVID-19 policies and critical race theory' The Justice Department and FBI were ordered Monday to help protect school employees across the U.S. following an uptick in violence against them. Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI and other agencies "to discuss strategies for addressing this disturbing trend." The order comes after the National School Boards Association sent a letter to President Joe Biden about the "immediate threat" local schools and boards are facing. CBS>> -- Recommendations -- Lancaster, PA The Legacy Coalition - Grandparent Summit My Reading Life - Ann Bogel The Culture of Narcissism - Christopher Lasch

In the 19th century, India was coming to grips with the modern world. While British companies, like the East India Company, helped modernize India through trade, British missionaries, like William Carey, helped modernize India through culture formation. One of the more creative interactions with the west happened in Bengal through the work of Christian missionaries. For example, when Krishna Mohan Bannerjee was a child, he attended the School Society Institution started by David Hare, a watchmaker from Scotland. Though Hare's faith commitments are unknown, he was concerned about social welfare in Bengal and started several noteworthy schools in the area. Hare recognized Bannerjee's potential and pushed him to continue his education, first in Pataldanga, and eventually at the newly founded Hindu College (now Presidency University) in Kolkata. Bannerjee thrived at Hindu College, where the atheist headmaster, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, advocated for free discussion and debate on any and every issue and profoundly influenced Bannerjee. When his father died of cholera in 1828, Bannerjee was forced to support himself through manual labor, and yet, still excelled in his studies. After graduating from Hindu College in 1829, Bannerjee got a job teaching at David Hare's school. In 1829, Scottish missionary Dr. Alexander Duff noticed that Christian missions in India had only reached the lower castes. Duff proposed a new mission strategy of offering education in English in the sciences and biblical studies, in order to help upper-caste Hindu students see the contradictions in their own beliefs and move toward Christianity. Like so many others, Duff connected Western learning and success with Christianity. He believed that making Western learning and the Bible available would inevitably lead to conversions. Bannerjee began to attend Duff's lectures and even visited Duff's house for serious discussions about religion and philosophy. In 1832, Bannerjee converted to Christianity. His conversion came at great cost: Hare fired Bannerjee from the school, Bannerjee's wife was forced to return to her father's home, and a firestorm erupted in the local press about Hindu College. Ironically, Bannerjee's conversion was blamed on the atheist, Derozio, and the popular headmaster was forced out. Bannerjee moved to the Church Missionary Society School, where he served as headmaster. He studied theology at Bishop's College and became the first Indian to be ordained as a priest in the Anglican Church in Bengal. Before long, Bannerjee became the foremost Indian apologist of his day. Prior to 1865, Bannerjee followed the lead of Duff and other missionaries in seeing Hinduism as nothing but superstition and idolatry that needed to be destroyed. However, his entire approach to apologetics eventually changed, and he began to argue that Christianity was actually the fulfillment of Hinduism. He noted how sacrifice was the most important ritual in the earliest forms of Hinduism. Further, he showed from the Vedas, the Upanishads, and other Hindu writings that Prajapati, the Lord and Supporter of Creation, sacrificed himself to save humanity, and did so by taking on a mortal body. This, Bannerjee argued, prefigured Jesus' incarnation and sacrifice on the cross. Bannerjee's efforts to find a doorway from Hinduism to Christianity grew out of his love for his country and his culture. He wanted to reconcile Christianity and modern education with Indian culture. In keeping with this goal, he became heavily involved in a wide range of social organizations in Bengal and worked for social reform. He opposed the caste system, polygamy, idolatry, the sale of girls into marriage, and sati, the practice of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. He also supported the education of women, seeing it as a yardstick for measuring the social progress of a country. Beyond his work as an evangelist and apologist, Bannerjee was a critically important figure in the Bengal Renaissance, bringing modern ideas of scholarship and social justice to India and developing an approach to Christianity that honored Indian culture while remaining firmly anchored in the British evangelical tradition. He was a remarkable example of contextualizing the Gospel to India, and applying the biblical worldview to all areas of life. For Bannerjee, this started in school, inspired by a teacher who taught students to desire wisdom, seek truth, and follow honest inquiry. Eventually, this pointed Krishna Mohan Bannerjee to love God with all his mind, and to love his neighbors as himself.

John and Shane field a question from one listener for resources to support a Biblical practice of marriage. Another listener asks for resources for a child who enjoys art, but is trying to understand artistic expression from a Christian worldview. In the latter part of the show, a listener asks if secular is a term Christians should use if "every square inch" belongs to God? To close, John and Shane discuss if "agree to disagree" is a good tactic to have in worldview conversations, if it is loving or actually harmful.

Business experts are noticing an increase in Gen Z-ers' need to know they're doing things well. "Sixty-six percent of Gen Z say they need feedback from their supervisor at least every few weeks in order to stay at their job," writes Ryan Jennings, a generation expert, "Considering Gen Z grew up in digital environments full of real-time feedback (likes, comments, shares, etc.), it's not surprising [they have] an elevated appetite for feedback at work." On the other hand, many believe Gen Z is the most narcissistic generation. It's not hard to see why, when young people are constantly taught to live "their" truth and cut out "toxic people" - which is mostly anyone who makes them feel bad. Incredibly, the latest peer-reviewed data shows that Gen Z-ers know they have this tendency, and don't really like that about themselves. So, there's hope after all. Growth of any kind requires being willing to listen to others, even when they tell us things we don't want to hear.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is among a group of billionaires looking for the secret to immortality. Bezos funds Altos Labs, a startup pursuing breakthroughs in biological reprogramming technology. The ambitious new field has already seen some promising, not to mention terrifying, results in animal testing. Biological reprogramming technology attempts to revert cells to an embryonic state. If successful, this could unlock the potential to "rejuvenate" organs, perhaps entire bodies. On the one hand, there's nothing unusual or controversial about the human desire to go on living. Christianity affirms that death is not a natural part of life in the strictest sense. It's a result of the fall. Death is, to borrow a phrase from theologian Neil Plantinga, "not the way it's supposed to be." Scripture calls death "an enemy." When Jesus arrived at the tomb of Lazarus, He wept at the death of his friend and the pain it caused, even though He clearly planned on turning that funeral into a party. At the same time, the desperate race for immortality is not an attempt to reverse the effects of sin. Rather, it reflects how desperate man without God is to exert complete control over the cosmos, and to have life on our own terms. Jeff Bezos is certainly not the first person in history willing to go to such extreme lengths to stave off the inevitable, only the latest and most resourced. Some speculate that this is nothing more than a mid-life crisis for the 56-year-old tech mogul. After all, Bezos's 25-year marriage ended in 2019, and, in July, he stepped down as CEO of one of the biggest and most powerful companies in the history of the world. Perhaps he's just looking for ways to spend his $200 billion. It would take a lot of trips to outer space to spend that fortune. Perhaps he's reacting to the age-old truth, that even all the wealth in the world cannot ultimately satisfy a hole in the heart that is God-shaped. Another, more ancient billionaire once lamented, "When I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind." Of course, if life truly is meaningless in the first place, more of it won't fix the problem. The Bible teaches that we can never be satisfied until we are reconciled with the God who made us. Until then, we remain enemies, selfish rebels at war with life itself. Living forever in this state wouldn't be an accomplishment. It would be a nightmare. Genesis tells us that, after the fall, God kept Adam and Eve from the Garden in order to prevent them from eating of the Tree of Life: Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—" therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. God's actions were as much of mercy here as of judgment. Later, King Solomon would describe how God "set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what [He] has done from beginning to end." We are created beings created for eternity. C.S. Lewis famously put it this way, "If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world." The desire for immortality ultimately points us to, and can only be satisfied by, God Himself. He made us to live forever. He is life itself. The eternal life we seek, both the why and the how, is only found in Him.

In 2020, Chinese box office revenue officially surpassed that of North America. Shirli Li writes in the Atlantic, "Filmmakers and actors have always been subject to bosses who decide which movies get to soar at the box office….Now, more than ever before, that boss is Beijing." Fast and Furious star John Cena demonstrated this deference in May when he posted a back-bending apology to China, in Mandarin, for calling Taiwan a country. Another example is the potential ban facing Marvel's The Eternals because its director, Chloé Zhao, criticized the Chinese Communist Party … eight years ago. Repeatedly, U.S. film companies posture as courageous defenders of human rights when they vocally oppose laws in states like Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas. But then they're deafeningly silent about doing business in China, a country actively imprisoning more than one million Uyghur Muslims, hiding the presence of massive slave labor camps and no freedom of any kind when it comes to journalism. Hollywood, it seems, mostly just listens to the money. The hope has always been that Western values would somehow infiltrate China and change it from the inside. But the opposite is happening. There's nothing like the allure of massive profit to drown out our collective conscience.

Whenever I struggle to understand C.S. Lewis's nonfiction work, I find it helpful to go to Narnia. For example, so many of the concepts Lewis introduced in Mere Christianity are found in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Throughout each of the Narnia books, Aslan, the Pevensie children, and other characters embody many of the ideas he explored in his nonfiction. Another example is The Abolition of Man, a book critically important for our cultural moment. In the book's opening essay, "Men without Chests," Lewis thoroughly critiques modern education which, Lewis says, fills students' heads with knowledge and their bellies with passion, but does nothing to cultivate the chest. This idea from Lewis is based on something Aristotle taught, that the head is the seat of human reason and the belly is the seat of passion. Good citizens, Aristotle believed, are those whose heads govern their bellies. When someone is ruled by their passions, they are unstable. Aristotle thought that humans could govern their bellies through the formation of good habits. There's certainly a lot of truth to that. But anyone who has ever been in a real conflict between head and gut knows that, typically, the gut wins. Even more, our reason becomes merely instrumental to justify whatever it is we want. My friend Michael Miller, a senior fellow at the Acton Institute, once described the belly as an 800-pound gorilla constantly demanding, "Feed me, feed me, I want. I want, feed me, feed me." The head, on the other hand, is more like an 80-pound professor with a bowtie. Who's going to win the conflict between a massive gorilla and a tiny professor? The gorilla…every time. This is what C.S. Lewis was critiquing in his essay "Men Without Chests." A person will only function well if they are bolstered by a strong "chest," or virtue. Only a well-formed moral will, which cares for virtuous things, can overrule and ultimately govern the belly. For a story version of this opening essay of The Abolition of Man, see The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. This book has one of the best opening lines: "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." Eustace is the boy without a chest, as readers soon discover. He's a spoiled brat; as Lewis goes on to describe, he attended schools that filled his head with knowledge and his belly with passion, but did nothing to cultivate his chest. A thematic undercurrent in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is how Eustace developed a chest. Spoiler alert: it had a lot to do with his relationship with Reepicheep, one of Narnia's smallest characters. The mouse, a perennial favorite character in all of Narnia, had much moral courage. He had, to borrow Lewis' phrase, a chest. "Men Without Chests" is just one reason that The Abolition of Man is such an important book for understanding our current cultural moment. Lewis's analysis of culture in this book is more relevant now than ever. It is a must-read for any and every Christian. Recently, Dr. Michael Ward, one of the foremost C.S. Lewis scholars on the planet, a researcher from the University of Oxford, and a visiting professor at Houston Baptist University, has written a companion guide to the Abolition of Man. The guide is called After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man. In this book, Dr. Ward takes readers on a chapter by chapter, essay by essay journey through the most important ideas in The Abolition of Man. Because the analysis in this book is so critical to understanding our cultural moment, the Colson Center will send a copy of both The Abolition of Man and After Humanity: A Guide to the Abolition of Man as our thank you for a gift of any amount to the Colson Center this month. In fact, anyone who gives this month will also be able to join an exclusive set of video introductions from Dr. Ward and a live webinar to discuss the key concepts in the book. This special opportunity to study one of Lewis's most important books, guided by one of the world's top Lewis scholars, is only for friends of the Colson Center. Visit us at BreakPoint to give a gift to the Colson Center and get your copies, along with access to the live webinar and prerecorded introductory videos.

Recently, the US Census bureau reported, somewhat diplomatically, "It's clear that in an unprecedented environment, families are seeking solutions that will reliably meet [the needs] of their children." That's an understatement. The New York Times reports that just last year, more than 1 million children did not enroll in kindergarten. The impact of learning loss from missed school time has parents worried across every grade. After years of the nationwide percentage of homeschool families hovering around 3.3 percent, that number jumped to 11.1 percent in the fall of 2020. If all of this means a renewed emphasis on parental involvement, that's a good thing. Whether homeschooled or otherwise, involved parents consistently predict far better educational outcomes for kids. Which makes sense, because parents are the primary, God-given guardians of their children's future. Education begins in the home. Or, as Tina Windebank put it over at Citizenlink, "Relax! Your kids are already homeschooled."

Last week, professor of religion Mark Silk suggested that we should use the pronoun "they" when referring to God, instead of "He." Writing over at Religion News Service, Silk offered a couple of "textual" arguments to support his admonition, but his primary aim was to update our God-talk with what he called "the imperative of gender-inclusive language." Silk isn't the first to suggest something like this. And, it's not strictly accurate to say his ideas promote gender inclusivity. Calling God "she" or "her" or "Mother" was a way to dismantle the patriarchy not so long ago, but, in this cultural moment, the call is to de-gender God altogether, along with everything else, including us. Silk's best theological argument is that Elohim, a common Old Testament word for God, is plural. However, while Elohim is technically plural, so are the Hebrew words for face, panim, and Egypt, Mizraim. No one suggests that plural pronouns are required for these words. This grammatical quirk of Hebrew isn't as significant as Silk makes it. The more significant problem with Silk's idea is that by abandoning biblically gendered language, we abandon the words God chose to describe Himself, and this alters our understanding of God. While God doesn't reveal himself as "male" in an embodied gendered sense (like humans), God does uniformly use masculine terms to reveal Who He is. He acts like a mother, according to a few passages in Holy Scripture, but He reveals Himself as the Father throughout Holy Scripture. This may not seem like a big deal. Some will argue that God is a big boy and can handle being called "her" or "zhe" or "they." Plus, others add, God is infinite, beyond our comprehension. He can't be bothered by pronouns. To that, I reply, No way. Call your spouse by the wrong name, and see if it matters. Describe your wife as you want her to be, not the way she is... what will she say? Tell her you love her for characteristics that she does not have, and see how that goes over. Our experience tells us that language matters, especially descriptive language that someone uses to define oneself. As a person, who God reveals Himself to be matters… a lot. Things that do not matter to objects do matter to persons. Rocks and trees and books don't care how they're addressed - they don't care about anything! Animals will get used to whatever you call them most often, especially if you have food. But persons care how they're addressed. This isn't a weakness; this is the glory of being a person. What's more, without the personness of God as the foundation of our own personness, the things we most value about being human would be lost to the cold calculus of cause and effect. God isn't a force or an energy with no opinion of what we think about Him. God is a person, with specific characteristics. God is not a nebulous blob to be molded according to our wishes. God is infinite, but He is not indefinite. He makes Himself known as a God of justice, holiness, compassion, and love. These are defined realities of his character. It is not for us to decide which parts of His self-revelation are passé. We call God "Him," because God calls Himself "Him." We can wrestle with why, but the reality is that He calls Himself "Him" in a language in which He could've easily called Himself "it" or "her" or "they." Our perceptions of God should be shaped by what God has revealed about Himself, not by our cultural "imperative of gender-inclusivity." Ironically, when we say things like "let's not limit God with our categories," especially when dealing with categories He Himself introduced to the world, we do what we claim we are trying to avoid: we limit God with our own culturally constructed limits. When we take away the boundaries He has revealed, we bind Him within our limited imaginations. As a result, we are left with a god created in our own image, who always agrees with us, and never challenges the idols of our hearts. Christianity is fundamentally a revealed religion. If God exists, our knowledge of Him is wholly dependent on the knowledge provided by Him. To refrain from calling Him "Him" because of some kind of culturally conditioned mood we're in is to speak of Him in a way other than what He has revealed. The Bible's gendered language is no accident of history. Rather, it tells us significant things about God and His attitude toward His Bride, the Church. It is not coincidental that our lives are given to us as gendered beings; rather, it reveals aspects of the greatest love story in human history. God is the Father, Christ is the Groom, and the Church is His beloved Bride, for whom He conquered death itself.

John and Maria discuss a popular movement that's gaining momentum in how young people build community. Relational minimalism cuts out people who are viewed as toxic, and it's problematic for our sense of unity. Maria shares her thoughts on the media and culture frenzy surrounding Britney Spears. She shares some insight from Neil Postman regarding how we worship pop-culture and lose our bearings in the process. John then introduces a false report that the world is being cured of Down Syndrome. New reports mask the fact that the world's way of resolving it is through abortion, which is misleading about what is actually happening. -- Story Mentions in Show -- Relationship Minimalism? Why Downsizing Other People Won't Make You Happy In the article, Logan documents a growing group of young people practicing "relationship minimalism." Inspired by home organizing coaches like Marie Kondo, these mostly urban, single adults are not only clearing their lives of excess stuff; they're tossing out excess people. For example, 20-something YouTube star Ronald Banks says that living a minimalist lifestyle with only a few sets of clothes, simple furniture, and bare minimum electronics prompted him to go the next step and ditch meaningless relationships, too. Or, as he called them, "emotional clutter." BreakPoint>> Crowd Gathers Ahead of Britney Spears Conservatorship Hearing A group of Britney Spears supporters gathers near the courthouse where her conservatorship hearing is scheduled. Patrick Healy reports for the NBC4 News at 11 a.m. on Wednesday Sept. 29, 2021. NBC LA>> Britney Spears' conservatorship judge is facing death threats; Los Angeles Sheriff says they are 'monitoring' Britney Spears' conservatorship judge has been hit with a wave of death threats on social media as the singer's battle to remove her father from the 13-year-long order rages on in court. Fox News>> Could this be the last generation of Down's syndrome children? 'I had this vision of someone with a pudding-basin haircut following me round the supermarket. I thought I'd never go on holiday or have any sort of life ever again.' So says 42-year-old actor Rebecca Hulbert of her initial reaction when her angelic-looking two-year-old The Telegraph>>

Arizona Christian University created a stir last week when it released its annual American Worldview Inventory, conducted by George Barna. The results were disappointing. Out of 176 million Americans who identify as Christians, just six percent hold a recognizably Christian worldview. The most troubling finding was that a majority of self-identified born-again Christians don't believe in the Holy Spirit as a "real, living being." Instead, they identify Him as "a symbol of God's power, presence or purity." This, of course, directly contradicts the fundamental creeds of the faith, which identify the Holy Spirit as a Person - "the Lord and giver of life," Who "with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified." Scripture, too, is clear that the Holy Spirit is a "Who," not a "What," the "helper" and "comforter" promised by Christ before His ascension. The fact that so many Christians don't understand this shows how much work we have ahead of us. We're going to need some help from the very God too many of us have forgotten.