The popular “Existential Comics” Twitter page appeals to a segment of the population most of us avoid at dinner parties. It’s humor at its most esoteric. But Existential Comics recently posted a real zinger that cuts scientific hubris down to size.

A scientists asks why philosophy matters. The philosopher counters and asks “Why does science matter?” The scientist thinks for a moment before replying that science matters because… And here, the philosopher interrupts him and says. “You’re doing philosophy.”

It would be funnier if so many scientists today didn’t share this ill-informed attitude toward philosophy. New Atheist rock star and Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins tweeted on Darwin Day that philosophers’ failure to anticipate Darwin was “a severe indictment of philosophy.” And theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking recently declared “philosophy is dead.”

Bill Nye “the Science Guy” took on the subject last month in a Big Think video on YouTube. A philosophy student contacted Nye to ask whether he, like so many atheist scientists, considers philosophy a “meaningless topic.”

In Nye’s rambling response, he characterizes philosophy as a curiosity—a field that raises “cool” but mostly trivial questions like whether the universe is real and whether we can know we exist. Philosophy is “important for a while,” he says, but can quickly devolve into “arguing in a circle.” And unlike science, philosophy rarely gives “an answer that’s surprising.”

These kinds of charges, writes Olivia Goldhill at “Quartz,” show that Nye buys into the common caricature that “philosophy is about asking pointlessly ‘deep’ questions, plucking an answer out of thin air, and then drinking some pinot noir and writing a florid essay.”

Continue reading BreakPoint – Bill Nye the Philosophy Shy: Why Science Didn’t Just Happen →

In 1985, social critic named Neal Postman, in the introduction to his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” compared two famous dystopian visions: “1984” by George Orwell and “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley. He noted that though many people thought their visions similar, Huxley and Orwell had very different theories about how people would lose their freedoms.

Orwell thought it would be Big Brother—the all-watching, all-powerful state. Now certainly, in the age of the NSA and TSA, it sounds like he may have been on to something.

But Postman thought Huxley was the one who got it right. Here’s how he put it:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, because there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture… As Huxley remarked in“Brave New World Revisited,” the civil libertarians and rationalists ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.

In “1984,” people are controlled by inflicting pain. In“Brave New World,” they were controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared what we love will ruin us.

“My book,” Postman then concluded, “is about the possibility that Huxley was right, not Orwell.” And perhaps nothing has so vindicated Postman’s take on American culture like Pokemon Go, a game in which users capture, battle, and train mythical creatures. Already it has more users than Tindr and even Twitter!

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Should You Allow Your Kids to Play Pokémon Go? →

A pitfall of social media such as Facebook and Twitter is that we can find ourselves saying something we shouldn’t.

While most of us can delete the offending message before too much damage is done, well-known people and organizations can’t. By the time they realize their mistake, it’s been widely seen, forwarded, and captured for posterity.

At that point they either apologize, defend the comment, or maybe insist that their account was hacked.

Well, a recent Facebook post had me wondering if the Planned Parenthood account had been hacked, but then I remembered it was Planned Parenthood.

In the aftermath of the events in Baton Rouge and suburban St. Paul, where two African American men were killed by police officers, Planned Parenthood posted a graphic featuring an African-American woman with her arms draped around a boy, presumably her son.

Now if you’re wondering what Planned Parenthood had to contribute to the national discussion about these shootings, the answer is nothing. Even if you think the organization is good and not evil, commenting on relations between law enforcement and African American communities is completely beyond its competence.

But that didn’t stop Planned Parenthood.

The above-mentioned graphic was accompanied by these words: “You deserve to parent your child without fear that he or she will be hurt or killed. Freedom from violence is reproductive justice.”

Continue reading BreakPoint – Stopping Killing with More Killing: Why Planned Parenthood’s Philosophy Doesn’t Work →

When liberal journalists come out and confess their bias, it’s tempting to say, “The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.” But don’t. This is good news.

Writing at the New York Times recently, columnist Nicholas Kristof took that hard first step. The title of his piece says it all: “A Confession of Liberal Intolerance.”

“We progressives,” he writes, “believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table, so long as they aren’t conservatives.” (Or, one might reasonably add, evangelical Christians).

Kristof and fellow liberals profess a love for tolerance and diversity. But when it comes to the most important kind—diversity of thought—he admits that the gatekeepers in academia and the media actively stigmatize those who hold views different from their own.

“We’re fine with people who don’t look like us,” he writes, “as long as they think like us.”

Universities, once recognized as bastions of tolerance and diversity, bear perhaps the greatest blame. Kristof cites studies showing that just 6 to 11 percent of humanities professors are conservatives. Fewer than one in ten social-studies professors call themselves conservative. For perspective, consider that twice that number identify as Marxists!

And lest anyone blame this on conservative self-selection, a third of academics openly admit that they would be less likely to hire a qualified candidate who voted Republican. Black, evangelical sociologist George Yancey says he faces more discrimination on campus for his Christian beliefs than he does off-campus for the color of his skin. This aggressive bias turns classrooms into hard-left “echo-chambers” where only one side of any debate is ever heard.

Kristof took his concerns to Facebook, where he asked his mostly liberal followers why those who pride themselves on tolerance can be so intolerant. The replies he got were stunning.

“Much of the ‘conservative’ worldview consists of ideas that are known empirically to be false,” commented one fellow liberal.

Why stop with conservatives? asked another. “How about we make faculties more diverse by hiring idiots?”

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Good News: Some in the Media Recognizing Anti-Christian Bias →

Back in 2012 and in 2014 I told you about a papyrus fragment in which Jesus purportedly refers to His “wife.”

On both occasions, I said there were many reasons to be skeptical about the fragment, both about what it said and about the authenticity of the fragment itself.

Well, a recent story in the Atlantic Monthly has so thoroughly debunked the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” that even the Harvard historian who has championed its authenticity admits that it’s probably a fake.

And that leaves us with the question: Why were some people so eager to believe in it in the first place?

The fragment was first said to date from the fourth century A.D., which would make it roughly contemporary with the oldest complete manuscripts of the Gospels. The prospect of an “alternative Christianity” was exciting to people who question the veracity of biblical accounts (including the resurrection) and whose definition of Christianity includes everything but the real thing.

Well, further testing concluded that the fragment dated from the sixth to ninth century A.D. long after the biblical canon and the great creeds of the faith had been decided upon. Undaunted, the fragment’s promoters held out the possibility that it could shed light on what Harvard’s Karen King called “questions about family and marriage and sexuality and Jesus.”

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Gospel of Jesus’ Wife Found to be Fake →

The world lost its conscience over the Fourth of July weekend. Elie Wiesel, the holocaust survivor who spent the sixty-seven years after the fall of the Third Reich striving to make sure that history wouldn’t repeat itself, died in his Manhattan home at the age of 87.

I was privileged to meet Wiesel once. We spoke about Bonhoeffer, with whom he was, of course, very familiar.

Wiesel was born in 1928 in the Romanian town of Sighet. For most of World War II, the town was administered by Hungary. When Wiesel was 15, the Third Reich occupied Hungary and began the extermination of the last substantial Jewish population under its direct control. In just eight weeks, 424,000 out of an estimated 800,000 Jews living in Hungary were deported to Auschwitz, ninety percent of whom were exterminated upon arrival.

Elie Wiesel, along with his parents and his youngest sister, were among the deportees. While his mother and sister were killed immediately upon arrival, Wiesel and his father were put to work. Just before Auschwitz fell to the Soviets later that year, he and his father were sent to Buchenwald, another notorious concentration camp.

Wiesel’s father died only a few weeks before Buchenwald was liberated by Patton’s Third Army in April, 1945. He and his two sisters, who had emigrated to North America prior to the war, were all that was left of his family. By the standards of what is called the “Shoah” in Hebrew, they were more fortunate than most.

Of course, in the face of monstrous evil, “fortunate” is a relative term. Very relative.

Continue reading BreakPoint – Remembering Elie Wiesel →

It’s widely believed that China will supplant the United States as the leading power in the world by no later than the mid-21st century. Not only will China’s Gross Domestic Product exceed that of the United States, it may climb two or even three times as high.

But an increasing number of experts have begun to doubt that China’s GDP will ever even match ours. And the dream of restoring “the global centrality that Chinese consider their birthright” will remain just that, a dream.

There’s a reason for the doubt: There are simply not enough Chinese.

The idea would strike most people as ridiculous. They’d say China has too many people, not too few. With a population of nearly 1.4 billion people, Chin is home to one-fifth of all the people on planet Earth.

But that huge number obscures the country’s looming demographic crisis. That crisis is the subject of an article in the June Atlantic Monthly entitled “China’s Twilight Years.” In it, Howard W. French, the author of two books on China, tells readers that “In the years ahead . . . [China] will transition from having a relatively youthful population, and an abundant workforce, to a population with far fewer people in their productive prime.”

Today, China has slightly less than five workers for every retiree, a ratio French calls “highly desirable.” However, by 2040, the ratio is estimated to be 1.6-to-1. Folks, that is a staggering change.

The demographic downturn is already having an impact in some unexpected places. Last year, China announced it was reducing its armed forces by 300,000 men. While the official spin was that it was part of its “peaceful intentions,” the more “compelling explanation” was demographic: “With the number of working-age Chinese men already declining . . . labor is in short supply.”

As French puts it, “The consequences [of this demographic downturn] for China’s finances are profound.”  The downturn is already becoming a “drag on economic growth,” and what it portends for China’s future is really scary: by 2050, the number of Chinese over 65 is projected to rise to nearly 330 million from 100 million in 2005.

Continue reading BreakPoint – How China’s One-Child Policy Destroyed its Economy →

It’s one of my favorite family stories, one I especially like to remember and share with my daughter as we approach the Fourth of July.

It was April 1954. My mother, a German immigrant to America, had boarded the MS Stockholm. The passage across the Atlantic Ocean was a stormy one, so to distract herself, my mother thought about the fact that, in just a short time, she would arrive in America—the land of her dreams.

In the final hour of the voyage, my mother was abruptly awakened at 5 a.m. by a pounding on the door of her tiny, windowless cabin deep in the bowels of the ship. Opening the door, my mother and her cabin mate found a member of the crew.

“Come up on deck,” he said, smiling. “There’s something you’re going to want to see.”  So my mother, along with dozens of other excited passengers, threw on their coats and made their way up to the deck. There, rising up in the dawn light, was the Statue of Liberty. It was one of the most exciting—and emotional—moments of my mother’s life. To her, the statue WAS America, the bright hope of the world for millions of immigrants like her.

I tell this story in my new book, “If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty.” And I tell another story, as well—one that took place forty-eight years after my mother’s arrival. It’s the story of what it was like to live in New York on September 11, 2001 and during the harrowing days and weeks after the attacks.

Just a few months after 9-11, I was standing on the upper deck of a ferry headed from Manhattan to New Jersey. As we passed through New York Harbor, I suddenly saw Lady Liberty, almost as if I were seeing her for the first time. I surprised myself by getting choked up. And I suddenly realized the reason I had tears in my eyes was that, after all that had happened, she was still standing there, still graciously welcoming poor, huddled masses, still holding forth her torch to light the way to liberty and hope. It just broke my heart.

I began thinking of some of the noblest Americans who ever lived—people who stood up—sometimes at the cost of their lives—to honor the American ideal: Nathan Hale, Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, those first responders on 9-11. They knew what America was about—or SHOULD be about. They worked and sacrificed for the America that God intended us to be.

Continue reading BreakPoint – Are You Upholding the Promise of America? →

Yesterday, we talked about the Supreme Court’s supremely disappointing ruling against a common-sense Texas law that required abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital and abortion mills to meet the same safety standards as other medical facilities.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court ruled the law unduly burdened a woman’s right to an abortion. It’s just another indication that, at the end of the day, our culture is committed to sexual autonomy above anything and everything else—even the health and safety of women.

Then yesterday, we learned the Supremes had left a Washington state couple, and their right not to violate their consciences as pharmacists, out to dry. Now pharmacists in Washington state must offer abortifacients, or go out of business.

For pro-lifers, these rulings can feel like a gut-punch. But let’s be clear, these decisions are by no means the end of the pro-life movement.

Enormous strides for life have been made over the past few years. The needle is pointing in our direction—which is why the pro-abortion crowd is so wildly celebrating these decisions.

Look at the lay of the land. Half of all Americans now believe abortion should be legal only under extreme circumstances—and the pro-life movement is getting younger, not older. Pregnancy care centers outnumber abortion clinics three to one. Ultrasound and in-utero photography show us beyond a shadow of a doubt the humanity of the preborn—even on TV shows like the Big Bang Theory!

Don’t forget the legislative advances: 286 abortion restrictions have been passed at the state level just since 2010 –all but two remain untouched by this SCOTUS decision. As Sarah Kliff gloomily reported at Vox, “the Pro-life movement is winning.”

And consider this: The Daily Show’s celebratory tweet yesterday about the decision was met with harsh criticism—even by pro-choicers!

A year ago, the Obergefell decision making so-called same-sex “marriage” the law of the land, felt like a gut punch too.  And on July 4 last year, I woke up to an email from a friend in New Zealand. He wrote this:

“Dear John, I’m celebrating American rebellion by saying extra prayers for your country, after I have prayed . . . for my own. I know from our experience here, where the gay marriage debate was lost… how discouraging the whole thing can look.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Why Pro-Lifers Should Not be Discouraged Despite Abortion Ruling →

Yesterday, the Supreme Court, by a 5-3 vote, struck down Texas’s House Bill 2, which required, among other things, a physician performing an abortion to have admitting privileges in a hospital within thirty miles of where the procedure is performed.

It also required that “the minimum standards for an abortion facility be equivalent to the minimum standards … for ambulatory surgical centers.”

Let’s not mince words: The Court’s decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt is a setback for the pro-life cause.

To fully grasp what all of this means, some background is in order. While Roe v. Wade established a “constitutional right” to abortion, state and local governments may regulate some aspects of abortion: for instance, requiring a waiting period and parental consent in the case of minors.

But in series of cases culminating in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court placed limits on these kinds of regulations, ruling that regulations that place an “undue burden” on a woman’s “right” to an abortion were unconstitutional.

In the 24 years since Casey, what constitutes an “undue burden” has been decided on a case-by-case basis as pro-life forces and their legislative allies have tested legal boundaries. In the Texas case, pro-abortion forces responded by claiming that the “right” to an abortion was “in jeopardy.”

Continue reading BreakPoint – Pro-Life Setback: Supreme Court Strikes Down Women’s Safety →

Earlier this year my BreakPoint colleague, John Stonestreet, told you that the U. S. Department of Education, under pressure from LGBT groups such as the Human Rights Campaign, agreed to create a public, searchable database of Christian colleges and universities that obtained Title IX waivers based on claims of religious freedom.

John and others called it a “Christian college hit list” because it will allow LGBT activists to target Christian colleges for harassment and possible legal challenges. Sen. Ron Wyden and several other Democrats in the Senate say the waivers “allow for discrimination under the guise of religious liberty.”

Christian colleges, for their part, say the exemptions are nothing new and allow religious schools, for example, to provide male-only or female-only dorms. They fear the database will make them easy targets for those who hate them.

You think those fears are overblown? Well, fast-forward to today.

The California state Senate has passed a bill that would make it harder for Christian institutions to obtain religious exemptions from anti-discrimination laws protecting LGBT individuals, and make state grant money more difficult to obtain while making it easier for students and staff to sue them.

California, by the way, is the nation’s largest state and home to more than 30 higher education institutions that possess religious exemptions to federal or state anti-discrimination laws—at least for now.

Continue reading BreakPoint – A License to Discriminate: California’s Assault on Christian Colleges →

Last week Eric Metaxas talked about Russell Moore’s appearance at the Justice Conference in Chicago. Moore challenged the 2,500 young evangelicals there to expand their notion of “justice” beyond the popular issues of helping immigrants and the victims of sex trafficking to include the dignity of human life, the rights of children to have mothers and fathers, and the need for sinners to embrace the good news of Christ.

In other words, we must carefully define “justice” if we want to be champions of justice.

And speaking of definitions, the Justice Conference is sponsored by World Relief, the relief and development arm of the National Association of Evangelicals. As such, the group has helped tens of thousands of people in crisis and poverty around the world.

But this gathering wasn’t typical of what’s often defined as “evangelical.” The mission of the event, according to Stephen Bauman, CEO of World Relief, was to “bring out the broader voice of justice and let people decide what’s true, what’s right.” And yet, the conference invited several well-known progressive, non-evangelical speakers such as Cornel West and Father Michael Pfleger. Another speaker, Mark Charles, referred to the Declaration of Independence as “systemically racist” and told the crowd, “Everything you own is stolen.”

Mark Tooley of the Institute of Religion and Democracy rightly replied that the Declaration, though delivered to us by imperfect men and lived out imperfectly ever since, has served as a beacon of freedom and human dignity around the world.

But then there’s this: two of the conference’s most prominent “evangelical” speakers—Tony Campolo and Jim Wallis—have rejected the historic Christian teaching on marriage. Now today it’s those issues in particular—on marriage, sexuality, and identity—that create the question: what is an evangelical, anyway? Within evangelicalism, is the historic biblical position on sexuality up for grabs?

Continue reading BreakPoint –  What Really Makes Someone an Evangelical Anyway? →

Two Sundays ago, an ISIS-inspired terrorist killed forty-nine people at a gay night club in Orlando. Yet just three days after the attack, the New York Times editorial board laid the blame for Omar Mateen’s self-professed act of Islamic terrorism squarely at the feet of…believers in traditional marriage. I’m not kidding.

For those confused about how Christians and social conservatives are responsible for a radical jihadist’s actions, the Times helpfully explains: Our “corrosive politics,” they write, paved the way for this monstrosity. And by “corrosive politics,” they make it clear they mean defense of the natural family and created differences between the sexes. The Daily Beast followed up, accusing conservatives who are mourning the tragedy of “exploiting the LGBT community.” Evidently if your politics don’t line up with the goals of the sexual left, you’re not allowed to shed tears for the victims of terrorism.

But by far the most disturbing response, at least to me, came from CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who decided to publicly shame Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi during a live interview. While Bondi tried to explain what Florida is doing to help the victims and their families, Cooper raked her over the coals about her opposition to same-sex “marriage.”

In fact, he all but called her a hypocrite for defending the Florida constitution which—at the time—defined marriage as the union of man and woman. An attorney general’s job, of course, is to uphold and defend her state’s constitution. But Anderson Cooper did not seem to care.

As Mollie Hemingway remarked at The Federalist, apparently Cooper and CNN cannot fathom how anyone could oppose gay “marriage” and also grieve the murder of fifty fellow human beings. The implication by the media is clear: If you haven’t been on board with the LGBT political program, you’re partially responsible for what happened in Orlando.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Blaming Christians for Orlando? The Media Hits Rock Bottom →

John Stonestreet and I talk quite often on BreakPoint about the importance of fathers. And when we do, we usually point to statistics (like I did on the air last week) that reveal that in terms of education, delinquency, drug abuse, and sex and pregnancy, young people who have no father fare worse than those who do.

And that’s all true. But there are a few problems with relying solely on statistics. The person you’re debating can come up with stats to counter yours. And many statistics need interpretation. Just listen to the debate over the unemployment rate and you’ll find yourself agreeing with Mark Twain, who famously quipped, “There are three kinds of lies: Lies, darned lies, and statistics.”

But most importantly, simply telling someone something rarely convinces them of anything. Facts, statistics, moral assertions: They speak to the head, not to the heart.

There’s a rule that good writers and debaters try to observe, and you may have heard it before: Show, don’t tell. In other words, don’t lecture your readers to make a point. Show them what you’re talking about. Tell a story. Provide illustrations. Aim at the heart.

And that’s exactly what one major company, Gillette (you know, the guys who maker razors), did this Fathers’ Day with a commercial called “Go Ask Dad.” It presents in such a heart-warming, simple, and convincing way just how important it is for—in this case—young men to turn to dad for advice and help.

Here’s the gist: Procter and Gamble, Gillette’s parent company, says that “in a world where screen time tends to outweigh actual face time, the internet often replaces dad as the go-to source for ‘how to’ information.”  Some 94 percent of teenagers, they claim “ask the internet for advice before their dads.”

So Gillette devises a contest between the Web and fathers. They bring in teenage boys from different countries and put them in a room with a computer. Then they tell the boys they need to figure out how to do a few simple tasks. Learn how to tie a tie. Learn how to ask a girl out on a date. Fry an egg. And of course, learn how to shave.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Show, Don’t Tell: The Importance of Father-Child Relationships →

The sociologist Peter Berger once told a story in First Things about his childhood in Mussolini’s Italy and the ideological use of language.

Italian, like Spanish and French, has one way of addressing someone close to you, “tu,” and another for addressing a stranger, “lei,” which is also Italian for “she.”

As Berger told readers, Mussolini thought using “lei” was “effeminate” and “degenerate.” So instead of using “lei,” the Fascists insisted on substituting “voi,’ which is the second person plural – sort of like “you all.”

Linguistically-speaking, this was nonsense. But it had real-world consequences: “From that moment on,” Berger wrote, “every time you said ‘lei’ in Italy you were making an anti-Fascist gesture, consciously or unconsciously . . . And every time you said ‘voi’ you were making the linguistic equivalent of the Fascist salute.”

Berger’s story comes to mind in this latest encounter with a neo-logism courtesy of the sexual revolution. The new word is “cisgender.” In case you are unfamiliar with this word, it is used to refer to, to quote Wikipedia, “people whose experiences of their own gender agree with the sex they were assigned at birth.”

Now statistically-speaking, that’s virtually everyone. Dare I say, a better word could be “normal.” But note how embedded in the definition itself, gender is chosen and sex is assigned—as if it were not tied to reality at all.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Spell-Checking ‘Cisgender’: Neosexual Propaganda →

As longtime BreakPoint listeners will know, there’s a misattributed adage that really bugs me, and even more so my BreakPoint this Week co-host Ed Stetzer. Saint Francis of Assisi is frequently quoted as saying: “Preach the Gospel at all times, if necessary, use words.”

“…this statement,” observes Stetzer, “is a bit like saying, ‘Feed the hungry at all times, if necessary, use food.” Writing at The Washington Post last month, Ed observed that words aren’t just optional when preaching the Gospel—they’re fundamental. That’s because the Gospel is “good news.” It’s not just a way of life, it’s also a message about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ on behalf of all who believe. It’s not a list of “dos”—thanks to Jesus, it’s a list of “dones.”

That’s why, if you call yourself a Christian, spreading the word about the cross and empty tomb isn’t optional. Christianity, says Ed, “is a missionary faith,” and our music has long reflected that. I think of classic hymns like “Bringing in the Sheaves,” “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and “How Beauteous Are Their Feet,” which all celebrate the work of Gospel ministry, and call God’s people to action.

But somewhere along the way, we stopped singing so much about evangelism. Ironically, many of the songs used in evangelical churches today have a therapeutic emphasis, and much of our preaching centers on showing people the Gospel within our own lives.

Now don’t get me wrong: Our relationship with Christ is personal, and one of our most powerful testimonies is a life lived in obedience to Him. But as Ed points out, that’s not the same as preaching the Gospel. Before He ascended to His Father, Jesus commanded us to “Go…and make disciples of all nations.”

Continue reading BreakPoint – A Task Unfinished: Why Christians Should Sing More about Evangelism →

One of the biggest worldwide hits of the summer—or any summer, for that matter—is The Jungle Book, Disney’s charming new interpretation of the Kipling classic. Children are eating up this film. But it’s not surprising that the intelligentsia, which once called the book a celebration of British imperialism, are now calling it racist garbage, not to mention politically incorrect.

Ironically, in their rush to condemn The Jungle Book, the critics are missing Kipling’s most politically incorrect message of all: That boys need their fathers, and need them desperately.

It’s a message we should pay particular attention to on Father’s Day, coming up on Sunday.

As Jody Bottom writes in The Federalist, Kipling’s writings for children “derive from his intense feeling of being an abandoned child, sent home from India to live in a boarding school at age five.” Bottom notes, “The subtext of nearly every one of his children’s stories is a boy’s desperate need for a father.” Kipling himself is “so eager for a father that he cannot write about a boy without casting every older male in a father role.”

For example, in The Jungle Books, the story of an orphaned man-cub named Mowglie, we have Baloo the bear, whom Bottom calls a “kindly but learned” father figure. Bagheera, the panther, is another father figure, while the wolf Akela “is father as clan lawgiver.” The python Kaa is “father as source of ancient memory and possessor of mysterious powers.”

We see the same phenomenon at work in another Kipling novel about a fatherless boy, titled Kim. Bottom notes that father figures in this tale include “Mahbub Ali, a Pashtun horse trader, [who] becomes the mature figure of worldliness for the boy, an elderly Tibetan Lama becomes the father of his spiritual unworldliness,” Bottom writes, while “a British officer . . . becomes the father figure who calls the boy to a high political purpose.”

We see echoes and evidence of this need for fathers in modern life. It seems that boys don’t merely feel abandoned when their fathers are out of the picture: All the available evidence reveals that both boys and girls don’t do as well as kids who have a loving father providing a steady presence in their lives.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Man Cubs Need Their Fathers: Kipling’s Jungle Books →

There’s a stereotype out there that evangelicals only care about abortion and “morality” issues like homosexuality and marriage. Lots of pundits describe us as monolithic in our approach to these issues.

That may have been true in the past, but no longer. To cite just one example, Daniel Burke of CNN has identified seven types of evangelicals in politics. They run the gamut from extremely conservative to extremely liberal. And these groups are often so focused on their pet agendas they rarely talk to each other, much less work together.

Russell Moore wants to change all that. Moore, who is president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, is staunchly pro-life, pro-adoption, and pro-marriage—a member of what CNN calls “institutional evangelicals.”

So why did Moore travel to Chicago to address young, progressive evangelicals at this year’s Justice Conference? Well, like Mr. Smith in Washington, Dr. Moore went to stir things up.

And he succeeded. Chelsen Vicari of the Juicy Ecumenism website reports that Moore began by chiding his own allies in the culture wars while applauding the young people who care deeply about the so-called “justice issues” like immigration and sex trafficking.

Moore said, “When I’m speaking to people in my tribe of conservative confessional evangelicalism I often have to say you are pro-life, and rightly so, but because you recognize the image of God and the humanity of God in the unborn child . . . you must also recognize the humanity and dignity of God in people who might not be politically popular with you right now: with prisoners, with refugees, with immigrants.”

Then, like a prophet of old, Moore turned the moral spotlight on his young audience. Moore said that abortion, too, is a justice issue. “We must … stand up and say No to racial injustice, No to refugee-bashing, No to immigrant-demonizing, No to predation on the poor, and No to the violence and injustice of abortion.”

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Mr. Moore Goes to Chicago: Why Christians Should be a Voice for the Oppressed →