The World and Everything in It: August 15, 2025

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning!

Today on Culture Friday, the problem with AI generated bands and music … and a new documentary featuring Os Guinness, Truth Rising … calling Christians to courage in a shaky cultural moment.

NICK EICHER, HOST: One of the narrators of the film … John Stonestreet … standing by. Also today, an unmarketable genius who never played the fame game…

BREND: The idea that somebody can do their four albums then they just move on is perhaps not such an easily packageable narrative.

And Word Play with George Grant.

BROWN: It’s Friday, August 15th. 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: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Alaska summit preview » President Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin will meet face to face just hours from now in Alaska … for what the White House has described as a “listening exercise.”

Trump says of Putin that he will hear him out regarding what it will take to end the war in Ukraine … and get a sense of whether the Russian leader is serious about ending it.

TRUMP:  As Putin knows, I'm the toughest one that he's ever had to deal with. He's never had to deal with any, anybody like me.

Putin on Thursday praised Trump’s efforts to end the war. That is keeping with what many analysts see as a charm offensive on the Kremlin’s part in dealing with the American president. But Trump has voiced frustration with pleasant phone calls with Putin … that were followed only by more violence.

Trump says the real negotiations would happen in a follow–up meeting to include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

TRUMP:  The second meeting is gonna be very, very important. 'cause that's gonna be a meeting where they, uh, make a deal, and I don't want to use the word divvy things up, but you know, to a certain extent, it's not a bad term. Okay. But there will be a give and take as to boundaries, lands, et cetera, et cetera.

But Zelenskyy has been adamant that Ukraine will not be dividing Russian occupied Ukrainian land. He says the Ukrainian people would not tolerate that, and his country’s constitution would not allow it.

Zelenskyy has been in touch with European leaders this week. They’re working behind the scenes to bolster Kyiv’s leverage in any possible negotiation with Moscow.

Trump 90th anniversary of Social Security remarks » And Trump on Thursday issued a presidential proclamation from the Oval Office honoring the 90th anniversary of the Social Security Act.

The president said his administration is working to bolster the program.

TRUMP:  In the campaign, I made a sacred pledge to our seniors that I would always protect social security and under this administration we're keeping that promise and strengthening social security for generations to come.

He pointed to a series of legislative provisions that he says will help the vast majority of seniors pay "zero tax" on their Social Security benefits.

Democrats charge that Trump is not keeping his campaign promise. They’ve been critical of the president's cuts to Social Security staffing as well the Department of Government Efficiency's access to taxpayer information.

The White House says they are making technological upgrades, as well as lowering customer service wait times.

Wholesale inflation » Wall Street is hoping to rebound this morning after stocks dipped Thursday following hotter-than-expected wholesale inflation numbers. WORLD’s Benjamin Eicher has more.

BENJAMIN EICHER: Markets slumped on news that the Producer Price Index—a key measure of wholesale inflation … jumped 0.9% in July … on a month-over-month basis. And it was up 3.3% year-over-year.

Both of those numbers were well above expectations.

And many see that as evidence that tariffs are applying upward pressure on prices.

But some producers of core products that are sensitive to tariffs — things like imported home goods and electronics … are also reporting higher margins. Economists say that could suggest that some companies are using tariffs as cover to raise prices.

The unwelcomed wholesale numbers came just one day after stocks rose on Wednesday's government report showing consumer inflation remained flat in July.

For WORLD, I’m Benjamin Eicher.

Israel West Bank settlement » Israel's finance minister says construction is set to begin on a controversial new Israeli settlement in the West Bank.

SMOTRICH: [Speaking Hebrew]

Bezalel Smotrich says Israel will answer efforts to establish a Palestinian state with more Israeli neighborhoods and communities. He adds that Jewish reality will ultimately bury the false dream of a Palestinian state.

DEEK: [Speaking Arabic]

One Palestinian official is calling the Israeli announcement a “colonial, expansionist, and racist move.”

The UK, Canada, France, and Australia have said they’re ready to recognize a Palestinian state if certain conditions are met.

The Israeli government argues that a Palestinian state would pose a grave security threat to Israel.

Tropical Storm Erin » Tropical Storm Erin, now spinning over the Atlantic, is expected to become a major hurricane this week.

It is expected to steer clear of land, but Jack Beven with the National Hurricane Center says:

BEVEN:  It's too early to tell what areas might or might not get impacted by Erin. And, uh, so, uh, people along the east coast of the United States at least keep an eye on it.

Officials across the northern Caribbean are on alert today. Winds were expected to top 60 miles per hour this morning and strengthening,

The storm will trigger dangerous swells, high surf, rip currents, and it will drop heavy rain from the Leeward Islands through Puerto Rico.

I’m Kent Covington.

Straight ahead, Culture Friday with John Stonestreet. And later, Wordplay with George Grant.

This is The World and Everything in It. 

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Friday the 15th of August.

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

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. It’s Culture Friday and John Stonestreet joins us. He’s president of the Colson Center and Host of the Breakpoint Podcast. Good Morning John!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

BROWN: Hey, listen to this.

MUSIC: [Excerpt from album]

BROWN: We’ve got something in common…I like music, too.

That’s a single from the group, The Velvet Sundown.

You wrote about their music …“with the coffee house vibe and their one million hits on Spotify.”

Turns out the group got all that attention before fans realized the band and the music ... all AI generated.

I will admit, watching the AI generated music videos with the little AI people … kind of creepy. But John, so what, the artists behind the music aren’t real people….do we have to connect with every musician whose music we like?

STONESTREET: No, and I that’s also an illusion, right, that people listen to musicians and they think they know them. I mean, that happens on all kinds of levels. But this is something else. This is not just, not connecting with a musician. This is something that God endowed human beings with the capacity to think musically, even the command to be musical. I mean, there’s, if you read the Psalms, there’s a command to worship the Lord with song. But to outsource that, this is a dehumanizing of music.

Music is something that is unique to humans. You don’t find it in the animal kingdom. I mean, you have songs, I guess, of birds and that sort of stuff, but you don’t have symphonies. It’s actually something that is a reflection of both the imagination, but especially a way of worshiping. And that’s why even music not directly aimed at God or telling us truth about God is still an expression of worship, in my view. And it could be a good expression, or it could be a bad expression. It could be noble or it could be idolatrous, but this is to a whole nother level of expecting somebody else to do the work for us.

So there’s so many of these AI stories that come up, and it makes me think of something that Peter Kreft wrote years ago, the Catholic ethicist. He said, you know, just when our toys went from being sticks and stones to thermonuclear bombs, we all became moral infants. In other words, this has a lot to do with the kind of people we are and whether we’re able to handle this technology. And so far, I’m not convinced.

BROWN: I want to go back to what you said about music being an expression of worship. I agree. But this isn’t Christian music. Does that matter? Do you make a distinction?

STONESTREET: I really don’t. And just like I don’t think that there’s much of a distinction to be made between Christian songs and non Christian songs and secular songs. It’s basically all music is a reflection of how God made us, and it either aligns with what’s true and it points our hearts and minds towards God.

You know, we know from Scripture that you can point your mind and heart towards God, not just by looking at God, but by looking at his world, or looking at the human experience. I mean, this is the Song of Solomon. I mean, there’s, there’s all kinds of ways.

So some of those categories, I think we’ve superimposed on all of human expression, but especially music.

BROWN: So, John, exactly where do you draw the line?

STONESTREET: Yeah, I think the question of where you draw the line is not the right place to begin. I mean, I know you have to get there, and this is going to sound like a cop out, and maybe it is, but, you know, it’s kind of like what is the line of purity? Purity is not a line. It’s a direction.

In other words, are you running into a direction that honors God and where your habits and your heart and your mind and your intention are in that direction to align with how God made us and the sorts of people that we’re supposed to be or if we’re not?

In other words, you know, a tool of any kind, a gun, is really helpful in the hands of a hunter, and it’s really harmful in the hands of a killer. The difference isn’t a line between hunting and killing. It takes that expression, but the real difference there is what kind of person is holding that gun. That’s what I have to think about when it comes to AI.

I mean, we talk here all the time about how Neil Postman got it all right and predicted how we were going to engage with entertainment. He did the same thing with technology. So are we using the technology to advance those things which God created humans to do, or are we using them to replace humans altogether? I think we can draw a number of lines around that framework, and what’s good and what’s bad, what’s useful and what’s not.

EICHER: Well, hey, John, I hope you can stick around for a little bit longer, because I’d like to talk with you about a new project of yours coming out in just a few weeks in September called Truth Rising. Now, your team sent me a screener of the 90-minute documentary, and I’ve got to say to you, John, well done. I watched it over and over. Even scrapped my original column idea for the September WORLD Magazine that went online today and decided to write about this instead. That’s how enthusiastic I am about it.

STONESTREET: Ah, that’s great. Thank you.

EICHER: Yeah, sure. So I guess since Collin Garbarino is away and we were not planning on a movie review, we can add one of our own — a documentary review — here of Truth Rising. And here’s where I’d like to begin with it.

I know that you’re aware of another recent project called The After Party. It drew a lot of attention last year. It was aimed at the 2024 election, sort of trying to reframe a Christian approach to politics. It billed itself as moving Christians beyond “partisan divides.” But the leadership of this project and the funding of this project led, shall we say, more than a few people to see it as shaped by just Never Trumpism and leaning left politically.

But when I watched Truth Rising, it struck me as moving in the opposite direction and providing a hopeful vision for a cultural engagement grounded in Christian conviction. So, John, was Truth Rising meant as a response to that by any chance?

STONESTREET: You know, I can’t speak for everyone that was involved in the Truth Rising project. This is a partnership from the Colson Center and Focus on the Family. And very quickly we realized we wanted to invite Os Guinness to really kind of be the thought leader—the Gandalf, you could say—of the project.

The After Party literally never came to my mind until you just now asked me that question, Nick. I’ve got to be honest, it had nothing to do with it. I think our approach is, listen, we’re in the tradition of some wonderful thought leaders—Francis Schaeffer, Chuck Colson—who wrestled with ideas and the significance of ideas to cultures and even civilizations.

You think about guys like Jacques Barzun or Pitirim Sorokin, who talked about the rise and fall of cultures and civilizations. When we think of civilizations, we think about them as historical artifacts, right? You see them in museums. You see them in history books. And yet we’re in the middle of one. And we’re in the middle, if Os Guinness is right, of a really vulnerable time in Western culture.

I don’t know if we’re in a Bonhoeffer moment, where everything we try will fail, or if we’re in a Wilberforce moment, where everything we try will succeed. But what I want to know is, what kind of people should we be? Isn’t that the question that Francis Schaeffer and Chuck Colson both asked, using up all the available adverbs — “How then shall we live?” or “How now shall we live?”

I’ve said this a number of times here, and I deeply believe it. I learned it from Os Guinness, that God has called us to a particular time and place. We’re not just called to a job, we’re not just called to a ministry, we’re not just called to acts of charity and good works — although all those things are true — but God put us in this moment in history and not in another.

And so if indeed we’re in a civilizational moment, as Os Guinness puts it and describes and so many of the thought leaders argue, what kind of people can we be? And you know, many Christians have bought into a secular worldview — that history proceeds with these mindless forces, and we’re just victims of wherever it takes us, that there’s really not a lot we can do. And that’s exactly opposite of how the Christian worldview describes the significance of followers of Christ being called in place by God in times and places, and how God sometimes uses remarkably small things to make remarkably big changes.

This is a journey. The Truth Rising film is ambitious. It attempts to start with an analysis of Western culture and end by calling Christians to be courageous voices, like the people whose stories we tell. And hopefully Truth Rising can call more and more Christians to that kind of life.

EICHER: You know, John, listening to you describe it, that’s exactly how it played for me. I think in my column, I wrote that watching Truth Rising felt a bit like a 4K compression of the last decade of Culture Friday conversations.

You know those courageous voices that you highlight — that you just mentioned — Chloe Cole, Jack Phillips, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Seth Dillon, Katy Faust, the last two of those have even written for WORLD. It’s that same mix of conviction and clarity we’ve been talking about for years.

But here’s what I’d like to ask next, and I said this in the column too — the film felt to me like a baton pass, like Os was handing the torch to you. Was that intentional?

STONESTREET: Well, I think he’s passing the torch to all of us, and that’s, of course, what I think matters the most. And this was central to Chuck Colson’s message. This was central to what you heard from so many of the thought leaders, including Os — that engaging culture or being a culturally sound and thoughtful Christian isn’t just the job of the professionals.

All of us are in a cultural moment. This cultural moment is super shaky. I mean, we’ve all felt it, right? We’ve all gone from voices that yesterday were telling us religion is poison to today saying that they like Christmas carols, or yesterday saying you’re not allowed to say that there’s such a thing as boys and girls to now being changed a bit. I mean, it’s so dizzying how fast culture changes.

And what I wanted to really see happen is the church called in a powerful way to jump into this moment. And by the way, the film is really a call to action, and then it’s followed by a four-part teaching series that takes small groups through four pillars of courage.

What does it mean to be a courageous Christian? Four things: hope, truth, identity, calling. Be a person of hope, like First Peter says. Be someone grounded in the truth, because that’s the only way forward. Be someone who understands what it means to be made in the image of God as an answer to the crisis of identity of our culture. And then have a keen sense of calling — put some flesh on that: hope, truth, identity, calling. That’s where we want all this to land.

EICHER: Well, hey, listen, we may not have time. I’ve got a million questions for you, John, but the one thing I have to ask you about is the old truck.

STONESTREET: Haha, everybody wants to know about the old truck, yeah.

EICHER: So it’s a ’64 Chevy C10 Fleetside, right?

STONESTREET: Beautiful.

EICHER: So did I get it?

STONESTREET: Yeah, yeah, pretty darn close. I think that’s what it was. Have to go back and remember—it’s not mine. It had a Corvette engine retrofitted with old-looking gauges to go with the real one. And Os Guinness legitimately almost did not get in the truck — like that scene …

EICHER: Yeah, he did not look like he wanted to be there at all.

STONESTREET: … that was not acting. He was like, “You got to be kidding me,” in his British accent, without curse words. I mean, it was like … and honestly, I couldn’t see because we had three cameras across the front windshield that had to be bolted in because the suction cups wouldn’t work on the curved windshield.

EICHER: Amazing.

STONESTREET: True story — and I drove that national treasure, not the truck, I’m talking about Os Guinness — risking all of our lives from the Lincoln Memorial out to rural Virginia.

EICHER: Hey, and my brother, I told you I have watched it over and over, wanting to be a good reporter for the magazine, but I noticed that you ran a red light. We need to talk about that.

Yeah, I have the evidence, but clearly you’re following the camera car, which hurried through a yellow, is what I’m guessing, and almost left you guys stranded at the red. And I’m imagining you going, “We’ve got to get this shot.” So I’ll just chalk it up to one-take documentary driving and let you off here with a warning.

But seriously, John, I could not help thinking that that old pickup was a metaphor for Western civilization — something sturdy, something worth keeping, but also something in need of restoration and care. Was that the idea?

STONESTREET: You know, we worked with Coldwater Media, who are known for telling great stories. Those guys love cars, as you know from Drive Thru History, which is one of their wonderful projects. But one of the best analogies, I thought, that emerged in the film was the former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, who says that civilizations run on fuel, and if you put the wrong fuel in them, they sputter and die. And we all sense that we’ve been putting the wrong fuel in there.

It’s very similar to what Os says elsewhere — that we’re a cut-flower civilization. The ideas that animated the West, again, made it flourish and led it to become a flourishing context for human beings, have been cut off. And that doesn’t mean the flower immediately decays — it loses its shine and petals start to fall off.

And I think that long decay and that long decline comes when you don’t have those ideas tethered. So this is really a call for Christians to tether their lives to the things that are good and true and beautiful. And you can also use that analogy — put the right fuel in the tank, and when you do, like that truck, that baby will hum.

EICHER: That baby will hum. Good thought.

BROWN: With all this talk about it….I’m looking forward to seeing this documentary myself! John Stonestreet, president of the Colson center and host of the Breakpoint podcast, thanks again, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, August 15th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

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

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: The story of a songwriter you may never have heard of — but whose music quietly captivated some of the biggest names in pop.

David Ackles never had a hit single, and his albums barely sold. Yet his songs drew praise from Elvis Costello, Elton John, Phil Collins, record executive Clive Davis … and WORLD’s music reviewer.

BROWN: Ackles recorded for Elektra and Columbia, building a small but fiercely loyal following—and a legend that outlasted his career.

Now, a new book by Mark Brend titled Down River: In Search of David Ackles … the book uncovers the story behind the mystery—and why his music still matters. Here’s WORLD’s Arsenio Orteza.

ARSENIO ORTEZA: “Buddy, can you spare a contract?” Thus read the caption under the photo of the piano-playing singer-songwriter David Ackles in the 1976 edition of The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock. That was practically the only publication that would mention him at all from that point until 1999, the year he died from cancer at 62.

Ackles' Encyclopedia of Rock entry was brief. It read: “First two albums, David Ackles (1968) and Subway to the Country (1970), established his style—poignant, nostalgic material laced with heavy drama.” There was more, but poignant, nostalgic, and heavy drama pretty well summed Ackles up. What the encyclopedia didn’t mention was how heavy Ackles’ drama could be.

MUSIC: [“Candy Man”]

This is “Candy Man,” a cut from Ackles’ second album, Subway to the Country. The song concerns a candy-shop owner who introduces pornography to children as a way of getting revenge on a society that he blames for the loss of his left hand. It sounds like the plot of an art-house film, and it’s not alone in Ackles’ body of work. In the song “His Name Is Andrew,” the title character undergoes an Ingmar Bergmanesque loss of faith. In “Aberfan,” Ackles recounts a real-life disaster that killed 116 children. And Ackles did have lighter moments. As The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock pointed out, he could be poignant and nostalgic. But all in all his music proved a tough sell. It’s not surprising, therefore, that his story has gone untold–until now.

In his new book, Down River: In Search of David Ackles, Mark Brend finally gives the musician his due.

MARK BREND: I think of him in a category that includes Tom Waits and Scott Walker and Leonard Cohen and, um, Van Dyke Parks maybe, these unusual figures who kind of ended up in the rock world, but musically they come from somewhere quite different.

Brend points out that, unlike his contemporaries, Ackles came from the world of musical theater. One can hear what he means especially well in a song called “Everybody Has a Story,” the opening cut of Ackles 1973 album Five and Dime.

MUSIC: [“Everybody Has a Story”]

Ackles’ theatrical roots ran deep. He was a child actor, appearing in six films about Rusty the dog. He also imbibed the world of live theater thanks to his mother, who directed serious church-theater productions for years. Throw in early exposure to the piano, a gimlet-eyed view of human nature, sardonic humor, and an understated Christian faith, and you have a combination that even in the experimental ’60s would’ve made Ackles an outlier.

But just how understated was Ackles’ faith? From an evangelical point of view, very. Only four songs on any of his four albums contained overt references to Christian sentiments. But from the point of view of Ackles’ denominational affiliations—mainline Presbyterian growing up, Episcopalian as an adult—and from the point of view of his show-don’t-tell theatrical background, his understatement makes sense. Brend interviewed and talked with Ackles toward the end of his life. So I asked him whether he detected other ways that Ackles’ faith manifested itself.

BREND: In his songs, I think you see a lot of compassion for people. So even when his characters in his songs are rather shabby people, he—or they get involved in all sorts of shady things, he has a compassion for them. And, as you know, in the music business there’s a lot of competitiveness and sometimes quite a lot of ego going around. And that didn’t seem to apply to him.

Ackles’ compassion for his characters also bore fruit in elegantly and perfectly constructed songs of quiet desperation and lost or unrequited love. And by “elegantly and perfectly constructed,” I mean lyrics and note values that seemed made for each other, exact rhymes instead of the near rhymes prevalent nowadays, all this in the service of bringing to life emotions that we’d prefer not to face. “Waiting for the Moving Van,” for instance, should move anyone who has ever had to keep a stiff upper lip while cutting bait with a family situation too broken to save.

MUSIC: [“Waiting for the Moving Van”]

So if Ackles is so great, why hasn’t he been posthumously discovered and celebrated the way that other overlooked singer-songwriters of his era have? The easy part of the answer is that Ackles has never had a major reissue campaign. There Is a River is a two-CD anthology that Rhino Records planned to release in 2007 but was cancelled due to a legal dispute.

The hard part of the answer is the subject of Down River’s epilogue. Brend argues that we seem to require our lost-genius narratives to have a tragic component before we find them compelling. Other than a car accident, a frustratingly unfinished musical about the early 20th-century evangelist Aimee McPherson, and the cancer that eventually got him, Ackles was tragedy free.

BREND: He wasn’t somebody who was clinging to past glories. And I think that’s—the idea that somebody can do their four albums then they just move on and do other things in life is perhaps not such an easily packageable narrative.

Brend doesn’t expect Rhino’s There Is a River box ever to be released. But he does hope that Ackles’ four albums will be reissued along with other previously unreleased material, much of which Brend says is “excellent.”

Meanwhile, copies of Ackles’ original LPs and now out-of-print CD reissues from the 1990s and early 2000s can still be found second hand. And, like Brend’s book Down River, they’re well worth searching out.

MUSIC: [“Midnight Carousel”]

I’m Arsenio Orteza

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, August 15th. 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.

Quick reminder: Tomorrow we’ll have the extended version of Lindsay Mast’s interview with Clare Morell. You may have heard part of it on Wednesday, but there’s more to say and the full conversation is worth hearing.

It’s all about smartphones and screen detox for families … a topic that resonated with many listeners. You’ll find the complete interview this weekend on The World and Everything in It podcast feed … wherever you get your podcasts.

BROWN: Up next, Word Play for August. George Grant has been rummaging through the dictionary again … and has uncovered a curious phenomenon: good words breaking bad … words once noble and uplifting, now demoted, downgraded, maybe even a little disgraced.

GEORGE GRANT: Pejoration is an expression linguists use to describe the process of etymological degeneration. It is a kind of semantic entropy, grammatical erosion, or philological regression. Simply put, it is when a word’s positive meaning gradually morphs into a negative one.

Examples of pejoration abound. The word silly for instance comes to us from Middle English. It originally meant someone who was “happy, blessed, or fortunate.” In some contexts, it was even used to describe someone who was “pious, holy, or good.” But by the time of William Shakespeare, the term’s use had declined to its present-day meaning of “lacking good sense, trite, or foolish.” Crafty is derived from an Old English root meaning “strong, adept, or skillful,” but in some contexts it now connotes “dishonest, sneaky, or duplicitous.” Cunning is a word that has come to have negative connotations in modern English, but it once meant “wise, learned, or having notable expertise.” Hierarchy has suffered a similar deterioration. Originally it denoted the rank upon rank of angels in the heavenly host. John Milton used the term somewhat pejoratively to describe the elite status of secular or ecclesiastical authorities. In modern English nuances of egalitarian envy or even hostility can sometimes adhere to the word. Other examples of pejoration include knave, egregious, awful, gay, spinster, mistress, wench, naughty, hussy, and tart—all once perfectly acceptable, positive terms, but no longer.

Only rarely do the meanings of words improve over time. When it does occur, it is called amelioration—the very opposite of pejoration. For example, the word nice once meant “foolish, simple, or absurd.” It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that it came to mean “kind, considerate, or friendly.” Likewise, ambitious and aggressive are words that once had adverse connotations but have now been largely rehabilitated. In regional colloquial slang, sick, wicked, and bad can be used to mean “good, cool, or desirable.” As film critic Roger Ebert once quipped, “When bad is good and good is bad it’s hard to know which way is up.”

C.S. Lewis illustrated pejoration and amelioration in what he called “the moralization of status words.” This is the process, he said, of terms originally denoting status and class slowly acquiring the moral connotations, favorable or otherwise, of the ethics attributed to that class. Thus, villains and ceorls, which originally simply meant medieval serfs, deteriorated to “churlish rogues.” Meanwhile noble and gentle, rose in moral connotation.

Mario Andrew Pei the Italian-born American etymologist asserted that, “Of all the words that exist in any language only a small minority are pure, unadulterated, original roots. The majority are coined words, forms that have been in one way or another created, augmented, cut down, combined, and recombined to convey new meanings. The language mint is more than a mint; it is a great manufacturing center, where all sorts of activities go on unceasingly.”

The English language is always on the move. It never sits still. As Phil Lord has said, “We constantly risk people misunderstanding us—if only because plain English never seems to stay plain.”

I’m George Grant.

NICK EICHER, HOST: All right, it’s time to name the team who helped make things happen this week:

Mary Reichard, David Bahnsen, Caleb Welde, Steve West, Josh Schumacher, Kim Henderson, Daniel Suhr, Hunter Baker, Amy Lewis, Lindsay Mast, Josh Reavis, Carolina Lumetta, Anna Johanson Brown, Bekah McCallum, Emma Freire, Emma Eicher, Cal Thomas, John Stonestreet, Arsenio Orteza, and George Grant.

Thanks also to our breaking news crew: Kent Covington, Travis Kircher, Christina Grube, Steve Kloosterman, and Lynde Langdon.

And thanks to the Moonlight Maestros: Benj Eicher and Carl Peetz.

Paul Butler is executive producer.

Harrison Watters is Washington producer, Kristen Flavin is features editor, and Les Sillars is our editor-in-chief. I’m Nick Eicher.

BROWN: And I'm Myrna Brown. 

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The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is Biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Bible records that Levi the tax collector left that to follow Jesus, and threw a feast for Jesus at his house: “And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at his disciples, saying, ‘Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?’ And Jesus answered them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.’” —Luke 5:30-32

A reminder to attend a Bible-believing church this weekend! Encourage others, and let others encourage you.

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