Listener Feedback: November 2025

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, November 21st. 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.

Time now for Listener Feedback for the month of November. We begin with longtime listener Laura Laster. She’s a pilot and aviation professor at LeTourneau University, and she had a response to our recent conversation with transportation expert Bob Poole about air-traffic-control funding.

LAURA LASTER: I just want to offer another perspective from a flight school point of view: privatizing ATC would make learning to fly even more expensive. It would raise costs for all pilots in the United States, where we currently enjoy an amazing level of freedom that you don’t see in other countries because we don’t have privatized ATC like in Canada, Europe, and much of the rest of the world. The recent problems weren’t caused by any specific air traffic control failure but by the government’s inability to stay open during funding issues. That could be solved by something like the Aviation Funding Stability Act, which would allow the FAA to continue operating during government shutdowns if passed—something I would encourage.

EICHER: Next, a comment from listener Meagan Blanchard. She was responding to Seth Troutt’s recent commentary on how Christians ought to think about interacting with artificial intelligence.

MEAGAN BLANCHARD: Hi WORLD. Thank you so much for the quality work you do through journalism and editorials that you send to us each day. I thank you for inspiring and educating us. I'm always warning my children, you're not allowed to have a relationship with anything that does not have a heartbeat, but practically sometimes that can be hard to know what leads up to that. And I think Seth had such great ideas identifying ways that we can just humanize AI and let it creep in slowly. And before we know it, we do have that relationship with something without a heartbeat, i.e. a bot or anything like that. So thank you so much for this excellent piece and continue to do great work.

Next, listener Jeb Rice picked up on this week’s Washington Wednesday about border policy and offered a reminder that God’s work is not confined to the borders of the United States.

JEB RICE: If, as a Christian, I thought God was only active in the United States and we should let everybody come here. But having been to other countries, knowing that God is extremely active all over the world, and we can fulfill our commands from God anywhere in the world. They do not have to be in the U.S. So I think people who think that the only answer is to let them in, have a very narrow view of the action of what our God is, who our God is, and what our God can do. Thank you very much. I appreciate what you guys do.

BROWN: This month, we’ve also heard from several listeners grateful for WORLD’s commitment to send reporters into the field.

SALLY DRISCOLL: Yes this is Sally Driscoll from the west side of Michigan And I think of calling often after different pieces especially Kim Henderson's pieces. But I just wanted to comment. I just was listening and Caleb Welde’s piece on Ukraine was haunting and moving and very thoughtful and I just appreciate the work he did and that you're sending people around the world.

Listener Mary Norton thought so, too, not only the Ukraine piece but other international reporting.

MARY NORTON: Thank you for having boots on the ground. I just listened to Caleb Welde's report of life in Ukraine. That encourages me to keep praying for the people of Ukraine, the people of Nigeria, and Sudan. Thanks, Onize, for your reporting there. And for Israel and Gaza. Keep up the good work. I really appreciate your reporting.

EICHER: Finally today, we received a wave of appreciative mail this month about one episode in particular—Travis Kircher’s long-form conversation with a CCM pioneer:

MATT BROWN: Hey Matt Brown Tucson Arizona the segment on Twila Paris was just amazing and I did not know the context of bringing and that was so incredibly well done. 

LORRAINE FRITCH: Hi, I'm Lorraine from Menifee, California. Twila's songs are rich in theology and yet so singable. Thank you for highlighting this wonderful singer-songwriter.

CHRISTIAN ELLIOTT: As an aging child of the 70s Jesus Revolution, I very much enjoyed listening to Travis Kircher's interview with Twila Paris, hearing both the short segment and the full weekend edition. Twila's music has been inspiring and encouraging to me through many years of ministry…

Many listeners have been so encouraging about our long-form interview series that we’ve been running this fall. We’ve got a few more lined up that we think you’ll enjoy. Tomorrow, a thoughtful conversation between WORLD’s Les Sillars and novelist and poet Paul Kingsnorth on his new book: Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity.

KINGSNORTH: We have been trying to build a world in which we are in control, often for understandable reasons, in which we can manage and control every aspect of life. And we've got to the point now where our technologies are so advanced that we're able to, or we hope or think, that we're able to do things like creating super intelligences, creating artificial minds, potentially not just extending our lives, but ending death, at least this is the dream. So the story that it tells is really the attempt to replace nature with technology. Another way of looking at that, is that it's the same story that played out in the first book of Genesis, where we decide that we're going to eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and become as gods. We're trying to be gods. And we've got to the point now where many of the people creating these technologies openly speak in those terms.

Join us tomorrow for the half-hour conversation with Paul Kingsnorth…anywhere you get our podcast.

BROWN: That’s this month’s listener feedback. Thanks to everyone who called in. If you’d like to comment on a recent segment, send us an email or a recorded message to: editor@wng.org. You can also phone it in: 202-709-9595.

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.