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Dear Friend,
I don’t know about you, but I found myself reeling this week after Wednesday’s shocking assassination of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk. The Turning Point USA founder died in Utah while hosting an event for college students, doing what he loved to do, challenging to live debate young people who disagreed with him.
I watched a video of Kristan Hawkins, the pro-life activist who leads Students for Life of America, telling the news of Kirk’s shooting to college students at the University of Montana during her own open-air debate with students on the subject of abortion. When they heard Kirk had been hit, the students laughed. It’s disturbing that a segment of our culture openly revels in violence and even murder inflicted on political opponents. There’s a real heart sickness here, one that enables these kinds of attacks and indeed must encourage them.
We aren’t the first generation to devalue human life, of course, but we’re seeing the problem in stark terms today. Along with the shooting of Charlie Kirk and the fatal stabbing of Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte, another example was the mass shooting at Annunciation school in Minneapolis two weeks ago, where two young children died.
In the new issue of WORLD Magazine that went to press Wednesday, reporter Grace Snell writes about a new type of criminal profile the FBI recently began tracking: Nihilistic Violent Extremists. The term refers to the “troubling trend of violent crimes carried out for no apparent reason,” Grace reports, “except a glorification of chaos and depravity for its own sake.” You could say these perpetrators, who lurk online and often have ties to satanist and neo-Nazi groups, are motivated purely by hatred and evil.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Romans 12:21—“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” While we rightly feel outraged by murder and violence and call for justice, God has set an even higher standard for us as Christians: Do good in the world, even to our enemies. What good is God calling you to in your own life?
This October issue’s cover story examines the current tug-of-war between American’s executive and judicial branches. As Emma Freire explains, that tug-of-war isn’t actually new, but reflects a long-standing tension built into our system of government. After Emma’s story, constitutional scholar Ilya Shapiro writes about how Congress can help rein in certain judicial excesses.
Finally, a housekeeping note: Next week I’ll be moving to WORLD’s News division to help oversee our very capable team there as they produce daily news content. If you don’t already, I hope you’ll sign up for some of our daily and weekly newsletters featuring the WORLD News team’s Biblically sound journalism.
And please read on for more highlights from the latest edition of WORLD Magazine.
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