The U.S. Department of Education is changing the rules again, and, again, forcing teachers into situations they may not be prepared for. On June 23, the feds announced that , going forward, gender identity would be included in protected classes under Title IX. Between the efforts of federal officials implementing the latest executive orders and the activism of LGBTQ advocacy groups, school administrators struggle to keep up. Too often they end up caving to these outsiders by crafting new rules o...
Jun 27, 2022•3 min
After nearly 50 years of waiting, working, praying, and weeping, a moment longed for by millions around the nation and around the world has arrived. In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned, not only the heinous 1973 Supreme Court decision known as Roe v. Wade , but also the equally flawed decision from 1992, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization , the Supreme Court found that these earlier cases, the foundation of so-call...
Jun 27, 2022•8 min
While Maria's out for the day, John and Shane swivel to discuss the breaking news of the reversal of Roe v. Wade after the Supreme Court announced the Dobbs decision. Reading through the ruling in real time, John points out that Roe was never constitutional. Because Shane just had an opportunity to interview Ryan T. Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis on their new book Tearing Us Apart, he talks about how abortion harms not only preborn children but entire cultural systems. As John and Shane close,...
Jun 25, 2022•57 min
Given the amount of attention the issue gets, it's easy to yield to a so-called "inevitability thesis" when it comes to transgender ideology, that it's just a matter of time before everyone is on board. A recent story aired for pride month highlighted the story of two parents who chose to raise their biologically female daughter as a transgender boy. "Before Ryland could even speak," the anchor narrates, " he managed to tell his parents that he is a boy." But, the piece continues, "unlike some t...
Jun 24, 2022•7 min
"Perhaps it's the clarity that comes from enduring a difficult period, but I've noticed, in myself and others, a diminishing tolerance for uncomfortable or unfulfilling social interactions," Melissa Kirsch recently wrote in The New York Times . Reflecting on the impacts of the pandemic, Kirsch repeated what has become cultural orthodoxy: If certain relationships are a drag on your health, time, happiness, or resources, ditch them. Of course, Scripture says that "bad company corrupts good morals....
Jun 24, 2022•3 min
This month, Colorado became the first state to officially ban anonymous sperm and egg donation . The law also gives those conceived through anonymous donation the right to seek out their biological parents at 18. This is a win for reproductive ethics and for children. As Katy Faust at Them Before Us puts it, every child has the right to the love of their biological mom and dad, and that relationship matters throughout development. On average, kids raised by their married biological parents do be...
Jun 23, 2022•3 min
To repeat something said on Breakpoint last month, kids deserve better books than the ones currently being written for them. Too many children's books today are activist books, not really written to kids (and certainly not for them) but to and for grown-ups who want to be the kind of parents who would give this kind of book to their kids. I must admit, however, that I recently received an "activist" kid book that I really like, and so does my son. It's age appropriate, written to kids, and desig...
Jun 23, 2022•6 min
According to a recent WORLD magazine opinion piece , "a massive trove of documentary evidence" was released this month, detailing in concrete terms China's brutality towards minority groups. "The files include photographs of detainees (including children), flamboyant speeches by senior Communist Party officials, police and military reports, and training documents," Eric Patterson, the executive vice president of the Religious Freedom Institute, described. "They expose the precision of China's ge...
Jun 22, 2022•3 min
Back in 2017, with a 7-2 majority vote, the Supreme Court ruled that denying a church "an otherwise available public benefit on account of its religious status" amounts to violating the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution. In that case, known as Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer , a Missouri church that operated a licensed pre-school and day-care facility applied for funding from a state program that offered "funds for qualifying organizations to purchase recycled tires to resurf...
Jun 22, 2022•8 min
As University of Tennessee professor James Tucker writes , "The deterioration of reading achievement in the United States has been noted for decades, and the many attempts to correct this decay have been unsuccessful." He then quotes a sobering statistic: "At least "44 million adults [in the United States] are now unable to read a simple story to their children." The question is, why ? Obvious factors include poverty, technology and education, but so are our ideas about what literacy is for . We...
Jun 21, 2022•1 min
A once-popular song by the band Switchfoot declared, "We were meant to live for so much more but we lost ourselves . " In the closing line of his remake of the song "Hurt" (which, by the way, was way better than the original version), Johnny Cash lamented that the one thing he'd do differently, if he could live life over, was "keep himself—I would find a way." Most people, no matter their worldview, resonate with this kind of thinking about life. It points to something the Bible claims about how...
Jun 21, 2022•5 min
Babies are people, not things. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stonestreet with the Point. In a recent interview with Today , an actress revealed she had paid a surrogate to carry twin boys for her because to be pregnant herself would have jeopardized her career. Often, arguments for surrogacy paint pictures of childless couples yearning to be parents. Even that sad situation doesn't justify taking a baby from the body that bore him. But the real stories of surrogacy often look more like this on...
Jun 20, 2022•1 min
Matt Walsh's new documentary, What is A Woman? is built on a very simple premise: Ask the academics, pediatricians, and politicians who promote trans ideology to define their terms.
Jun 20, 2022•5 min
John and Maria discuss the 50th anniversary of the break-in at Watergate. Although Watergate marks the decline of American trust in political institutions— something we're seeing in the January 6 hearings, John points out that Watergate's best legacy was the redemption of Chuck Colson. After Maria shares an inspirational story on Mary Slessor, a missionary in Nigeria, they continue their conversation from last week on why uncarefully parsing first-order and second-order doctrines can be risky. T...
Jun 17, 2022•1 hr 5 min
Earlier this month, Women's March president Rachel Carmona declared that "For the women of this country, this will be a summer of rage. We will be ungovernable … until the right to an abortion is codified into law." Those aren't empty words. Shortly after the Roe v. Wade draft opinion was leaked, at least five crisis pregnancy resource centers were vandalized across the country. On May 8, a Molotov cocktail was thrown through a Wisconsin pro-life group's headquarters , and the words "If abortion...
Jun 17, 2022•1 min
Fifty years ago today, on June 17, 1972, operatives from President Nixon's re-election campaign broke into Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. Were it not for a night guard who noticed that a garage door was taped open not once but twice, the most notorious political scandal in American history may not have been. But he did notice. Before it was over, an American president was forced to resign, and the standard was set by which all other scandals would henceforth be compared. I...
Jun 17, 2022•5 min
Recently, Pizza Hut, as part of their "Book It!" reading program, highlighted books that promote LGBTQ ideology to children. For example, Big Wig is a book about cross- dressing aimed explicitly at a Pre-K through 3rd-grade audience. The "Book It!" website describes the book as a "wonderful read-aloud (that) celebrates the universal childhood experience of dressing up…. acknowledging that sometimes dressing differently from what might be expected is how we become our truest and best selves." The...
Jun 16, 2022•1 min
For much of history, people have marked deaths and marriages with religious ceremonies and sacraments. In a time of rapidly declining religiosity, some are now looking to alternative spiritual authorities to give meaning to their most important moments. Spiritual authorities like, say, Mickey Mouse. Recently, a Reddit post by a newlywed couple went viral after they asked whether it was impolite to spend their entire catering budget on an appearance by Mickey and Minnie Mouse. "My fiancée and I a...
Jun 16, 2022•5 min
It's an interesting time for travel. The price of flights notwithstanding, many are opting for what social media has dubbed " revenge travel ": the chance to get out and make up for time lost during the pandemic. Which brings up the question: What is travel good for? A popular answer is that travel is necessary to experience la dolce vita , or "the sweet life." Writing to the Atlantic , one reader described his year overseas: "I went to Italy burned out from American corporate pressures and retu...
Jun 15, 2022•1 min
Earlier this year, a very secular publication came to an unexpected conclusion. Vox ran a series of articles under the title " America's Struggle for Forgiveness,. " In it, they wrote, "Grace might be the holiest, most precious concept of all in this conversation about right and wrong, penance and reform—but it's the one that almost never gets discussed." Even in the most morally exhausted cultural moments, there are signs of life. Made in God's image, with eternity in our hearts, we're desperat...
Jun 15, 2022•6 min
Quantum theory boggles the mind. As science journalist John Horgan writes , quantum theory is science's most precise, powerful theory of reality. It has predicted countless experiments, spawned countless applications. The trouble is physicists and philosophers disagree over what it means , that is, what it says about how the world works. At the core of the disagreement is what matter consists of at the quantum, or the smallest, level . At that size, matter's properties change when we try to obse...
Jun 14, 2022•1 min
How Christian must Christians be to still be Christian? For the Colson Center, I'm John Stonestreet. This is Breakpoint. A question every youth pastor should expect to answer at least once in their career is the "how far is too far?" question. Of course, the person asking—usually a guy—wants to know how close to the moral cliff he can get before getting married. It's a common question, albeit fundamentally wrong. The ones asking rarely stay pure for long since purity is better understood as a di...
Jun 14, 2022•6 min
According to the U.K. Express , the Chinese government is afraid. Afraid of what? Afraid that there could be 300 million Chinese Christians by 2030, which would be a spectacular increase from the 75 to 100 million Christians in China today. Still, for perspective, there were only about 4 million Christians in China when the Communists took over in 1949. That number had barely changed by Mao's death in 1976. But since then, Christianity has grown like the Chinese economy: 7% or 8% a year, despite...
Jun 13, 2022•1 min
Mary Slessor was born to a Scottish working-class family in 1848. At an early age, Mary joined her parents in the Dundee mills, working half a day while going to school the other half. By age 14, Mary was working 12 hour shifts. Ever an avid reader, she kept a book propped up on her loom so she could read while working. Mary's mother, a devout Presbyterian with an interest in missions, saw that her children were raised in the Faith. When a local mission to the poor opened in Dundee, Mary volunte...
Jun 13, 2022•4 min
John and Maria discuss the way some Christians are handling PRIDE month. Notably, Maria asks John to explain the background of a known publisher of Christian-based books, Eerdmans, and a list of books they've published to "help" Christians think about PRIDE month. Maria then asks John to comment on a recent article by journalist and commentator Ezra Klein who discussed how climate change is impacting the decisions of some adults on whether to have kids. Maria offers some helpful thoughts for us ...
Jun 10, 2022•1 hr 11 min
Many Christians settle for a reductionistic view of salvation, in which eternity is secured but the rest of life left untouched. The Bible, however, presents a much more holistic vision of redemption. To explore salvation from a broader point of view, this year's Wilberforce Weekend looked at "Life Redeemed." The event was framed around three questions: What are we saved from, what are we saved to , and what are we saved for? Rachel Gilson is the author of a fascinating book entitled Born Again ...
Jun 10, 2022•5 min
This summer the U.S. Supreme Court could overturn Roe v. Wad e in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization . Part of what the justices will have to consider is a legal principle called stare decisis , which means respecting precedent. If the High Court wants to respect Roe , especially its deep ideological and legal flaws, it should take into account why Roe was decided the way it was. Since then, the pro-abortion movement has insisted that abortion is a "women's rights" issue. B...
Jun 09, 2022•1 min
During a prayer gathering on the National Mall a few years ago, Terry Beatley, a commissioned Colson Fellow and president of a pro-life organization called the Hosea Initiative , reminded the crowd of a story Chuck Colson told in a Breakpoint commentary over 25 years ago. The story, of how God changed the heart of one of our nation's most notorious abortionists, is about as dramatic a conversion as Chuck Colson's was. Yet, it came in the wake of one of the greatest defeats pro-lifers had suffere...
Jun 09, 2022•4 min
John and Os Guinness discuss the privitization of faith, if Americans should support revolution or revival in this cultural moment, and what Christians should do with public school. They also answer a host of other questions from the audience at Wilberforce Weekend this year asked by Michael Craven, Vice President of Equipping and Mobilization at the Colson Center.
Jun 08, 2022•46 min
Kudos to these Tampa Bay Rays. On Saturday night, several players for the Tampa Bay Rays opted out of wearing rainbow logos for "Pride Night." Pitcher Jason Adam represented those players to reporters, saying, while players want all to feel "welcome and loved" at games, We don't want to encourage [an LGBTQ lifestyle] if we believe in Jesus, who's encouraged us to live a lifestyle that would abstain from that behavior. Just like (Jesus) encourages me as a heterosexual male to abstain from sex out...
Jun 08, 2022•1 min
