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 o...
Oct 01, 2021•1 min
In the 19th century, India was coming to grips with the modern world. British companies, like the East India Company, aided in modernizing India through trade, and British missionaries like William Carey helped modernize India through culture formation. Arguably the most creative interaction 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 watchma...
Oct 01, 2021•6 min
A Minneapolis ballot initiative would replace one of the city's largest police departments with a new "Department of Public Safety." While not doing away with police officers entirely, the initiative would reduce the number on patrol and outsource many police duties to unarmed community safety officials. Not everyone is on board. Minnesota Public Radio reports that , while the majority of voters are in favor of some reforms, few want fewer police officers. This is especially true for African-Ame...
Sep 30, 2021•1 min
The Christian commitment to advancing education is part of the historical record. While not wholly consistent in every time and place, the Christian view of life and the world (especially its view of a created, ordered reality and the divine imprint on every human person) has been history's most fertile ground for advancing learning and knowledge. In a Christian worldview, the value of education isn't merely utilitarian. Instead, it grows from the rich soil of Christian beliefs: in a God who wan...
Sep 30, 2021•6 min
This week John and Shane discuss adoption, ranging from embryo adoption to same-sex adoption. A listener asks how adoption supports God's family structure and what the role of it is in God's redemption. Another listener writes in noticing a movement to single-parenthood in their region. The listener asks how to move forward with friends, when those friends are offended by Scripture. Later, John and Shane consider how and when to use modern quotes in BreakPoint and when to use Scripture. John giv...
Sep 29, 2021•1 hr
In mid-September, an organization called "TwoDadsUK" held an exhibition called The Modern Family Show in London. It was a trade show to sell fertility services for LGBTQ people. One vendor's floor-to-ceiling banner announced,, "The New Face of Surrogacy!" next to a photo of two men embracing. No woman. This is an example of marketing being more about the audience than the product. . The audience are those who've intentionally chosen a sterile union, but who now demand the product, which is a chi...
Sep 29, 2021•1 min
Sep 29, 2021•5 min
According to the U.S. Department of Education, since the start of the pandemic, more than 1.5 million students have left traditional public schooling. Many parents are realizing, some for the first time, that students aren't learning what their parents thought they were learning. As one former college professor noted, if you haven't been in education in the past three years, it's almost unrecognizable to what you experienced growing up. This has led to incredible growth in the number of home sch...
Sep 28, 2021•1 min
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, were chosen to grace the cover of the 2021 edition of " Time100: The Most Influential People of 2021 ." After publicly cutting ties with the British royal family several months ago and moving to America, the couple described the whole ordeal in a televised interview and, as a result, made this year's list. Many people have strong opinions about Harry and Meghan's decision to leave Buckingham Palace; I don't. My knowledge of British ...
Sep 28, 2021•5 min
More than 500 female athletes signed an Amicus brief last week asking the U.S. Supreme Court to rule against a Mississippi law that bans abortions after about 15 weeks of pregnancy. Signed by female Olympians, soccer and basketball and swimming stars, the brief failed address the critical questions of the humanity and moral status of children in the womb. Instead, the athletes focused on how abortion restrictions "harm" them. Their approach is typical of the kind of arguments being made against ...
Sep 27, 2021•6 min
John and Maria visit on changes in the education landscape. They discuss the power of technology to not only inform our understanding of the world, especially in education, but how technology forms us. They consider the addictive nature of technology and how it can be associated with increasing numbers in things ranging from facial tics to gender dysphoria. Maria then asks John's perspective on China's crackdown on technology, especially for adolescents. China is limiting video game access for y...
Sep 25, 2021•59 min
Most likely, Tsuda Umkea's father regarded her as expendable. He was so angry when his second child was a second daughter, he stormed out of the house. Still, during Japan's rapid modernization campaign in the late 19th century, he had become interested in the education of girls, and especially the possibility of girls studying in Western countries as exchange students. So, when that opportunity arose for his six-year-old daughter, he volunteered Umkea, known as Ume, to go. Ume ended up in Washi...
Sep 24, 2021•4 min
Pediatricians are growing increasingly concerned about an explosion in facial and vocal tics in teenagers, especially teenage girls. According to the International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society, case numbers in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and Australia have skyrocketed over the last year. They've even called it a "parallel pandemic" alongside COVID-19. A UK journal has reported similar findings. A significant majority of these young patients report spending a lot of time on so...
Sep 23, 2021•5 min
John visits with Vishal Magalwhaldi, author of several books, including The Book That Changed Your World , and most recently The Third Education Revolution , in which he traces both the history of the Christian promotion of education around the world and the opportunity we have in front of us right now....
Sep 22, 2021•48 min
Some people think that Christian interest in education is only instrumental. In other words, we start schools so that we can tell our kids about Jesus Christ and how to become Christians. Of course, there's nothing wrong with that, but the Christian understanding of education goes much deeper. Throughout human history, wherever the Church has gone, education has followed. This is because of how Christianity understands life and the world, particularly the nature of reality itself and the human p...
Sep 22, 2021•5 min
The pandemic policies, social unrest, and political division that's left so much of our culture on edge have created quite a bit of tumult for churches, too. A few weeks ago, in a blog at Mere Orthodoxy , Pastor Michael Graham offered a new way to categorize how Christians are reorganizing amidst the chaos. Long gone are the days when believers automatically joined the church down the street. Even denominational loyalties, theological convictions, and worship styles are not as important as they ...
Sep 21, 2021•5 min
In a recent Wall Street Journal article , psychiatrist Anna Lembke offered a stark warning about our favorite technologies. Dopamine is the brain's natural feel-good chemical. It rewards us when we do enjoyable things: connect with friends, laugh at a joke, eat a taco. Today, that powerful reward cycle is being hijacked by digital technology. Technology is designed to be addictive. With every tap, click, and like, our brain chemistry, which is supposed to spur us on to action, is instead keeping...
Sep 20, 2021•5 min
John and Maria revisit a piece from this week that highlights the beauty of God in the Cosmos. John provides a reflection that we are not simply our bodies or simply a spirit. He gives a worldview lesson, reflecting on another piece that highlights how the Greeks viewed the unborn. Maria then asks John for insight on a recent court case in North Carolina. She focuses her question on the point that the ruling judge ruled against the Catholic school because the school didn't have a strong enough p...
Sep 17, 2021•1 hr 2 min
In yet another indicator that they are not ok, men in America are abandoning higher education in record numbers. According to the Wall Street Journal , at the end of the 2020 academic year, the percentage of male college students dropped to just over 40 percent. Soon, if current trend lines continue, one expert predicts , for every man who earns a college degree, two women will earn a degree. On one hand, this says as much about the state of higher education as it does young men. Simply put, the...
Sep 17, 2021•6 min
In a recent and unintentionally poignant episode of National Public Radio's "On the Media" podcast, an entire conversation debating free speech hinged on the definition of a word that was never really established. "Free speech absolutism," reporters claimed, is an old-fashioned concept because some speech causes harm . Never defined in the conversation (and rarely defined in decades of debate about free speech and first amendment rights) was the word "harm." Most English language dictionaries ar...
Sep 16, 2021•6 min
John and Shane are asked a host of questions surrounding recent BreakPoint commentaries. To start off, John fields a question asking if the church completely missed the lessons we should've learned from 9/11. Additionally, another listener asks if the shift in worldview attention from Islam after 9/11 to critical theory today is one that is honest or if we're missing something in culture. Later in the show a listener asks for definition on where the American idea of inalienable rights is housed,...
Sep 15, 2021•1 hr
According to the U.S. Department of Education, since the start of the pandemic, more than 1.5 million students have left traditional public schooling . Parents and students, it seems, are looking for something different. Many parents and students are looking elsewhere because students struggled to learn online, and some have even fallen behind . Others feel helpless to respond to how school districts and states have handled, and sometimes mishandled, the pandemic . Others are worried about their...
Sep 15, 2021•6 min
Last week, a U.S. District judge ruled against a Catholic school that fired a male teacher who had announced he was marrying his male partner. Coming from a judge notably progressive on sex and marriage issues who cited last year's consequential Bostock decision , the decision wasn't much of a surprise. However, a significant part of his reasoning was: the Catholic School was not Catholic enough . Here's the story. In 2014, a male substitute drama teacher at Charlotte Catholic School announced o...
Sep 14, 2021•6 min
September 11, 2001. For those who were alive and old enough to remember, it is a day indelibly seared into our memories. Puzzlement at the first plane, shock at the second, and terror at the third and fourth. Throughout, there was a slowly emerging realization that this was no accident, that America was at war, and that our world had dramatically, irreversibly, changed. That night, America went to sleep thinking that 10,000 people could be lying crushed in the burning rubble of New York City, Wa...
Sep 13, 2021•5 min
John and Maria discuss the impact of 9/11 on our current cultural moment. They revisit the historical significance of the timeframe surrounding the terrorist attacks, also explaining the worldview and ideological challenges we've faced following the 9/11 attacks. -- Bonus Episode | BreakPoint Podcast Special -- Reflecting on 9/11: Timeless Wisdom from Chuck Colson John Stonestreet & Chuck Colson | BreakPoint Podcast | September 10, 2021 -- In Show Mentions -- Teaching 9/11 to the Emerging Ge...
Sep 11, 2021•1 hr 6 min
Welcome to a special edition of the BreakPoint podcast. In view of the 20th anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attack on the United States, our team went back and revisited commentaries from our founder Chuck Colson. I was blown away by the gracious and truthful framing that Chuck offered to the events of that day. In a series of BreakPoint commentaries, Chuck Colson offered a Christian worldview that was, as we often say at the Colson Center, "big enough." I was also struck by how relevant this ...
Sep 10, 2021•33 min
Tomorrow, as we mark the 20th anniversary of arguably the most devastating day in America's history, we should also remember how Christians are to confront evil. In the days after 9/11, Chuck Colson offered an incredibly good gift: a Christian worldview framework for understanding what had happened, and a roadmap for Christians to both speak truth and love their neighbor. He warned against out-of-control anger and against seeking revenge instead of justice, in both our personal responses and the...
Sep 10, 2021•5 min
Like many of you, I remember exactly where I was on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. I was preparing to teach a class of college freshmen on the topic of Christian worldview. Obviously, my teaching plans for that day changed, but I also had a very real example of how significant worldview is to understanding the world around us. I remember the chaos, I remember the confusion, I remember thinking this had changed our world forever, and it did. Those of us who were alive and old enough realized that t...
Sep 09, 2021•7 min
John and Shane talk through the challenges in reasoning through the pro-choice stance in the face of Texas' new heartbeat bill. John also answers a question on a recent commentary dealing with Millennials. The listeners asks how to communicate the goodness of the Gospel to those who might have a taste for it. To close, John and Shane go point-by-point through a series of statements a Christian school administrator is fielding in Australia. The listener's school is considering how to process sexu...
Sep 09, 2021•1 hr 3 min
How did things in Afghanistan change so dramatically, seemingly overnight? How did a decades-long, frustrating stalemate become the greatest American foreign policy debacle in 50 years ? A nation is left asking, "What went wrong?" The most immediate explanation is the way the withdrawal was handled, from pulling out troops before evacuating citizens and allies, to abandoning the Bagram Air Base. These details and others are hard to explain. A common, longer-view explanation is that the War in Af...
Sep 08, 2021•4 min
