Listener Feedback: April 2025

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, April 25th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. Up next, Listener Feedback for the month of April. We begin today with a couple corrections and clarifications.

EICHER: March 27th in a commentary on education we referred to the Department of Education and interchangeably used the initialism DOE. In the great bowl of alphabet soup that is the federal bureaucracy that particular spoonful belongs to the Department of Energy and it’s ED that stands for Department of Education. Easy to mix up, especially in a system where the acronyms multiply faster sometimes than the agencies themselves. But no excuses.

BROWN: Correction from yesterday: we took listeners to two seder celebrations but misidentified one of the traditional dish is the sweet mixture of nuts and apples meant to represent the bricks and mortar is actually called Charoset. We have updated the program transcript to reflect the correction. Listener Joe Swann of Cross Plains, Tennessee was one of many who really liked the story.

JOE SWANN: I wanted to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the story: A Tale of Two Seders, by Travis Kircher that you ran on April the 24th, especially so because we hosted a seder meal for my Sunday School class on Good Friday Evening. It was a wonderful story and keep up the good work.

EICHER: Our piece on Earth Day the interview with regenerative farmer Joel Salatin drew lots of response. Salatin critiqued industrial farming and raised the question of how God might respond to our treatment of the earth—citing DDT as an example.

BROWN: That caught the attention of listener Gideon Griswold. He enjoyed the interview but thought the DDT reference missed the mark:

GIDEON GRISWOLD: Correct me if I'm wrong, but that hasn't been in wide use since 1971. I've been working at a small business that does pesticide for eight years now, and I can say that the pesticide industry has strictly regulated their frequent inspections, and we work with this stuff every day, so there's a strong incentive to keep it safe and sustainable.

It’s true, D-D-T was banned in the U-S in 1971. And although it’s still used in specific cases here and abroad the E-P-A notes that long-lasting residues remain a concern. Still, the example might’ve landed better framed as a legacy issue.

EICHER: We also heard from David Holden a pest control and crop advisor in California for decades. He found our piece too one-sided:

DAVID HOLDEN: All these problems have been addressed and are being worked on and have been worked on for many, many years. That's part of science, learning how to correct what you don't know. I've been a believer for all those years and I feel that I've also been a person who has taken the Lord's admonition to manage this planet well.

One more listener note this from Jace Dunagan—a regenerative farmer and first-time listener. He says he loved what he heard, especially the storytelling style. He’s long believed that if conservatives could match the emotional power of NPR-style reporting, it would be a game-changer. But in his words, this podcast does even better—because it not only shares the struggles we all face, but points to the real solution: the eternal hope of Christ.

Thanks Jace! Glad you found us!

BROWN: On to another story that drew lots of positive feedback: our long-form interview with author Cam Lee Small. Listener Les Alsterlund and his wife are adoptive parents and say that they welcomed the honesty: that while adoption is good, it’s often difficult.

LES ALSTERLUND: There are challenges that people just cannot understand who are not also walking the adoption journey to. Something Cam brought up is having support. If your church does not have this already, I want to encourage listeners who are adopted parents to start a small group for adopted families at your church. You should not walk this journey alone. You need the encouragement and prayers of others who are walking with you.

Another adoptive dad had this to say:

SCOTT ROBERTS: This is Scott Roberts from Walnut Shade, Missouri. I'm so thankful for stories like this. Thanks for all you do and the resources that you connect us with. I'm planning to get the book and get it to my son and see if he can learn some, be able to get through some of the trauma that he's faced through this. Thanks again.

EICHER: One more comment:

TODD: This is Todd Teisling from Des Moines, Iowa. I just wanted to give you some positive feedback about the excellent news stories particularly regarding the national security group chat and the stories regarding immigration and some of the ripple effects and concerns on those issues, I greatly appreciate the balance and the perspective shared in these stories and the refusal to cheerlead particular agendas.

Before we go today, we learned a few weeks ago some sad news: That one of our regular guests over the years died on April 4th Cedarville University history and law professor Marc Clauson who frequently joined us for Washington Wednesday:

CLAUSON:“Look, you got to do something about this. You can't just keep people indefinitely, because we have a right to a speedy trial.” So it's an issue, but it's not a big issue at this point. But I think it could have the potential for being bigger in the future.

CLAUSON: Yeah, election integrity, I think, is crucial. If we don’t have confidence that our elections take place freely and completely fairly and openly, then we begin to lose confidence in the whole system itself.

CLAUSON: There is a statute that purports to prevent a president who's charged with a crime and convicted, certain kinds of crimes, to be ineligible to run for president again. However, the Constitution in Amendment Eleven does not say anything about any prohibition against the president running again, period.

Marc Clauson was 69 years old, and will be greatly missed by his family, his students, his church and his friends at WORLD.

BROWN: If you have a comment to share you can email editor@wng.org. You can include an audio file attachment to your email and we’ll consider it for air. You can even phone it in at 202-709-9595.

And that’s this month’s Listener Feedback!

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.