We don’t usually wish people a “Happy Birthday!” on the air, but I’m going to make an exception in this case. On August 7, one of the most inspiring and just downright likable people in American sports turn 60, Ernie Johnson of TNT.

If you are unfamiliar with Johnson’s work and his story, let me fill you in.

Most people who have heard of Johnson know him through his work both as an announcer and as a studio host.

Between 1993 and 1996, Johnson, alongside his father, Ernie Johnson, Sr., was the TV announcer for the Atlanta Braves. In addition to his play-by-play work for the Braves, Johnson has also announced Major League playoff games, college and professional football, and PGA golf events, among many other things.

But he’s best known for his work in covering the NBA. He’s the host of TNT’s “Inside the NBA,” which has won nine Emmy awards. Johnson and the show’s regulars—Shaquille O’Neal, Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley—trade good-natured insults and basketball insights.

But what makes the show really work is Johnson. His gentle management of hugely outsized personalities keeps the show from descending into chaos while keeping the fun quotient high. But it’s more than astute people skills that makes Johnson so special. As Charles Barkley said in a 2015 ESPN profile of Johnson, he has “uncommon courage and a pure heart.”

This is true of Johnson both at home and in the studio.

Johnson and his wife, Cheryl, have four adopted children: Michael, who was born in Romania; Carmen, who was born in Paraguay; and Ashley and Allison, whom they adopted out of foster care.

This commitment to adoption sets the Johnsons apart all by itself, but the story doesn’t end there. Michael, who is 25, was born with a “progressive form of muscular dystrophy” and has been dependent on a ventilator for the past five years.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  The Faith of TNT’s Ernie Johnson: In Good Times and Bad →

Recently on BreakPoint, John Stonestreet said, “you are your body.” Meaning that we Christians understand that the human person is an embodied being; our bodies aren’t prisons we escape at death. He was right, of course. I say this because I don’t want you to misunderstand what I’m about to say: You are NOT your brain.

Let me explain. Much of modern science uses sloppy language that seems to attribute personhood to the central nervous system, conflating matter with mind, electrical signals with thoughts, and tacitly denying free will and even consciousness. You hear it every time a speaker at a TED conference or a host on the Discovery Channel talks of our brains “wanting,” “thinking,” or “deciding” things.

As Michael Egnor writes at Evolution News and Views, this is a “mereological fallacy,” the error of ascribing to the parts what only the whole can do. For example, stomachs do not eat lunch. Neither do fingers perform sonatas. People do these things. “The brain is an organ,” writes Egnor. “[it] floats around in spinal fluid inside the skull.” It is not a person. And therefore, it is not you.

But try explaining that to the New York Times. Citing a talk by Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano, the Times takes up the tired refrain that consciousness is just an illusion produced by the brain, “a con game the brain plays with itself.”

Our very sense of self, the Times rhapsodizes, that “ghostly presence” inside our heads, is just so much “data processing.”

“The machine mistakenly thinks it has magic inside it,” Princeton’s Graziano is quoted as saying.

Continue reading BreakPoint – New Science Trends: Why Human Beings are More Than Our Brains →