Can we stand for truth without becoming jaded? G.K. Chesterton, in his 1908 book Orthodoxy , describes how when he was a boy, many told him that his ideals would eventually "break up like clouds" and that he'd be forced to put his real faith in simple, practical politics. He writes: What has really happened is exactly the opposite. … I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics. To...
May 20, 2022•1 min
A recent opinion column made quite a splash. In it, the author observed: In every other situation common to the human experience—eating, drinking, exercise, even email—we have come to realize that limits produce healthier results. It's unlikely that sex and relationships are exceptions to the rule. An unrestrained sexual culture hasn't necessarily led to better sex for all or to better relationships. In many cases, it has inspired numbness, callousness, hurting others and being hurt. And rather ...
May 20, 2022•5 min
" Religion, not gender," the Economist reports, "is the best predictor of views on abortion ." The editors continue: Shocked by a draft Supreme Court opinion that would allow states to ban abortion…. some [activists] hope that women enraged by the loss of Roe v Wade will vote en masse for Democrats in November. But, they argue, that hope is misplaced. Whereas the gap between men and women on abortion restrictions is just 6%, religion—combined with race—accounts for a 65% difference. Among both m...
May 19, 2022•1 min
After the invasion of Ukraine, what should be done with Russian art? According to Simon Morrison in a recent The Washington Post article, Vladimir Putin's war against Ukraine has prompted a global push to disavow all things Russian: Music providers like Sony are suspending their Russian operations. … The Royal Opera House in London scrapped a summer season featuring the Bolshoi Ballet. … The Cardiff Philharmonic in Wales pulled the 19th-century . . . composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Some of these mea...
May 19, 2022•5 min
John and Shane consider how to support families who have children wrestling with gender identity. A listener writes in asking for ideas, as some in his own family are navigating gender dysphoria. Then, Shane asks John for a way to think well on manhood and womanhood, noting the natural gender breaks with speakers like Jordan Peterson.
May 18, 2022•37 min
Imagine if giving money in support of a group that protects religious liberty, crafts pro-life legislation, or teaches a biblical view of sexuality or marriage meant that your name and the amount of your contribution would be publicly available. Anyone, including anyone who hoped to intimidate, harass, or "out you" to your employer, would have access to that information. Would you still give if giving exacted a social cost as well as a financial one? That's the situation countless conservative a...
May 18, 2022•5 min
A bizarre talking point circulating in the wake of the Supreme Court leak in the Dobbs case is that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, women who suffer miscarriages could be criminally charged in states that restrict abortion. The rumor apparently stems from a handful of stories involving women who've been charged for the death of their preborn babies after they used drugs or caused a car accident by driving under the influence. These stories have nothing morally or medically in common with miscarria...
May 18, 2022•1 min
Writing for The Atlantic , Quinta Jurecic argues the politics of rage are "seeping into every corner of life." The New York Times , for example, reported that over 500 health officials had quit their jobs since the pandemic, many citing threats and intimidation. According to an Education Week survey, 60% of school administrators say their employees were threatened with violence over the schools' handling of COVID. In 2021, the FAA logged over 6,000 reports of "unruly passengers," as opposed to j...
May 17, 2022•1 min
Last week at our annual Wilberforce Weekend conference, we held a pre-event on Thursday evening to discuss what it means to prepare for a post- Roe future. The presentations were exceptional across the board. Today, I want you to hear from my friend Stephanie Gray Connors. She responded throughout the evening to various slogans used in our culture to promote abortion. Here's one of the short talks she gave in response to the slogan, "legal abortion saves women's lives." Here's Stephanie Gray Con...
May 17, 2022•5 min
Chuck Colson lived a redeemed life. This past weekend we celebrated the redeeming work of Christ in our lives and the lives of those who have come before us. One of the redemption stories we highlighted was Chuck Colson's, and today on the BreakPoint Podcast we share Chuck's story, as told by him, of how Christ saved him not only from something, but to and for many things for the glory of God.
May 16, 2022•32 min
Recently, Stanford Center on Longevity announced a project called the "New Map of Life." "In the United States," the authors write, "as many as half of today's 5-year-olds can expect to live to the age of 100, and this once unattainable milestone may become the norm for newborns by 2050." The problem, the authors admit, is that we don't know what to do with an extra 30 years: The "narrative of an 'aging society' seems to convey only a crisis." Reaching this 100-years-of-life milestone is, as one...
May 16, 2022•1 min
Recently, we held a public event on the evening before our annual Wilberforce Weekend to talk about how we can prepare to live in a post- Roe world. A very important aspect of that event was learning how we can respond to the common slogans, the common lines that people often throw around in support of abortion. We asked Stephanie Gray Connors, one of the great apologists for the sanctity of life in our present moment to address some of these slogans. One of those slogans was "embryos aren't rea...
May 16, 2022•5 min
John and Maria consider the ethics surrounding protests, looking specifically at the public outcry over the leaked draft opinion of the Supreme Court. The pair also considers how the war in Ukraine is sparking the consequences of the overpopulation myth many have believed. And then to close, John unpacks the reason the Colson Center has selected The Life Redeemed as the theme of this year's Wilberforce Weekend.
May 13, 2022•56 min
A month or so ago, Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked to define "woman." She responded, "I'm not a biologist." That was just a week after a biological male won the NCAA women's swimming championship. Gender scholars were quick to support Jackson, pointing to biological anomalies such as people who are born "intersex." But intersex and other "disorders of sexual development" are exceptions. They don't erase the basic biological category of a woman. Ironically, many who remained...
May 13, 2022•1 min
Today launches our annual Wilberforce Weekend. Ten years ago, Chuck Colson gave what would be his final message , at a Wilberforce Weekend event. His message that day was that the world needed the Church to be the Church. His call that day remains the central purpose of the Wilberforce Weekend. This weekend, we will be looking at salvation and redemption from every possible angle we can, in order to better live a life that is redeemed. Chuck's life was a wonderful redemption story. Today on Brea...
May 13, 2022•6 min
For years, sociologist Arthur Brooks has been trying to understand the secret to human happiness. Recently i n The Atlantic, Brooks argued that at least part of the answer is wanting less, something taught by teachers as ideologically diverse as the Buddha and Thomas Aquinas. "As we age, we shouldn't accumulate more to represent ourselves," writes Brooks, "but rather strip things away to find our true selves—and thus, to find happiness and peace." This is good practical wisdom, but there's more ...
May 12, 2022•1 min
A friend of mine has, for decades now, suffered severe back pain. Finally, surgeons took a remarkable step, implanting a device that sends electrical signals to his spinal cord in order to disrupt pain signals traveling to his brain. For the most part, his pain has been dramatically lessened. This was an incredible help for my friend. After all, pain tells us that something is wrong. His condition was never going to change, so the pain served no purpose. The more our knowledge of the human brain...
May 12, 2022•5 min
John and Shane devote this episode of the Breakpoint podcast to the challenges society will face if Roe v. Wade and a federal protection on abortion is overturned and removed.
May 11, 2022•31 min
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been immensely expensive, and not only because of global sanctions and lost military equipment. In fact, the highest price Russia is paying in this war has to do with an increasingly scarce resource: lives. Estimates of Russian casualties in just the first week of the war ranged from 2,000 to 6,000, with thousands more lost since then. Every life lost is tragic, but a s British journalist Ed West points out , this is a loss modern Russia simply cannot afford. Rus...
May 11, 2022•5 min
The status of modern friendship isn't good. "It's precisely because of the atomized, customized nature of our lives that we rely on our friends so very much," Jennifer Senior recently wrote in The Atlantic . "We are recruiting them into the roles of people who once simply coexisted with us—parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, fellow parishioners, fellow union members, fellow Rotarians." Friendships, however, are in short supply. According to one survey , nearly half of Americans have three or few...
May 11, 2022•1 min
Last week's leak of a draft opinion in the Dobbs case reignited comparisons of abortion restrictions with Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale . This isn't new , of course, but it is silly and misguided. Atwood's dystopian novel is about a fictional theocratic successor to the United States, the "Republic of Gilead." In Gilead, select women are forced to become concubines for the sole purpose of breeding. Of course, not killing a child is not the same thing as forcing a woman to bear a child, e...
May 10, 2022•1 min
In 2015, Canada's Supreme Court struck down a 22-year ban on assisted suicide. The next year, its parliament passed legislation allowing " MAID ," or Medical Assistance in Dying for those who suffer from terminal illness and whose death was "reasonably foreseeable." Five years later, the "reasonably foreseeable" language was dropped, as was the requirement of terminal illness. Today, ending one's life with "medical assistance" simply requires a physician and a witness to agree that physical or m...
May 10, 2022•6 min
Today we revisit a speech by Chuck Colson on his renowned work The Faith. Chuck's main idea is that the church is at its best when we propose rather than impose the message of the Gospel. To order a copy of The Faith, visit www.colsoncenter.org
May 09, 2022•44 min
Responding to the leaked draft of Justice Alito's opinion in the Dobbs case, President Biden said, "The idea that we're gonna make a judgment that is going to say that no one can make the judgment to choose to abort a child ... goes way overboard." His statement is hard to follow but here's the point: The president said abortion kills a child —not a clump of cells, not a fetus, not a potential human. A child . This is more than a Biden gaffe. He is acknowledging what even honest pro-abortion fol...
May 09, 2022•1 min
Something long considered reliable evidence for Darwinian evolution, the chemical similarity of living things, is now in question. In 1973, l eading Neo-Darwinist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote that "nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution." He specifically pointed to "biochemical universals," or shared features in the chemistry of life , as evidence that all creatures "arose from inanimate matter only once" and that everything alive today descended from an universal common ance...
May 09, 2022•5 min
John and Maria explore the incredible emotion in the nation following a leak of a draft opinion from the Supreme Court. Then, Maria asks John about the ethics and the way Christians should respond to moves by the government to eliminate student student. They plan to do this by forgiving student loans, but is this a concept Christians should get behind? John and Maria explain the trapings of student debt forgiveness and why the move challenges society. To close, Maria asks John to go deeper into ...
May 06, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Pro-lifers aren't the only ones strategizing for a post- Roe America. By 2020, chemical abortions—abortions accomplished with oral medications— became the most common form of abortion in America. With the FDA recently permitting doctors to prescribe this poison without even an in-person visit , chemical abortions are only going to become more common. This is why it's critical to know that medical abortions can be reversible . The process starts with one drug that starves the baby. A few days lat...
May 06, 2022•1 min
Many say they want a world without Christianity, but many secular thinkers are discovering they should be careful what they wish for. Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of a public high school football coach who was fired for praying on the field after games. Though the firing should never have happened, this now years-long controversy has provided a window into how many in our culture feel about Christian prayer. Hint: they're not positive feelings. Still, one specif...
May 06, 2022•5 min
I don't love BuzzFeed 's clickbaity and crowdsourced approach to content, but a recent article caught my eye: Reddit users revealing what their childhood was like after their parents divorced. "When we were little, mom worked full-time and dad stayed home with us," wrote one user. "When I was six, they separated, and we only saw him once, maybe twice a year. I have never recovered from this sudden and unexplained abandonment." Others described having to become the unintentional middle man betwee...
May 05, 2022•1 min
A few years ago, a kids' book was published titled A is for Activist . On the book jacket is a tiny fist, raised, apparently, in solidarity. A quick stroll through any metropolitan library children's section will find more books like this one. There's Antiracist Baby by Ibram X. Kendi, The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish and, of course, Heather Has Two Mommies . There's Let the Children March and Woke Baby . There's even complete series, such as the "Little Feminists" and the "Citi...
May 05, 2022•5 min
