Free speech is very much at risk on college campuses. According to one study , some 66% of students say that "it is acceptable to shout down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus." And, over 80% of students report self-censoring their own viewpoints out of fear of saying the wrong thing. But as the Atlantic's Jennifer Miller reports, a new, grassroots movement of civil-dialogue clubs is offering a strong response in support of free speech. One such organization is Bridge USA . As one...
Mar 02, 2022•1 min
Today is Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of the season of Lent. Its message is more needed today than ever. Lent is a 40-day period of time (Sundays aren't included in the count), set aside in the Church calendar to reflect and to prepare. In a sense, the Season of Lent is for Easter what the Season of Advent is for Christmas, but even more counter-cultural in its assessment of the human condition. Plus, as a holiday, Easter is not nearly as popular as Christmas, and can come and go bef...
Mar 02, 2022•5 min
In Tuesday night's State of the Union address, President Joe Biden told young people with gender dysphoria that he will "always have (their) back." Though he didn't specify what exactly that means, presumably it had something to do with extending Title IX protections to include allowing men full access to women's facilities and sports ; extending mandatory insurance coverage for " gender reassignment" surgeries ; and restricting any counseling, treatments, or public advocacy that does anything l...
Mar 02, 2022•6 min
This past Wednesday morning, a man named Tedd Mathis announced that his father had died a champion. "Forty-eight hours before he died," Tedd wrote, "dad was wheeled to the nursing home chapel to preach his final sermon. Christ was worthy, even with a cracked hip, failing kidneys, and a 95-year-old body bruised and stitched together from numerous falls of late." There's something unusual and inspiring about a life lived faithfully to the very end. It's what we want for ourselves but see so rarely...
Mar 01, 2022•1 min
In ninth grade, I was a knucklehead. Even worse, I was a Christian school knucklehead. Those are the worst kind... Six days a week from as early as I could remember, between Bible classes and Sunday school, I was in the same building, often the same classrooms, hearing Bible lessons, often from the same people. I spent my time on basketball and girls (in that order) but didn't have much of a faith I could call my own. Around Christmas in December of 1990, I met someone who would change my life. ...
Mar 01, 2022•5 min
INC.com's Jeff Steen has a new technique for anxiety management: schedule time to worry. Setting aside time to consider what worries us, he writes, clarifies our fears. It reminds us of what's important, what we can do about it, and (most importantly) what we can't. It's something he's encouraged business leaders to do for years, and it's seen results. There's a biblical term for Steen's technique: prayer. If that sounds cliché, it might be because we've lost one of the main things prayer is mea...
Feb 28, 2022•1 min
With the Supreme Court opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization expected this summer, panic is rising in pro-abortion ranks. There is real possibility that the Court could overturn or at least severely gut Roe v. Wade, curtail abortion rights, and throw the issue back to the states. Because abortion advocates see this as denial of basic women's rights, their arguments are increasingly shifting from legal ground to moral ground. Instead of claiming that abortion is a constitutional...
Feb 28, 2022•5 min
John and Maria consider the images and harsh reality of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There's a call for Christians to pray, but is prayer really doing something? John responds. Then, Maria asks John to clarify a new religious liberty case before the Supreme Court out of Colorado. The case has a lot to say about free speech, but John pulls back and explains how religious liberty is really a primary liberty for all of humanity.
Feb 26, 2022•51 min
Two days ago, we talked about the possibility of war, the fear that maybe the long peace the West had enjoyed for nearly a century could be broken. Well, now that fear has been realized. As an American official told ABC News , "You are likely in the last few hours of peace on the European continent for a long time to come." After weeks of saber rattling out of Moscow, along with vain promises that they had no designs on Ukraine, the Russian army has invaded its neighbor. In retrospect, this isn'...
Feb 25, 2022•6 min
America's corporate cooption in China's oppressive activities is shameful. Political philosopher Charles de Montesquieu said that "The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy." With China, , we're seeing this play out in real-time. China's control and censoring of its own citizens is disturbing, but predictable. But the number of American corporations and media willing to censor themselves is what's really stunning W...
Feb 24, 2022•1 min
So-called "No-Fault Divorce" has always been a bad idea, and children have always been its tragic victims. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stonestreet. This is BreakPoint. A couple of weeks ago, Dominic Raab, the Deputy Prime Minister for the United Kingdom, praised what he called an "important" debate in Parliament. He was referring to a law effective April 6, under which married couples no longer have to name any faults before seeking a divorce. Ironically for a member of Britain's Conservativ...
Feb 24, 2022•5 min
- References - The Quarrel Movie>> Moral Therapeutic Deism - Christian Smith>> Making Sense of it All - Thomas Morris Pensees - Blaise Pascal The Mad Man - Nietzsche A Free People's Suicide - Os Guinness...
Feb 23, 2022•47 min
"What happens to fascist architecture after fascism?" asks a recent BBC Culture headline . It's a good question. Because buildings are made by people and cultures, they are never just "functional." They tell stories. A tax office in Bolzano, Italy, for example, features a mural of Benito Mussolini on horseback , giving the infamous straight-arm salute. "It's a remarkable piece of fascist [propaganda-inspired] architecture," writes the BBC's Alex Sakalis : "Awe-inspiring, odious and perplexing ...
Feb 23, 2022•1 min
The top headline of the past few weeks has been the saber rattling out of Moscow. This week, Russian leader Vladimir Putin stepped even closer to war. On Monday, Russian troops entered Ukraine, and Moscow formally recognized the pro-Russian breakaway parts of Ukraine as independent states (independent of Ukraine, that is). There will likely be further developments by the time this is posted. In addition to a build-up of forces, Russia has ratcheted up the rhetoric against America, NATO, and Ukra...
Feb 23, 2022•5 min
Dancing with Max by Emily Colson, , is an intimate look at what it means to raise a child with autism, alone. Emily's dance partner, Max, is Chuck Colson's grandson. He's now 31 and spreads love through art. The pandemic was incredibly difficult for people like Emily and Max, who lost their support structures. But Max took to painting colorful hearts on posters and hanging them around town. Pretty soon, Max's hearts were put on notecards, which have sold by the tens of thousands, with the procee...
Feb 22, 2022•1 min
Last year, the U.K. and German ministries of defense released a joint statement titled " Human Augmentation: the Dawn of a New Paradigm ." The statement explored the future of technology in seeking to "enhance" people beyond the limits of biology, for military purposes. In this case, it's not a question of "whether" human enhancement is in our future. It's "when." CRISPR and other gene-editing tools, promise the ability to genetically alter human beings, turning off harmful genetic factors and t...
Feb 22, 2022•5 min
According to new census data , the number of parents living with their own children dropped to 40% in 2021 from 44% in 2011 and 48% in 2001. At the same time, as Brad Wilcox, Director of the National Marriage Project tweeted, "elite colleges are disproportionately made up of students from intact families." According to the Institute of Family Studies, 75% of graduates from selective schools have married birth parents. This counters the "divorce-is-better-for-the-kids" narrative, repeated in op-e...
Feb 21, 2022•1 min
In the historical dockyards at Chatham in England is the largest collection of Royal National lifeboats in the U.K.. On many of the lifeboats, printed numbers show how many times the boat has launched, and how many lives it saved. It's a haunting presentation of how life can sometimes hang on a precipice, and what it takes to rescue souls lost at sea. The dockyard is also an interesting analogy for the Church in this cultural moment. Sometimes churches seem more like a museum of saints, a place ...
Feb 21, 2022•5 min
John and Maria discuss recent events in the world, connecting how Christians find grounding and purpose in God's redemptive story. They consider the Church's role and influence in driving a culture of relationships in the wake of Valentine's Day. After a short break, the conversation shifts when they reflect on how the conflict in Ukraine is mirrored by a conflict inside the Orthodox Church. In this moment of virtual online church, Maria prods John to explain the important role technology plays ...
Feb 19, 2022•1 hr 6 min
A rural Ohio high school superintendent made a questionable decision last month by allowing an "After-School Satan Club" to meet on school grounds while refusing a group of protestors from even meeting outside. The Ohio attorney general sent a letter, reminding the superintendent that the protestors had as much right to gather on public property as the club. That this required a letter from the state attorney general is telling. Cultural tastes shift quickly and unpredictably. Not so long ago, i...
Feb 18, 2022•1 min
Many Christian parents worry about how to best pass on the faith to their children. Sadly, statistics suggest they should. In 2020, the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University found that just 2% of millennials , a generation now well into adulthood, have a biblical worldview. That's the lowest of any generation since surveys began. Lifeway Research reports that two-thirds of those who attend a youth group as teenagers will drop out of church as adults....
Feb 18, 2022•5 min
No matter how noble its intentions, every idea is ultimately tested by how well it handles reality. By most measures, the "Defund the Police" movement has failed dramatically. Since 2020, when calls for policing reform escalated, the nation has seen a 30% spike in homicides , combined with a rise in other violent crime. Now, cities that slashed police budgets like Portland, Los Angeles, and Oakland are increasing them again —some by up to 12%. The President has been inconsistent on the issue but...
Feb 17, 2022•1 min
Futurists and tech industry gurus have long promised a utopia where humans aren't dependent on pesky biological or geographical realities. Behind yesterday's cyberspace and today's "Metaverse" is the same idea: In a brave new world of digital existence, humans can be freed from bodies, specific locations, and other physical limitations. The rise of online technology made it possible for churches to continue in the early, uncertain days of the pandemic. Many congregations have chosen to keep thei...
Feb 17, 2022•5 min
John and Shane field a question from someone in the medical community who asks what physician-assisted suicide does to our view of medical practitioners. The listener also asks for a worldview breakdown on how physician-assisted suicide came to be. Next, Shane asks John what makes a church "woke", after a listener asks John and Shane to explain what woke is and what it does to a church body. A listener also writes in asking for clarity on what the mindful movement is and what worldview category ...
Feb 16, 2022•57 min
Instead of having a doctor or nurse on hand, Nova Scotia's new "oral protocol" puts the ability to take lethal medicine in the hands of "patients" themselves. Incredibly, that could decrease the total number of assisted deaths in Canada. When using the oral method, up to 40% of California residents chose not to go through with the procedure. By contrast, asks ethicist Daryl Pullmann, why do only 2% of Canadians choose the same? Perhaps the presence of medical personnel creates a kind of "uninten...
Feb 16, 2022•1 min
New data is poking holes in what's become a prominent cultural myth. "When it comes to divorce," write Brad Wilcox and Lyman Stone in The Wall Street Journal , "the research has generally backed up the belief that it's best to wait until around 30 to tie the knot." This is because the divorce rate is generally lower for those who wait to wed. However, according to the National Survey of Family Growth , there's an interesting exception to this modern-day rule of thumb. Couples in their 20s who do...
Feb 16, 2022•5 min
Winston Churchill famously said that "we shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us." A recent example is Pittsburgh's Tree of Life Synagogue. After the deadly 2018 shooting , synagogue leaders consulted security expert Juliette Kayyem on how to prevent the same thing from ever happening again. "In security, we view vulnerabilities as inherently bad," she explained . "We solve the problem with layered defenses: more locks, more surveillance. Deprive strangers of access to your te...
Feb 15, 2022•1 min
Our information-saturated world runs on news headlines, one after another, all calling us to shock or outrage. It's tempting to simply want to turn off the noise. It's almost like the world is constantly coming into our clean rooms and dumping a new pile of dirty laundry for us to deal with. So, we just shut the door in order to stop the madness. For Christians, simply closing our eyes and plugging our ears is not an option. We may choose silence or a sort of media fast for a while, but God has ...
Feb 15, 2022•3 min
During an online school board call last month , Ontario teacher Carolyn Burjoski raised concerns over the literature given to K-6th graders. One particular novel, she argued, made it seem "simple and cool" to have a gender transition surgery. Mid-call, the Regional School Board chair Scott Piatkowski interrupted, and the board voted 5-4 to discontinue her presentation. "This person was speaking about transgender people in a way that was disrespectful, that would cause them to be attacked and I r...
Feb 14, 2022•1 min
What if the church became the new go-to source for singles to find a date, instead of an app? For the Colson Center, I'm John Stonestreet. This is BreakPoint. Years ago, would-be couples met at a dance, at church potlucks, or around a friend's dinner table. Even further back, due to the gender imbalance in Roman society because of selective infanticide, many young men found their spouses at church. Today, many singles (including Christian singles) search for a relationship online, scouring profi...
Feb 14, 2022•6 min
