Last week we received a note from a listener concerned with the pagan roots of the Christmas holiday. It's something you hear a lot this time of year, that Christians "borrowed lumber" from pagans to build the traditions of Christmas. Often, critics point to things like the Christmas tree, the alignment of Jesus' birth with the Egyptian God Horus, and the Christian culture war against the practice of Saturnalia. A lot of these arguments gained traction in a documentary called Religulous by liber...
Dec 24, 2021•1 min
Christians have so many wonderful resources that can help us celebrate Christ's birth and prepare our hearts for His second coming, and one of them is sacred music. The abundant supply of truly majestic Christmas music points to a long line of theological artists, individuals who took seriously both what truth needed to be said in music and how it could be said so as to be both memorable and beautiful. Perhaps the greatest offering of all is Johann Sebastian Bach's Christmas Oratorio. For much o...
Dec 24, 2021•4 min
Last week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced an investigation into two big pharmaceutical companies profiting from pushing off-label hormone treatment for gender dysphoric kids. In a public statement, Paxton accused these companies of failing to warn about the devastating side effects of the medications, including sterility. The fact is, the hormone suppressing medications being prescribed by so-called "gender clinics" are not approved by the FDA to treat gender dysphoria. They are onl...
Dec 23, 2021•1 min
At the risk of falling into the current debate over whether Christians should tone down the violent language and imagery when it comes to their faith, the Bible presents the Incarnation as an act of War. In fact, the Bible presents the Incarnation as the central chapter in the larger story of the conflict between good and evil; one never fully lost by God but captured in Christ Jesus. That's something missing from the 24-hour holiday music stations, most Christmas plays and pageants, and many Ch...
Dec 23, 2021•12 min
John and Shane are asked if there should be a Christian approach to boycotting. They are then asked about the unity Evangelicals and Catholics can have while still being true to their convictions. Another listener writes in to ask how to think well of a liberalizing in her field of psychology. To close, John and Shane discuss a commentary on the rise in opioid deaths in America and how the church can and should respond.
Dec 22, 2021•55 min
Two months ago, Apple quietly removed a Quran app and a Bible App from its app store in China at the request of the Chinese Communist Party. Apple claimed in a statement they had to do it because they have to, quote, "obey local laws." This is the same 2.8-trillion-dollar company with an "Inclusion and Diversity" initiative that claims, without a sense of irony, to hold a, quote, "long-standing commitment to making… the world more just." According to its American website, that means hiring a mor...
Dec 22, 2021•1 min
As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, Americans continue to leave religion behind in large numbers, even during the pandemic. According to Pew Research, the percentage of American Christians has fallen about 12% over the last ten years, from 75% in 2011 to around 63% today. The number who pray every day is even lower, at 45%. The demographic rising in its place are the so-called "nones," those who identify religiously as "nothing in particular." This group grew to about 20% of the US pop...
Dec 22, 2021•5 min
Last year, the FDA lifted an important restriction on the " abortion pill ," a drug that induces abortion in early pregnancy by starving the preborn child. Prior to the pandemic, doctors were required to meet face-to-face with patients before prescribing the drug, but that requirement was lifted during the pandemic. Last week, the FDA made the policy change permanent. This comes just as our culture, from psychological literature to the arts , has begun to understand miscarriage as real trauma, e...
Dec 21, 2021•1 min
More than a few folks, from theologian John Calvin to philosopher William James to French theologian and historian Louis Auguste Sabatier, have noted that humans are "incurably religious" creatures. In other words, religion is native to the human heart. In the history of the world, the wholesale rejections of the supernatural is a quirk of Western secularism. At the same time, it will not ultimately survive the human longing for transcendence and communion with the supernatural, no matter how fa...
Dec 21, 2021•5 min
Historian and long-time friend of the Colson Center, Dr. Glenn Sunshine joined Shane Morris to discuss if Christmas is a pagan holiday. During his conversation with Shane, Dr. Sunshine answered some of the core questions about Christmas. For instance, Sunshine argued that December 25th was not chosen as the date for Christmas in order to co-opt a pagan solstice festival. More likely, it was based on an ancient Jewish belief that people are conceived on the date of their deaths. Since Christ died...
Dec 20, 2021•52 min
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, believes social media platforms should be held accountable for the damage they cause teenage girls. He offers many reasons why. In one study, young women were told to use Instagram, Facebook, or play a simple video game. After just seven minutes of scrolling, the Instagram users, in particular, showed decreased body satisfaction and a negative emotional state. This isn't because of the amount of time on the site, but because of its design. Focusing on body ...
Dec 20, 2021•1 min
A few years ago, my friend and former Breakpoint co-host Eric Metaxas wrote a book called Seven Women . While researching for the book, Metaxas made a strategic decision: he would not write about women who were merely the first women to do something men had already done — even though these were the sorts of women people kept recommending he write about. Instead, Metaxas wrote about women who improved the world because they were women, not in spite of that fact. Since Seven Women was published in...
Dec 20, 2021•6 min
John and Maria discuss the destruction from a series of Tornados that swept the Midwest this week. The explore the worldview significance of the devastation in light of our culture's loss of the inherent value and dignity of life. To close, Maria asks John to expound on how society is experiencing a rise in acts of desperation, through crime and violence, and the avoidance of the deaths from despair. References: God Is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas Deitrich Bonhoeffer | West...
Dec 17, 2021•49 min
Every generation, it seems, complains about the next generation's music, sometimes for moral reasons and other times from taste. When Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring debuted in Paris , it sparked outrage from conservative opera-goers, leading to a full-scale riot. While musical styles often differ, the emerging consensus of researches suggests that music leaves its mark, especially when it delivers lewd or violent content . Multiple studies published in the American Association of Pediatrics, f...
Dec 17, 2021•1 min
In his article " A Photo History of Male Affection ," Brett McKay catalogs the dramatic ways male friendship has changed over time. One hundred years ago, men were far more comfortable showing each other everyday physical affection: draping arms over shoulders, sitting close to each other, even holding hands. To modern eyes, McKay's examples look, well, odd. It seems impossible for us not to see some kind of homosexual subtext to these photos. But challenging that assumption is precisely why McK...
Dec 17, 2021•10 min
According to Lifeway Research , over 90 percent of Americans celebrate Christmas, but only 22 percent feel confident they could retell the story of the Jesus' birth from memory. 17 percent said they couldn't remember any of it! It's tempting to cry out with Charlie Brown, "Isn't there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?!?!" Maybe it's time to whip out the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, and watch Charlie go through the motions of the holiday season without knowing why. Right when he i...
Dec 16, 2021•1 min
Yesterday on BreakPoint , we talked about the rise in addictions and overdose deaths due to our nation's opioid crisis. Through a constellation of unemployment rates, cultural darkness, and opioid availability, thousands in America's "Rust Belt" are falling to what are being called "deaths of despair." All of which was worsened by the greed and deception of pharmaceutical companies and the FDA. And now, thanks to a new report, we know that the largely rural pain of opioid deaths is being matched...
Dec 16, 2021•7 min
John and Shane discuss the role of subsidiarity in the life of Christians before they answer a question for resources on caring for the elderly and those with disabilities. Then, Shane asks John how Christians should prepare for a post-Roe world before John answers a question for resources on building a four-chapter Gospel framework.
Dec 15, 2021•54 min
Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization . The case is about a Mississippi law that effectively bans abortion after 15 weeks. Abortion advocates claim this law and others like it assault the fundamental rights of women and "force them to have babies." Last week, the French National Assembly adopted a bill extending the abortion limit from 12 to 14 weeks in that country. Most European countries restrict abortion to the first trimester, ...
Dec 15, 2021•1 min
The United States just passed a grim milestone: over 100,000 deaths from opioid overdoses in the past year. Most of these deaths were due to fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. Though sometimes prescribed as a painkiller, fentanyl is also a street drug that is often combined with heroin, cocaine, or methamphetamines. America's battle with opioids is now 25 years old. Dopesick, a new streaming series on HULU based on a book by the same name , tells how Purdue pharma sold opioids to the public as non-ad...
Dec 15, 2021•6 min
Washington State now allows convicted male felons who identify as female to move to women's prisons . No surprise but tragic nonetheless, reports are already emerging of biological males abusing and sexually exploiting female inmates. One convicted child molester was transferred to a Seattle women's prison after claiming to be a woman and changing his name. He's now accused of raping a developmentally disabled female inmate . A former guard told National Review that this predator was one of six ...
Dec 14, 2021•1 min
Le Petit Robert , a popular dictionary of the French language, recently created a gender-neutral pronoun . The word is "iel," a merging of the masculine pronoun "il" with the feminine pronoun "elle." But, it isn't sitting well with many French folks. Some see the move as an export of American wokeism into French culture , while others hail it as a travesty, an abuse of the French language. After all, French, like other Romance languages, is very gendered . Most nouns are either masculine, such a...
Dec 14, 2021•5 min
In the heart of the 1980s, there was a spate of "Aid" music projects. We had " We Are the World ," " Farm Aid ," and, for the holiday junkies, a song to raise money for starving Africans which contained the lines, " There won't be snow in Africa this Christmastime . . . Do they know it's Christmastime at all? " This is sweet, but it's also silly. From Christianity's earliest days, some of the most important Christian thinkers and leaders hailed from Africa: Tertullian , Origen , Athanasius , and...
Dec 13, 2021•1 min
Recently, the Economist reported that "in any given year one person in six is afflicted by a mental illness… [yet] two-thirds of people with a mental health problem do not receive any treatment for it. In poor countries, hardly any do. And almost everywhere, psychiatrists and clinical psychologists are scarce." After painting this bleak picture, the same authors propose a solution with promising results: Non-experts, trained in the basics of "talk therapy." After a year of training in Cognitive ...
Dec 13, 2021•6 min
John and Maria outline the worldview angles behind President Biden's "Build Back Better Plan." Notably, John points to the inherent issue with the Department of Health and Human Services directing relief money sent to families to be used specifically in professional child-care services. Then, John explains the current issues with the Olympics and China. Maria asks John a series of important questions on how the United States should respond to the human rights abuses China is committing against f...
Dec 10, 2021•1 hr 5 min
To hear the NCAA tell the story , an average swimmer from the University of Pennsylvania became a nationally ranked superstar overnight. Check the receipts, and we learn Will Thomas only started breaking records and winning meets by comically huge margins when he began going by " Lia" Thomas this past year. Similar incidents are increasingly happening in various sports at all levels, but swimming offers an especially clear picture of what it means when we allow men to compete against women. Succ...
Dec 10, 2021•1 min
One of the features of the sexual revolution, especially in these latter days, is a steady stream of new words that were invented to justify increasingly incoherent ideas. For example, the word " cisgender ," coined by sociologists in the 90s, refers to "those who continue to identify with the sex they were assigned at birth." The definition itself is loaded with ideas, such as sex being assigned at birth, but it basically means boys who identify as boys and girls who identify as girls. Only a c...
Dec 10, 2021•8 min
In Scientific American, physician Carolyn Barber describes a new condition: "texting thumb." "The patient's right thumb knuckle is inflamed, swollen, and often painful," she writes, "especially toward the end of the day… Her middle finger intermittently has a new 'catch' to it when bent. The patient she's describing? Herself . An emergency room physician, Barber took to working more on her phone. At the same time, she started seeing an increased toll on people's musculoskeletal systems from phon...
Dec 09, 2021•1 min
A young woman recently commented to a friend, "I feel like once you have kids, your life is just done." So, despite pressure from her mom, she was in no rush to settle down. "I've got too much living to do. I want to wait a while before I'm finished." It's not uncommon to hear people suggest that things like marriage and family and parenting are, at best, distractions from what life is really about (like a career or amusement or travel), or at worst, a sort of death sentence that marks the end o...
Dec 09, 2021•5 min
John and Shane are asked how to respond to church leadership who feels speaking about culture topics will cause ripples in the church. Later, the two are asked how they can speak with love to those who are confused about where their true sense of identity comes from? To close, John and Shane provide an understanding of how worldviews shape perspectives of the end times, and how Christians should handle those perspectives in living this cultural moment.
Dec 08, 2021•48 min
