The World and Everything in It: April 11, 2025

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning!

Today on Culture Friday, what would it take to recover a faith that values both grace and God’s design?

NICK EICHER, HOST: Andrew Walker is standing by to talk about that.

Also today:

AUDIO: Olé, olé, olé, olé!

WORLD music critic Arsenio Orteza on a punk icon’s wild ride—and a blue-eyed soul farewell.

Later, George Grant takes us back to the Age of Johnson—Samuel Johnson, that is—with the wit, wisdom, and dictionary definitions of England’s great man of letters. “Word Play” for the month of April.

BROWN: It’s Friday, April 11th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

BROWN: Here’s Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: GOP budget framework » Republicans are one step closer to passing a bill addressing President Trump’s top priorities.

AUDIO: On this vote, that yeas are 216. They nays are 214. The motion is adopted. Without objection, the motion to reconsider is laid on the table.

House Republicans on Thursday passed a budget framework, a sort of a blueprint for a massive bill to come later. And the president told reporters:

TRUMP:  We're well on our way to getting, as we call it, the big, the great big, beautiful bill. It's a beauty. There's never been a bill like this one. We're trying to get it all into one beautiful bill. It's, uh, tax cuts, regulation cuts, and many other things.

Democrats criticize it as a bill that they say will hand tax breaks to the wealthy.

House Speaker Mike Johnson explains what comes next:

JOHNSON:  We have our 11 committees that will get instructions for reconciliation in the house. They're ready to go. We've been working on this for many months. And now we go through the, the process of marking it up and finding the equilibrium points with everybody.

In simple terms, hammering out the details and getting everyone on the same page.

Thursday’s vote sets the stage to eventually push the so-called ‘big, beautiful bill’ through the Senate using the budget reconciliation process.

That would allow Republicans to get around a Democratic filibuster.

Lock the Clock hearing » Meanwhile, across the Capitol Rotunda, senators heard testimony about fixing the clock: adopting a fixed time year-round. No more ‘Spring forward, Fall back’ time changes.

But which permanent time would be best? Daylight Savings, or Standard?

Dr. Karin Johnson is a neurology professor at the University of Massachusetts.

KARIN JOHNSON:  The negative impact of daylight savings, time on sleep, and our brain health harms the economy workers, especially those with early start times before eight 30. Think of your farmers, your transportation workers, your factory workers are less likely to be productive and efficient.

But other witnesses testified about the potential economic benefits of year-round Daylight Savings.

Johnson countered that the U.S. has tried, and quickly abandoned,  permanent Daylight Savings twice before, most recently in 1974.

One plan under consideration aims to give that one more try.

But there is an alternative being discussed letting each state decide for itself.

ROCHESTER: What works in my home state of Delaware may not work in Washington State.

But some argue that would be too complicated.

A recent Stetson University poll suggests most Americans prefer keeping Daylight Savings over Standard time. But that vast majority, 3 out of 4, agree on ditching the twice annual time changes.

Inflation numbers » The Bureau of Labor Statistics says inflation cooled more than expected last month. WORLD’s Christina Grube has more.

CHRISTINA GRUBE:  Economists were expecting some improvement in the consumer price index in March, but the numbers were much better than forecast.

Prices were mostly steady last month. Overall inflation ticked down just a bit, while prices for most goods except food and energy went up slightly.

Over the past year, prices are up 2.4% overall. And that number is 2.8% if you leave out food and energy.

Economists expect tariffs that took effect this month to raise prices for consumers and businesses.

For WORLD, I’m Christina Grube.

Iran negotiations » US and Iranian negotiators are still set to gather in the Middle East tomorrow to begin new negotiations surrounding Iran’s nuclear program.

We previously mistakenly reported Amman, Jordan as the site for those talks. However, the negotiations will in fact begin in the Sultanate of Oman.

Israel-Hamas negotiations » President Trump says Israel and Hamas are moving closer to a deal to release the remaining hostages held in Gaza.

TRUMP: We're making progress. We, you know, there's 59 hostages, but only 24 of them are living.  But we're making progress. We're dealing with Israel, we're dealing with Hamas, and it's, it's a nasty group.

Meanwhile:

SOUND: [Prisoners released]

Ten Palestinians detained by Israeli troops reunited with their families yesterday after they were freed by the Israeli government.

Israel-Turkey talks » All of this comes as Israeli officials announced that they are holding talks with Turkey about the situation on the ground in Syria.

Israeli government spokesman David Mencer:

MENCER: I can share with you that each side has presented its interests in the region and it has been agreed to continue the path of dialogue for the purpose of maintaining regional stability.

Since Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad was ousted last year, Israel and Turkey have been competing over their separate interests there.

The talks are aimed at preventing conflict between Turkish and Israeli troops on the ground.

Moscow prisoner swap » The Trump administration has secured the freedom of an American with dual U.S.-Russian citizenship in a prisoner swap with Moscow.

Russian authorities arrested Ksenia Karelina in February of last year in the city of Yekaterinburg while she was visiting family there.

State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce told reporters Thursday:

BRUCE: Ksenia was detained in Russia for more than a year and will soon be reunited with her loved ones.

Karelina was an amateur ballerina who lived in Los Angeles.

In exchange for her freedom, the administration is sending to Moscow a Russian German man, jailed on smuggling charges in the U.S.

Thursday's prisoner swap comes as the two countries work to repair diplomatic ties, and as President Trump pushes for a peace deal in Ukraine.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: Culture Friday with WORLD Opinions managing editor Andrew Walker. Plus, Word Play with George Grant.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 11th of April.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

It’s Culture Friday. Joining us now is Andrew Walker. He’s a professor of Christian ethics and apologetics at Southern Seminary, and managing editor of WORLD Opinions.

Good morning Andrew.

ANDREW T. WALKER: Hey good morning! Good to be with you.

EICHER: Well Andrew, I wanted to start with your recent column, because I think it names something a lot of Christians are sensing but may not yet have put words to. It certainly resonated with me, a frustration I’ve felt.

You write that after years of cultural drift to the left, we’re now seeing some signs—particularly among younger Americans—of a rightward shift. But here’s the irony you point out: evangelicalism, which for so long lamented progressive influence, isn’t actually ready to lead in this moment.

And the reason for that is because too often, we’ve emphasized grace to the neglect of nature. You say, We’ve skipped over creation in our theology—focusing on the Fall, the Cross, and the Resurrection—but with no clear sense of what creation was for in the first place.

So when the culture begins to rediscover some creational goods, like family, masculinity, conscience, limits, the church doesn’t know what to say—or worse, it responds with embarrassment or dismissal.

So I’d love to start right there: What would it look like to recover a theology that embraces both grace and nature?

WALKER: Sure, that’s a really wonderful question.

Getting that relationship properly ordered is at the heart of what I think is going to be our answer for society.

One of the things I think we must understand is that when we consider the New Testament, there’s this phrase you’ll often see—not necessarily in the New Testament per se—but that theologians talk about. They talk about the idea that grace restores nature, that grace does not destroy nature.

What that phrase means in theological circles is that the life of redemption is not the total negation of our earthly life. Meaning, that when God created the earth, he created it very good. 1 Timothy 4 says that all things that God creates are to be received as gifts because they’re inherently good.

Now, obviously sin enters into the equation in Genesis 3. But a part of the redeemed life is having a renewed understanding of the intention for our humanity from the beginning. Then once we’re redeemed, how to relate that earthly life to our redeemed life.

One of the examples I’ll often give is Galatians 3. That talks about how when you’re in Christ, there’s neither slave nor free, male nor female, Jew nor Gentile. A lot of people think that is Paul exploding all of these earthly categories in a way that they no longer matter. That’s not what the Apostle Paul is getting at.

He’s helping us to understand that you retain those earthly qualities that you were brought into the world within. But there’s a new sotereological or salvivic horizon within which you now understand your earthly identity within.

So for me, what this means is, I have brothers in Christ that are true spiritual brothers, but the fact that Nick Eicher is my brother in Christ doesn’t mean that I forsake or abandon my earthly brother, Chris.

It means that I am made aware of what the various relationships I have in those various domains mean in their proper order and their proper relationship.

BROWN: You also write that some evangelicals treat creational goods—like authority, masculinity, even national loyalty—as red-state baggage: just politics that distract us from the church’s gospel task. What’s the cost of that? And how do we begin recovering those things without going too far?

WALKER: Sure, so let me say one thing off the bat. We’ve probably all been in churches where there’s maybe an ostentatious display of patriotism in unhealthy ways.

Leaving that aside, I think there’s been a trend in evangelicalism that has wanted to so celebrate our heavenly identity—kind of the idea that the kingdom of God is transnational—that therefore it eclipses your earthly identity to the point where you can’t have national pride in being an American. If you go back to that paradigm of a second ago, what “grace restores nature” means in the context of nationality is that you can love your country.

You can love your nation with a rightly ordered patriotism, but you have to love the kingdom of God more. Sometimes those things may come into conflict, and when they do, you are called to give that higher love to the kingdom of God. But insofar as there is no inherent tension, or there’s no conflict that’s causing a contradiction between the two, you can say, I am an American, I love being an American. I just love being a Christian more.

In fact, the life of the Christian informs our understanding of what our citizenship is going to look like, as we rightly order our patriotism within the boundaries of our country.

EICHER: Andrew, several weeks ago I asked John Stonestreet to respond to your column, and he had a slightly different take. Let me briefly summarize and then play a short excerpt so you can hear it in his own words.

John largely agrees with your framing—that the evangelical church isn’t prepared for a cultural moment that’s suddenly more open to creational goods like family, moral order, and natural limits. But he also offered a diagnosis of his own. He said the problem isn’t just that we’ve emphasized grace over nature—it’s that we don’t have a habit of thinking theologically at all. We’ve lost what he called our “theological muscle memory.”

Here’s that clip.

STONESTREET: So there’s not a sense of the church having a Christian worldview, a Christian view of reality that aligns with the revealed truth of scripture.

… [R]eligious experience is what matters and Christian truth doesn’t. Religious experience is what we’re after, and we go after that. Those are the limits of what we can know to be true about Christianity.

Now, of course, … that’s why I find it somewhere between interesting and bizarre to go back to a conversation we had not too long ago here: when somebody says that what needs to be changed about Christianity is how much they talk about worldview. It’s so ridiculous to me, because the thing that is missing is what we might call “applied theology,” the taking of what is true and thinking about the world through that lens.

Our problem is not that we’re talking about worldview too much. Maybe we’re not talking about it precisely enough. But the bigger challenge is that we don’t even think about faith in those terms.

So Andrew, I’d love to get your response. Do you see it the way John does? Is the real issue a deeper lack of applied theology—just a failure to think Christianly, full stop?

WALKER: It’s interesting. The discussion around Christian worldview is batted around in a thousand different directions. And that’s often a reality of what pocket of evangelicalism that you’re in.

If you’re in intellectual or academic circles within evangelicalism, worldview is talked about a lot. But if you get inside popular evangelicalism, it’s not talked about as often. I think that that is a demonstration of a tension within the evangelical world right now: that you’ll often have the intellectuals and the academics doing their thing and pop evangelicalism doing its thing over here.

I think what we need to be doing is figuring out ways to bring those two lanes together more often than we are.

Now, I want to give recognition to institutions like WORLD, Focus on the Family, and the Colson Center that are doing really good work at bringing Christian worldview to bear for a more popular-level audience. But I think the thing we must recognize is that our sliver of evangelicalism is perhaps smaller than what we want to recognize.

Because when you actually poll for theological beliefs with those individuals who identify as evangelicalism, there’s mass theological illiteracy. So perhaps, Nick, a little bit of this conflict is related to a polling problem of how you identify what an evangelical is.

If an evangelical is someone who has that religious experience and doesn’t really go to church and doesn’t really have a Biblical worldview, I’m not really sure that person is an evangelical.

To me, an evangelical is someone who has a heartfelt commitment to Christ, but that is realized in active engagement in a local church, and then they are trying to cultivate a Christian understanding of the world.

So maybe I can kind of split the baby and say, maybe better polling is the solution here.

BROWN: Andrew Walker is a professor of Christian ethics and apologetics at Southern Seminary. And managing editor of WORLD Opinions. Thanks!

WALKER: Thank you.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, April 11th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

That unforgettable voice you heard a moment ago belonged to Bobby Hatfield. But it was Bill Medley’s baritone that anchored the Righteous Brothers’ sound—and carried their biggest hits.

EICHER: There was a time when pop music gave us voices like those that you could feel in your bones—deep, steady, unmistakable. And though that era is slipping away, a few of those voices still echo.

WORLD’s music critic Arsenio Orteza has a tribute to two of them—one departed, one still singing—with a sound that won’t be easily forgotten.

ARSENIO ORTEZA: In 1964, a duo calling itself the Righteous Brothers scored a worldwide number-one hit performing a song written by Barry Mann, Cynthia Weill, and Phil Spector called “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.” The record is a dramatic condensation of heartbreak into three minutes and 45 seconds, and it established the Righteous Brothers—Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield—as prime purveyors of what would come to be known as “blue-eyed soul.” More specifically, it introduced the world to Bill Medley’s rich, baritone voice.

MUSIC: [Excerpt from “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” by the Righteous Brothers]

With the exception of their 1965 smash “Unchained Melody,” which Hatfield sang by himself, it was Medley’s lead singing that would define the Righteous Brothers chart-topping sound throughout the decade. It was also the most distinguishing characteristic of “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life,” the song that Medley recorded with Jennifer Warnes in the late ’80s for the Dirty Dancing soundtrack.

MUSIC: [Excerpt from “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes]

It too went to number one.

Hatfield died in 2003 at the age of 63. Thirteen years later, Medley recruited Bucky Heard and relaunched the Righteous Brothers as a touring act. (They’re on the final leg of the Lovin’ Feelin’ Farewell Tour as I speak.)

Over the years, Medley also recorded a string of solo albums, most of which went unnoticed. But he has a new one, Straight from the Heart on Curb Records, and it’s an exception. It’s possible that his advancing age and the growing awareness that he won’t be around forever have something to do with the attention that the album is getting. But what’s more likely driving the media coverage and positive reviews is the album’s quality. Medley covers 12 country songs, many of them classic, such as Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” and Buck Owens’ “Crying Time.” They’re songs that unfold slowly and allow Medley to bring his voice to bear on the mysteries arising from between their lines. Four are duets, matching Medley with Michael McDonald, Keb’ Mo’, Shawn Colvin, and Vince Gill in that order. Medley handles the other eight by himself, and none more effectively than the Gilbert Bécaud-Mann Curtis love song “Let It Be Me.”

MUSIC: [Excerpt from “Let It Be Me” by Bill Medley]

The singer David Johansen of the New York Dolls didn’t enjoy the same acclaim or the success as Medley, but he had a similarly commanding, if altogether different, voice. And because of his talent and adaptability, he not only survived in the music business for almost 50 years but also left his mark.

Johansen died at the end of February at the age of 75, three years after the release of a documentary about his life, Personality Crisis: One Night Only. Martin Scorsese directed it, and its title had a double meaning. “Personality crisis” referred, on the one hand, to the best-known song of the New York Dolls, the band that first presented Johansen to the world in the early ’70s.

MUSIC: [Excerpt from “Personality Crisis” by New York Dolls]

But “personality crisis” also referred to the wide range of guises under which Johansen performed. As a New York Doll, he was an outrageously androgynous provocateur. Later, he morphed into a solo rocker with soulful roots and album-cover photos that looked like a model’s portfolio. Later still, he’d lead an acoustic blues band called the Harry Smiths, and even later he’d lead a reunited version of the Dolls.

But it was in the middle of his career that he hit upon his most unusual—and most commercially successful—persona: the tuxedo-wearing, good-time nightclub singer Buster Poindexter. With an infectious grin and a gravity-defying pompadour, he became a regular on Saturday Night Live. He recorded four albums under the Poindexter name, each a masterclass in showmanship. And it was as Buster Poindexter that he unleashed his best-known recording, a cover of the soca song “Hot Hot Hot.” He came to regret the degree to which it overshadowed everything else he’d done, but it’s ubiquity did guarantee him a kind of musical immortality.

MUSIC: [Excerpt from “Hot Hot Hot” by Buster Poindexter]

I’m Arsenio Orteza.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, April 11th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Finally today, Word Play with George Grant.

Today, the tale of a dictionary-maker with a sharp mind, dry wit, and very little patience for French.

GEORGE GRANT: Samuel Johnson was one of the most important English writers of the 18th century. He remains one of the most quoted prose stylists in the English language. It has long been traditional to refer to the second half of the 18th century as the Age of Johnson. Even so, he is best remembered not so much as a writer but as a conversationalist—mostly due to the account of his life written by James Boswell, his ne’er-do-well travel companion. Many of Johnson’s most memorable quotations come not from his works but from his biographer’s recollection of his conversations: Johnson quipped, “Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble,” and “Language is the dress of thought.” He said, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully,” and “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

Born in 1709, the son of a failed village bookseller, Johnson struggled throughout his early life against the ravages of poverty. Though he demonstrated a precocious mind and a prodigious literary talent, he was unable to complete his education at Oxford. Instead, he began his lifelong labors as a freelance writer in London for various newspapers, magazines, journals, and book publishers. He was phenomenally prolific and adept at virtually every genre—from criticism, translation, poetry, and biography to sermons, parliamentary reports, political polemics, and dramatic stage plays.

When he was nearly fifty, he was commissioned to produce a dictionary. Over the course of the next seven years, he single-handedly took on the task of comprehensively documenting English usage—which when completed, set the standard for dictionaries ever afterward. The first edition contained 42,773-words. Each was not only succinctly defined, but illustrated with quotations from classic literature by Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and a host of others. When completed the dictionary was universally regarded as the pre-eminent lexicographical and etymological work.

Though it was largely academic, Johnson also introduced into it a good bit of humor. For example, he defined excise as “a hateful tax levied upon commodities and adjudged… by wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.” Oats, he said, was “a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” A sock was defined as “something put between the shoe and foot.” And a lizard was “an animal resembling a serpent, with legs added to it.”

Johnson did not regard French loanwords as proper for English usage. He omitted most of them—including champagne and bourgeois. Those that he did include were often hilariously derided. Finesse was dismissed as “an unnecessary word creeping into the language.” Ruse was dubbed “a French word neither elegant nor necessary.” And monsieur, he said, was “a term of reproach for a Frenchman.”

Tellingly, Johnson defined a lexicographer as “a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words.” But that tracing and detailing set the standard for every dictionary that would follow, from Noah Webster’s and James Murray’s to William Collins’ and Thomas Nelson’s. Each labored in the shadows of that great “harmless drudge.”

I’m George Grant.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Well, it’s time to say thanks to the team members who helped put the program together this week:

Mary Reichard, Mary Muncy, Kim Henderson, Daniel Darling, Josh Schumacher, Lindsay Mast, David Bahnsen, Carolina Lumetta, Jenny Lind Schmitt, Todd Vician, Theresa Haynes, Daniel Suhr, Emma Eicher, Rachel Leland, Travis Kircher, Amy Lewis, Cal Thomas, Andrew Walker, Arsenio Orteza, and George Grant.

Thanks also to our breaking news team: Kent Covington, Lynde Langdon, Steve Kloosterman, Lauren Canterbury, and Christina Grube.

And thanks to the guys who stay up late to get the program to you early: Carl Peetz, and Benj Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Harrison Watters is Washington producer, senior producer Kristen Flavin is features editor, Paul Butler executive producer, and Les Sillars editor-in-chief.

The World and Everything in It is a production of WORLD Radio—where we bring you Biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Bible records the Apostle Paul in Athens, saying: “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.” —Acts 17:30

When you gather with your brothers and sisters in Christ this weekend, don’t just attend a service together, but show up ready to encourage one another with an uplifting word.

And Lord willing, we’ll meet you right back here on Monday.

Go now in grace and peace.

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.