Last Saturday was World Suicide Prevention Day, a time to remember that suicide is a growing problem. In the U.S., it increased by 30% from 2000-2018 , and that was before COVID. In 2019, it was the second leading cause of death for ages 10-34 . Christians aren't excluded. LifeWay research has shown that 32% of Protestant church-going respondents had a family member or "close acquaintance" die by suicide. Because of this great need, Colson Educators has teamed with Dr. Matthew Sleeth, a former e...
Sep 12, 2022•1 min
Recently, an impressive development in embryology was reported by the Israeli Weizmann Institute of Science. Using only stem cells, without the presence of sperm, eggs, or even a womb, researchers successfully created functioning mouse embryos , complete with beating hearts, blood circulation, brain tissue and rudimentary digestive systems. Carolyn Johnson in The Washington Post described the discovery as "a fascinating, potentially fraught realm of science that could one day be used to create r...
Sep 12, 2022•5 min
John and Maria discuss the life and legacy of Queen Elizabeth II and her longstanding sense of service to her nation. Afterwards, they stress the correlation—not the causation—between deaths of despair and decline in blue laws, laws against commerce on Sunday. They end by touching on commentaries from this week, in particular one highlighting the rebuttal of a false narrative that the religious right was founded in racism.
Sep 09, 2022•1 hr 11 min
Yesterday, after the world had learned that her family had been called to her side, Queen Elizabeth II, the longest reigning monarch in British history, died at age 96. It's simply impossible to articulate just how much the world, Britain, the British Empire, Western civilization, and the monarchy changed during her reign. Many Americans were fascinated by her and the royal family, as demonstrated in the popularity of shows like The Crown. She seemed to navigate a changing world by not changing,...
Sep 09, 2022•1 min
A few weeks back, Twitter banned a user for violent language . The offending tweet was, "I will out sword drill any Christian man." For anyone not familiar with evangelical subculture, a "sword drill" has nothing to do with blades. It's a game to see who can find a particular Bible passage first. Had the protectors of Twitter taken the time to investigate or, even better, had some Christians on their staff to ask, they may have spared themselves the ridicule which rightfully followed. Unfortunat...
Sep 09, 2022•5 min
Recently the University of Washington published research into whether hormones and puberty blockers improve the mental health of kids with gender dysphoria. According to the PR team for the university, pretty much every media outlet that covered the study, and the study's authors themselves, the answer was yes. Except it wasn't . The numbers actually revealed no difference between kids' mental health before taking hormones and after a year of the treatment. At both moments in time, kids were suf...
Sep 08, 2022•1 min
"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 ." Alt...
Sep 08, 2022•6 min
Hope Resource Center , a Christian crisis pregnancy center in Knoxville, Tennessee, offers free pregnancy tests, well-women exams, STD testing, and ultrasounds. If you search for Hope Resource Center on Yelp, a "consumer notice" pops up with a warning: "Crisis Pregnancy Centers typically provide limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals onsite." Last week, Yelp announced that these notices will appear at the top of listings for every crisis pregnancy center—even wh...
Sep 07, 2022•1 min
The Institute for Family Studies has published a list of legal and policy recommendations to protect teens from the dangers of social media. Among the recommendations are age-verification laws, parental consent requirements, and shutting down social media platforms at night for teens. Other nations have already attempted to restrict young people's access to technology. For example, a couple of years ago, France banned cell phone use in schools up to age 15. Monitoring teens' engagement with soci...
Sep 07, 2022•5 min
Recently The New Yorker profiled a nursing home run by the Little Sisters of the Poor. The piece described, in admirable terms, the Catholic nuns' reputation for treating the elderly with dignity and compassion, as well as the Little Sisters' founder, a French nun known for personally taking in the homeless. Such behavior is not strange for followers of Jesus. What is strange is The New Yorker 's about-face. Not long ago, the magazine covered the Little Sisters for a very different reason. Writi...
Sep 06, 2022•1 min
Teen mental health has never been this bad. As New York Times journalists Michael Barbaro and Matt Richtel discussed last week on The Daily podcast, we're facing an unprecedented crisis in teen mental health. Mere decades ago, the major threats to the health and well-being of young people in the West were nearly all external, such as illness, car accidents, risky sexual behavior, alcohol, or smoking. Today, the greatest threats to the health and well-being of young people are internal. As Richte...
Sep 06, 2022•5 min
Fertility is a gift, not a problem. According to an NPR report, more women are seeking sterilization. For example, at Bozeman Health Deaconess Hospital in Montana, more women in their twenties and thirties are asking not for their tubes to be tied—a reversible procedure—but to be removed , a permanent procedure. This is another sign that women's fertility has been largely pathologized , treated as a bug rather than a feature of being a woman. It's as if a woman's body is presumed better when mor...
Sep 05, 2022•1 min
On this Labor Day, here are some important ideas from Chuck Colson on the importance of work. Americans are rethinking work, at least in the sense of employment. While there are many factors behind what has been called "The Great Resignation," "The Great Quit," and "The Great Reshuffle," we shouldn't underestimate the connection between how people see work and our culture-wide crisis of meaninglessness. Christian ethicist Oliver O'Donovan has written: "In work we make a difference to the world, ...
Sep 05, 2022•4 min
John and Maria focus in on the factors contributing to the remarkable rise in mental health issues for young people, including the crisis of authority that results from the barrage of information online. Afterwards, they discuss how the Church has always led in innovative education and must continue to do so. They end on a recent win and two losses for religious liberty in the lower courts.
Sep 02, 2022•1 hr 13 min
It's been a year since the U.S. military's disastrous pullout from Afghanistan left allies, colleagues, and up to 1,000 American citizens there to fend for themselves. Though the new Taliban government promised to respect human rights, especially the rights of women, it's turned out as many expected. Universities and primary schools are open to women, but girls over age 11 are locked out of secondary schools, women are only permitted to work in education and health, must keep their faces covered...
Sep 02, 2022•1 min
Three days before the first day of school in Columbus, Ohio, the teachers' union went on strike , leaving 47,000 students with nowhere to go. School board officials promised that schooling would move forward "online," but on what was supposed to be the first day, the website suffered hours-long outages. It was chaos. Even as this teachers' strike was brewing, a new school, in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Columbus, was preparing to open its doors for the first time. Westside Christian Scho...
Sep 02, 2022•5 min
Recently, in a speech at a Georgia church , rising progressive star Stacey Abrams, after noting that her parents had been pastors, declared, "I was trained to read and understand the Bible, and I will tell you this, there is nothing about the decision to eliminate access to abortion care that is grounded in anything other than cruelty and meanness." However, the way the Bible speaks of preborn children eliminates abortion as a moral option. In Psalm 139, the psalmist declares, " For you formed m...
Sep 01, 2022•1 min
Recently, at The Celebration of America's Promise to Parents event, hosted by the Alliance Defending Freedom, Abigail Martinez, a grieving mother, shared a story that every single parent, pastor, and lawmaker in America needs to hear. Abigail's daughter Yaeli began to struggle with depression when she was in the 8th grade. Without communication with her mother, Yaeli was quickly funneled by personnel at her school towards the LGBTQ group, and then to an outside psychologist. Soon, Yaeli was bein...
Sep 01, 2022•5 min
Earlier this month, British-Indian author Salman Rushdie was brutally attacked at an event in upstate New York. In 1989, Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses so enraged Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini that he issued a global kill-order , or fatwa, on the author, his editors, and publishers. Though Khomeini died later that year, fatwas cannot be revoked posthumously . So, Rushdie went into hiding, appearing later only under heavy security. Eventually, many in the West simply forgot about it. Shia extremi...
Aug 31, 2022•1 min
In 2016, Canada legalized euthanasia through the euphemistically titled Medical Aid in Dying (or MAiD). Since passing, the number of Canadians who either "enthusiastically" or "cautiously" support the practice has risen slightly from 75% to 80%. The response from communities representing those with disabilities, however, has remained consistently opposed. Their fears, that Canada's end-of-life policies would prove to be only the cliff edge of a moral abyss, have proven to be largely accurate. As...
Aug 31, 2022•5 min
Last week President Biden announced a plan to cancel student debt, about $330 billion worth . The cost to taxpayers could be as high as half a trillion dollars . My friend Dan Darling joked on Twitter that youth pastors just received the gift of a great sermon illustration, but some have actually defended the policy ( which even former Obama advisors have criticized ) by pointing to Jesus words in the Lord's Prayer: "forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors…" For example, a n editorial in ...
Aug 30, 2022•1 min
A new "manifestation trend" called "The Whisper Method" has gone viral on TikTok. If the word salad in that sentence is new to you, "manifestation" is the practice of focused, intense thinking about what you want until you get it. The practice is grounded in New Age philosophy and seems to re-emerge every few years in some new form. The "Whisper Method" is the latest manifestation of manifestation, and TikTok is where it is all happening. The "Whisper Method" involves thinking of what you really...
Aug 30, 2022•4 min
A new law in a northern state of India imposes up to 10 years in jail time for so-called "forced," or "mass" conversions … meaning more than one person at a time. It also casts suspicion on those influenced by Christian social services like health, education, and charity, which often appeal to those trapped in Hindu's marginalized lower castes. India's constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but laws like this reflect how rapidly the ruling party's push for Hindu Nationalism has changed thi...
Aug 29, 2022•1 min
The Dobbs decision is the most significant Supreme Court decision of our lifetime, and it's already been cited in another legal case. Recently, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall requested that a federal district court remove an injunction against a ban on medical intervention for youth seeking a transgender identity. He wrote: "But no one—adult or child—has a right to transitioning treatments that is deeply rooted in our Nation's history and tradition." His words are based on language from...
Aug 29, 2022•5 min
In response to a recent op-ed at Christianity Today , Maria and John insist that Christians can and should be involved in the public square, particularly in the schools. One clear reason is the proposed regulations reinterpreting Title IX. These regulations would remove parental rights from parents whose kids are drawn to radical gender ideology, making the schools conduits to transgender treatments. Maria and John then move to a discussion of the "why" behind a new stat showing that women are l...
Aug 26, 2022•1 hr 3 min
Next month, the Colson Center is offering a short course entitled " The Essential Church: Why Christians (and the World) Still Need the Church. " It's a timely message, especially given a recent shift in Church demographics. Christianity Today reported that younger women are, for the first time, less likely to go to church than men... not because more men are now attending church, but because more women are deconstructing their faith, and more likely to identify as "nones." Battered by church co...
Aug 26, 2022•1 min
Frequent readers and listeners of Breakpoint know about Max. The grandson of Chuck Colson and subject of a book called Dancing With Max , authored by Emily Colson (Chuck's daughter and Colson Center board member), Max is a remarkable young man who has autism. The last few years have been difficult for Emily and Max, especially since the COVID lockdowns disrupted their routines and canceled their helpers. The last few years were particularly hard on full-time caretakers. And yet, in the middle of...
Aug 26, 2022•5 min
According to Ian Lovett in The Wall Street Journal , "Dozens of priests from the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, the country's largest denomination, have been kidnapped or killed since the (Russian) invasion began." Some have been tortured, accused of stirring up anti-Russian sentiment. Those allowed to return to their congregations bear scars and missing teeth. Some never return at all. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church's split from Russian Orthodoxy in 2019 provides the political motivation for Russia...
Aug 25, 2022•1 min
Earlier this summer, the U.S. Department of Education announced new regulations regarding Title IX, which is designed to ensure and protect access for women and girls in education. These new rules are 700 pages long and are being trumpeted by organizations such as the National Education Association as a victory for victims of sexual harassment and clarification of discrimination based on sex. However, what is meant by "sex" will be a disaster for women. The massive document is infected with the ...
Aug 25, 2022•5 min
Last month the world got its first look at new photographs of deep space from NASA's James Webb telescope. The level of detail in the photos was staggering and beautiful, revealing stars, "Cosmic Cliffs," and ultraviolet radiation from the birth of new stars. Christians should approach new technologies with care. Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should . At the same time, this new telescope is an inspiring example of what humans can do because of how God made us. Technology can e...
Aug 24, 2022•1 min
