In her new tell-all memoir The Woman in Me, Britney Spears reveals that she was pressured to have an abortion by Justin Timberlake when they were a celebrity couple. "Justin definitely wasn't happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren't ready to have a baby in our lives." She concluded, "If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it. And yet Justin was so sure that he didn't want to be a father." Her experience is shared by millions. As an article in Christian Newswire put it, ...
Oct 30, 2023•1 min
Every year around this time, the ritual begins anew. The weather cools off, the leaves change color, and Christians start arguing about Halloween. Many people love this night. It gives them an excuse to host parties, kick off the holiday spending season, and provide economic stimulus for the dental industry. Others use it as an excuse to flirt with things much darker than plastic skeletons and creative jack-o'-lanterns. Too many adults use Halloween as an excuse to throw out common standards of ...
Oct 30, 2023•4 min
John Stonestreet and Maria Baer discuss the worldviews behind recent tragic headlines, including the shooting in Maine and the war in Israel. Alliance Defending Freedom is being targeted with a false narrative about their mission. - Recommendations - Golda The Narrative: Peace and War in Israel with Michael Mistretta All Israel Will Be Saved Segment 1: The Worldviews Behind Tragedies U.S. Sees Spike in Anti-Semitic Incidents Since Start of Israel-Hamas War ALVIN PLANTINGA: The Dawkins Confusion ...
Oct 27, 2023•58 min
On October 22, 2020, 34 countries signed the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women's Health and Strengthening the Family . Though it lacked any legal obligations, the statement was intended to express that it was indeed possible to advance the health and wellbeing of women and protect the lives of the preborn at the same time. The original list of countries included the United States. In fact, then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo helped to architect the project. Eight days after becomin...
Oct 27, 2023•1 min
A new California law signed by Governor Newsom on October 7 will enable strangers to lead children 12 and older on matters of mental health and their home life without requiring any parental consent. It's a bizarre irony for a state that's also suing the corporation Meta for harming children under age 13 through its social media platforms, based on the assumption that children are too vulnerable to resist the effects of social media. Evidently, children can't resist their phones, but they should...
Oct 27, 2023•6 min
A parent of a six-year-old recently asked WIRED Magazine's advice columnist, "My kid wants to be an influencer. Is that bad?" WIRED's answer, more or less, was that the concerned parent should relax. "All that collective angst about television, movies, newspapers, and theater," the author wrote , is "a lineage, a rite of passage through which all generations must proceed." That's true. But just because "The Twist" was pretty harmless doesn't mean that TikTok is. Smartphones are an open door for ...
Oct 26, 2023•1 min
In a recent article published by the Washington Institute , professor and lawyer Eric Treene offered a robust alternative way of understanding Christian Nationalism and its significance within American culture. Depending on who's doing the talking, Christian Nationalism is either the greatest danger to America or our only hope in resisting the onslaught of the progressive movement. But there is a better way. As Treene wrote, the current debate over Christian Nationalism is the most recent chapte...
Oct 26, 2023•5 min
Recently, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley questioned President of the NCAA Charlie Baker about the association's policy regarding male athletes who claim they are women. As part of his questioning, Hawley repeated testimony he'd heard a few months prior from Riley Gaines, a U.S. swimmer who was forced, with no warning, to shower, change, and compete alongside a man. Neither she nor any of her teammates were notified beforehand, let alone asked for consent. When Hawley asked Baker, who started his j...
Oct 25, 2023•1 min
A rarely stated but widely assumed myth of our " information age" is that access to information is the same thing as knowledge or, even worse, wisdom . Another is that time not spent accessing information is wasted, perhaps even immorally so. This explains, at least in part, the extent to which people go in order to avoid boredom today. Even brief 30-second intervals at a red light have us grasping for our phones. Most of us are uncomfortable with having "nothing to do," even for a moment. Howev...
Oct 25, 2023•6 min
Typically, People magazine publishes stories lamenting reduced access to abortion that has resulted for some women since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. But earlier this month, the magazine published a heartbreaking story lamenting an abortion. Las Vegas mom Tamika Thomas unexpectedly lost her two preborn babies after a local pharmacy wrongfully gave her an abortifacient. Having undergone in vitro fertilization, Thomas was picking up pills that she thought were going to help kickstart her pregna...
Oct 24, 2023•1 min
In a recent "X" post that went viral, a young woman lamented: "[I'm] Realizing at 32 that I don't care about building a career or climbing any corporate ladder. All I want to do is make the most amount of money working the least amount of hours possible so I can spend the MAJORITY of my time with my family, living life on my own terms instead of spending 40+ years working for a boss who's paying me what he thinks is 'fair.'" This woman speaks for many 30-and-40-somethings who wish they'd priorit...
Oct 24, 2023•6 min
A 2012 headline in U.S. News and World Report asked, " Is It Time to Rate Young Adult Books for Mature Content? " According to the article, there was an increase in profanity in children's books and sexual content in young adult novels. In fact, a survey that year revealed that 55% of the readers of young adult novels were adults, not teens. A decade later, no one seems to be asking questions about graphic content in books for young people anymore. Rather, that content is being defended and prom...
Oct 23, 2023•1 min
A recent episode of The Daily podcast from The New York Times ominously warned, " The Mosquitoes Are Winning ." Mosquitoes, believe it or not, are mankind's deadliest predators, carrying disease that result in over 219 million infections and over 400,000 deaths every year . Even that number is dramatically reduced from previous highs. Highly effective efforts to combat malaria through bed nets, vaccines, and insecticides have reduced global deaths by more than a third . Today, however, the world...
Oct 23, 2023•6 min
John Stonestreet sits down with Joel Rosenberg and Eric Patterson to discuss the war in Israel. Joel Rosenberg is the host and executive producer of THE ROSENBERG REPORT , the only weekly, prime time news and commentary show about Israel on any American news channel. It launched on October 6, 2022 and airs at 9pm eastern Thursday nights on TBN, the world's most-watched Christian TV network. Joel and his wife, Lynn, are dual U.S.-Israeli citizens and live in Jerusalem. Eric Patterson, Ph.D. serve...
Oct 20, 2023•1 hr 16 min
According to the National Academy of Medicine , 17 million Americans care for an older parent, spouse, friend, or neighbor with medical limitations. It is costly, beautiful, and important work, especially as so many push to eliminate suffering by eliminating sufferers. There are, as a full-time caregiver put it recently, important lessons learned and blessings received in bearing each other's burdens: "Over the years, I have prayed many prayers for the people whom I've been entrusted to care for...
Oct 20, 2023•1 min
Nearly 15 years ago, Uwe and Hannelore Romeike fled Germany in order to homeschool their children in the United States. Under Germany's education laws, the Romeikes were subject to severe financial penalties for attempting to homeschool. On a few occasions, police came to their home and escorted their children to school. In 2009, they moved to the U.S. and petitioned the government for asylum. They've lived here since, mainly in Morristown, Tennessee. Never formally granted asylum, they were gra...
Oct 20, 2023•7 min
Recently on the The Deep Map podcast, Robert Nicholson , founder of the Philos Project, a Christian Middle East advocacy group, said that he finds it "amazing" that "the people who claim to love Palestinians don't know anything about them, and they're not even trying to learn." In the interview, Nicholson emphasized findings of The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research . For example, over two-thirds of Palestinians reject a two-state solution . Ninety-three percent of Palestinians re...
Oct 19, 2023•1 min
Jesus of Nazareth is one of those rare historical figures who nearly everyone wants to claim. You might say that just as God made us in His image, people return the favor and remake Jesus in our image. In fact, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it became academically popular to claim to know what Jesus taught while assuming the Gospel accounts, especially the miraculous parts, were not true. An assumption that was simply taken for granted is that Jesus never claimed to be God. Though th...
Oct 19, 2023•4 min
The same day that Hamas militants murdered thousands of innocent men, women, and children, over 30 Harvard University student groups signed a statement of solidarity … not with the victims, but with the militants. "We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence … [T]he apartheid regime is the only one to blame," they wrote. Harvard's administration was deafeningly silent for days . Only after 500 faculty and over 3,000 universit...
Oct 18, 2023•1 min
Late last month, a large majority of Members of the European Parliament (MEP) voted to pass a regulation that will protect the donation and destruction of so-called "substances of human origin" for the sake of "patient health." According to European media service Euractive, the regulation is intended to "set a framework to provide donors and patients with a future-proof and harmonised system for transplants and donations." However, a group of European Union Catholic bishops warns that the langua...
Oct 18, 2023•5 min
"Want to Believe in Yourself?" The New York Times asked recently . The key is to "matter." In the article, "mattering" was given a psychological twist, defined as adding value to a community and being valued in return. On the one hand, this is an example of missing the point of the problem. Telling someone to choose to matter is like telling someone to make meaning out of an ultimately meaningless universe with their ultimately meaningless lives. At the same time, the author isn't wrong to imply...
Oct 17, 2023•1 min
Neil Shenvi and Pat Sawyer unpack these ideas on Critical Theory and expose them in their new book Critical Dilemma. With a gift to the Colson Center this month , you can request a copy. The authors will join us on October 26 for our next Breakpoint Forum to discuss the ideas of Critical Theory in light of some of these current headlines. The forum begins at 8 p.m. EST and will be hosted by Colson Center resident theologian Dr. Timothy D. Padgett. The forum is free, but you must register at brea...
Oct 17, 2023•6 min
The Washington Post loves to promote their reporting with the tagline, "democracy dies in darkness." But in a published hit piece last month, designed to smear Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), they intentionally put readers in the dark with half-truths and thinly veiled insinuations, pointing to the fact that a number of ADF plaintiffs are no longer in business as evidence that ADF has "fabricated" religious freedom attacks on Christian vendors who cannot serve same-sex weddings. Just because s...
Oct 16, 2023•1 min
The despicable and horrendous attacks by Hamas against civilians last week, including beheading children and kidnapping the elderly, seems a throwback to some distant, barbaric past of human history. We may have thought the world had long ago outgrown such barbarity, but it hasn't. In fact, as shocking as it is, the kinds of atrocities carried out by the Hamas terrorists are the norms of warfare, at least throughout most of human history. Modern notions of just war, proportionality, and distingu...
Oct 16, 2023•7 min
John Stonestreet and Shane Morris discuss the barbarity of the Hamas attack on civilians in Israel and the worldview that brought us such barbarity. Sections 1 and 2 - Israel and Hamas at War Breakpoint: The Atrocities of Hamas and the Reality of Evil Breakpoint: Moral Clarity and the Attack on Israel Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland Mindy Belz on Twitter] For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org...
Oct 13, 2023•50 min
Princeton professor Robert P. George reports how students respond when he asks them "what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it." It's easy to look at past atrocities and think, "I never would've done that!" but that confidence is misplaced. Without some grounds for unusual moral clarity, mos...
Oct 13, 2023•1 min
One of the most telling statistics from the General Social Survey, is that Americans are having less sex now than they did in 1980s and 1990s . Young men especially have become less sexually active. Since 2008, the share of men under 30 reporting no sex at all has nearly tripled. This stat is one of the clearest signs of what has turned into a counterintuitive but reliable pattern. The more "liberated" and "progressive" our culture becomes, the less interested in or capable of finding human part...
Oct 13, 2023•5 min
Recently, The Guardian published an oddly intriguing article entitled, " The Case Against Pets: Is It Time to Give Up Our Cats and Dogs?" Though arguing from the perspective of the animals, the author actually made a powerful observation about humans. As one expert who was quoted put it, The level of emotional dependence humans have on their companion animals is different from any time in the past. … Of course, there's nothing wrong with having pets. It's a way of fulfilling the creation mandate...
Oct 12, 2023•1 min
The Soviet Union was well known for rejecting so-called "bourgeois" morality in ways that led to rejecting reality. Economically this meant squashing human self-interest in favor of state control. So, basic modern commodities like cars and plumbing could take years for the average Russian to secure. Marxist-inspired agricultural science rejected "Western" science and led to the deaths of millions as crops were planted in the dead of winter, too close together, and without pesticides in the mista...
Oct 12, 2023•6 min
Imagine Congress was considering a bill to protect "religious liberty." Let's say the bill's author openly admitted his intention was to " allow maximum religious freedom ." Maybe he says he's concerned about attempted governmental restrictions on Christian religious expression in particular. Now imagine what the reaction to such a proposal would be on "X," formerly known as Twitter. Surely this would be labeled " Christian Nationalism ." Congress would be accused of trying to establish a theocr...
Oct 11, 2023•1 min
