The World and Everything in It: August 18, 2023

PREROLL: The World and Everything in It is made possible by listeners like me. My name is Jonie Skinner from Rhinelander, Wisconsin. I listen each day while I'm exercising after work. I hope you enjoy today's program.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning! The real-life football player at the center of the movie The Blind Side is suing the family that got him off the streets.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Yes, he is, and we’ll talk about it today on Culture Friday with John Stonestreet.

Also today George Grant with Word Play for August.

And WORLD Arts and Culture Editor Collin Garbarino reviews two movies, including Gran Turismo:

AUDIO: You really think you’re going to take a kid who plays video games in their bedroom—you’re going to strap them to a 200-mile-an-hour rocket?

And Steve West on flying through the deep blue skies.

REICHARD: It’s Friday, August 18th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

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

REICHARD: Now the news with Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Japan-SoKo summit » President Biden is hosting high-stakes diplomatic talks today with Japan and South Korea at the Camp David presidential retreat.

Christopher Johnstone with the Center for Strategic and International Studies explains.

JOHNSTONE: This is a relationship that’s fraught with issues left over from history, political difficulties. And yet, it’s a critical relationship.

Despite their past differences, both nations are key U.S. allies in the Asia-Pacific region. And they have something else in common: They both recognize the threat from Beijing.

JOHNSTONE: China’s growing influence, its behavior across the region is a challenge for all three countries, and there’s a benefit to cooperating.

China is likely to be a key topic of the talks between Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.

Hawaii » While the flames are no longer burning in the town of Lahaina on the island of Maui, the nightmare is far from over for residents.

Brad Kieserman with the American Red Cross told reporters on Thursday:

KIESERMAN: My organization has been at every major disaster in the United States for as long as it’s existed. I have been at every major disaster in the United States for the last decade. This is unprecedented.

The shells of burned out cars now line the streets. And scattered, hollowed out cinder block structures are the only clues as to where homes and businesses once stood.

Mental health professionals are providing grief counseling and treating many for post-traumatic stress disorder.

More than a hundred people are confirmed dead with as many as a thousand residents still missing.

Terrorist plea» The accused mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks and four co-defendants may escape the death penalty under a new plea agreement. WORLD’s Lauren Canterberry has more.

LAUREN CANTERBERRY: Some relatives of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the attacks received letters this week, notifying them that a plea deal with the terror suspects could take the death penalty off the table.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected architect of the 2001 attacks is among the five defendants who’ve been jailed at Guantanamo Bay since 2006.

Legal disputes over their interrogations while in CIA custody have caused multiple delays a trial date has not been set.

For WORLD, I’m Lauren Canterberry.

Pakistan churches » Pakistani Christians have taken to the streets in protest after a mob destroyed dozens of churches and homes over rumors that someone had desecrated a Quran.

SOUND: [Pakistani protesters chanting]

Reverend Frederick John called on the Pakistani government:

JOHN: to take strong measures to stop and eliminate terrorizing and hurting activities towards the minorities in the name of religion.

Footage shows Muslim rioters destroying buildings with sledgehammers and setting them on fire.

Pakistani authorities say they arrested nearly 130 people.

China nukes » The Pentagon says China continues to build up its nuclear arsenal amid growing tensions with the United States. WORLD’s Josh Schumacher has more:

JOSH SCHUMACHER: The Defense Department says Beijing is showing no signs of slowing down its drive to ramp up both its conventional and nuclear forces.

The communist government is reportedly working to diversify its launch capabilities, allowing it to launch missiles from the air, land, and sea.

Publicly, China claims it is keeping its nuclear arsenal at the minimum level necessary, and it is not engaged in an arms race.

For WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

Walmart earnings » One day after Target reported its first quarterly earnings drop in six years, Walmart on Thursday reported another strong sales gain.

Target pointed to economic factors as the reason for the downturn, rather than a boycott over its LGBT activism.

But Walmart reported a 6% growth in sales for the same period in which Target saw a 5% decrease.

Analysts do point out that Walmart is better positioned than most competitors to benefit as shoppers grow more cost-conscious amid high inflation.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: Culture Friday with John Stonestreet. Plus, Supercars and superbugs on the big screen.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Friday the 18th of August, 2023.

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

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s Culture Friday.

Joining us now is John Stonestreet, the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. John, good morning.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: John, a strange and very sad story this week, I’m sure you’ve followed it, involving the Tuohy family and the pro-football player Michael Oher. The story told in the Michael Lewis book “The Blind Side” that became a successful Hollywood film. Here we had a great, positive adoption story that’s turning out to be the opposite: not great and not positive. How bad is this?

STONESTREET: I think it's hard to tell. I think the most important thing that we have seen and that we can conclude is that what we see in a story has a lot more to do with the assumptions that we're looking through than anything else. People are already absolutely certain that either Michael Oher was the victim of a family with a white savior complex, or he is completely ungrateful and lying about the whole thing. And anyone who claims to know what the punchline is doesn't. I mean, we just don't know, we don't know the backdrop, we don't have that story.

You can go by the movie, but movies don't always track reality, and that seems to be the thing that triggered all this at the very beginning. This is a disagreement that has gone public and has been for a long time. And it's tragic. I think that at the very least what we can say is, it's equally wrong to romanticize adoption as it is to demonize adoption as some form of cultural imperialism. And look: The world's a much better place when families realize that they have a responsibility and an opportunity to bless those who don't have the same sort of family situation.

At the same time even our best actions can be driven by bad motives. The thing is, adoption has been one of the most significant long-term goods that Christianity has brought to the world, and it is a Christian thing. You can trace the sort of language that Paul uses in the New Testament to describe how we have been adopted into God's family and grafted in, and some of that language describes the gospel. This is when it enters culture, this is when it enters the world: This very idea that—outside of a birthright—others can be embraced as family. That's why it's one of the most important things in this kind of woke attack that's happened on adoption.

Again, I'm not saying that Michael was guilty of that. But this story is fitting that narrative for an awful lot of people who think that it's fundamentally wrong to have that sort of kind of an integrative approach to family ever. And that's a tragic way of preventing an awful lot of people from being helped.

On the other hand, it doesn't help to romanticize this. We know the stories. People who sign up to be adoptive parents sign up for something that is very difficult. And it doesn't always have that happy ending that we want it to.

EICHER: Kristen Waggoner, the lawyer who runs Alliance Defending Freedom, writing in WORLD Opinions, touches on the Michigan legislation targeting counseling for those with unwanted same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria, targeting conversations between counselors and clients. Waggoner says it’s not just Michigan: “In Indiana, for example, two parents lost custody of their child after they refused to deny the child’s biological sex. In California, lawmakers are weighing a bill that would make it harder for parents to win a custody dispute if he or she does not affirm the child’s claimed “gender identity.” A similar bill was proposed last year in Virginia. And a few months ago, in Oregon, a would-be adoptive mother was told that she is unfit to adopt or foster because she wouldn’t support a child’s gender transition or take the child to a pride parade.” So here’s my point and I’d like your comment: You can win all day long at the Supreme Court, but these same battles have to be fought over and over. And she kind of makes that point, too, that it’s just going to require us privately and publicly to contend and contend again. There’s no end zone and no spiking the football.

STONESTREET: I think she's exactly right—as usual—on a number of levels. The first is that a lot of what we're seeing right now in terms of conscience rights and freedom of religion is taking the form of needing to protect freedom of speech. And the reason that freedom of speech is so closely connected with the way that religious freedom has been attacked over the last really 20 years is that it's really been attacked not by directly attacking it, but by trying to shrink it down to the ability to believe whatever you want in your own head, your own heart, your own house of worship, and your own home. But not outside of that, not in terms of how you order your public life.

The most obvious example that you are ordering your public life around your deeply held beliefs is that you're actually saying it out loud. And the ability to say it out loud is really significant. That's why so many of these cases that ADF and First Liberty and some of these other organizations are dealing with have to do with speech and expression. And we're going to have to work that out.

We can, again, all thank Justice Kennedy, who was quite sure that his initial decision to expand the definition of marriage wouldn't have any of these consequences, because we'd all be super nice to each other and hold no animus and it wouldn't compel anyone's conscience. He was in a fantasy world when he wrote all that. It's turned out exactly as many folks predicted, and even worse.

REICHARD: John, I saw your piece in Breakpoint about the Boy Scouts. The Scouts held its National Jamboree in West Virginia this year, for the first time in six years. What struck you about that?

STONESTREET: I think the first thing that struck me was the first thing that The Washington Post article highlighted, which is the LGBTQ presence here. We have been assured at various stages that the Boy Scouts are still just exactly what they've always been, and there has been sign after sign after sign that it's not. And every time somebody's brought this up we've been assured by the leadership or Advocates and Defenders that, “Oh, no, everything's fine”. And then it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.

The story of this is that it only makes sense that the prominent place of the LGBTQ presence there is kind of the natural progression of how this organization has been incredibly important in American history and as—I can't stress this enough—a sort of intermediate institution, a sort of culture-shaping institution that has been highlighted throughout American history as being a way of forming strong citizens and allowing people to become the sort of people who govern themselves and contribute to society. There's not been a more important organization in the history of the United States than the non-governmental institution that is the Boy Scouts except the church itself. And that's if you put it all together; look at the number of congressional leaders, business leaders, Supreme Court justices, vice presidents and presidents who have been members. There's not an Ivy League school that can claim the sort of connection that the Boy Scouts have. And yet this year's jamboree was a shell of its former self.

What it's now chosen to highlight is anything but the sort of growing young men that it's always been known for. So this is a long devolution in the wrong direction. And it continues, and it's sad.

REICHARD: Yeah, I grew up with the the adage “Scouts Honor.” We don't hear that anymore.

STONESTREET: No, it doesn't mean anything anymore. Right? It doesn't, unfortunately.

REICHARD: What lessons might Christians learn from the whole debacle with the Scouts?

STONESTREET: I think that certainly the church should play that role in terms of shaping young men. And I also am grateful for things like Trail Life USA and others that are actually providing substitutes for the BSA.

I think a lot of times we want to get into cultural institutions and reform them when we have to replace them. And it seems like there's a real opportunity here that's being seized by a lot of Christians to do that. So I think that's the most important lesson and, fundamentally, what you actually say you believe matters as an institution. Pay attention to that and pay close attention to it.

EICHER: All right. John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center, and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thanks John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, August 18th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. 

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Arts and culture editor Collin Garbarino with what’s new at the theater this weekend.

COLLIN GARBARINO, REVIEWER: So far this year, box-office sales at movie theaters are up more than 20 percent compared to last year. That’s still down about 15 percent from where it was in 20-19, but the summer’s big hits like Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Sound of Freedom have lured back moviegoers who haven’t been to the theater since before the pandemic.

But what about these last couple of weekends before summer wraps up? Are there any surprises to delight audiences, or is it just more of the same?

JENNY: It’s called the scarab. It was given to my dad when I was a kid. It’s some kind of world-destroying weapon.

In the just-more-of-the-same category, this weekend, DC Studios releases its latest superhero film, Blue Beetle.

The movie stars Xolo Maridueña from Cobra Kai as Jaime Reyes, DC Studios’ first Latino superhero. Jaime is a recent college graduate who comes home to find his close-knit family struggling. His father has had health problems. They’ve lost their business. They’re about to lose their home. Jaime puts his dreams on hold to help the family.

Jaime goes looking for work at Kord Industries, a gigantic weapons manufacturer. Instead of finding a job, he finds a piece of alien technology that fuses with his spine.

JENNY: What is he talking about?

JAIME: I’m talking about this.

[GASPS]

BELISSA: I forgot how bad it looks.

RUDY: I’ve seen worse.

BELISSA: Where?

RUDY: You don’t want to know.

In addition to giving him a disgusting looking backbone, the scarab gives him superpowers.

But Kord wants the scarab back because it plans to replicate and weaponize it. They target Jaime’s family to flush him out.

JAIME: You said this thing is gonna protect me, right? It’s not going to let me die?

RUDY: No, no. I mean, die—

JAIME: Alright, let’s see if it works.

JENNY and RUDY: No, no, no, no!

The movie’s chock full of jokes, which is a nice change for the usually somber DC franchise. Many of those jokes cater to viewers familiar with Mexican culture. But aside from the jokes, there’s not much to this derivative origin story full of cliches. It feels like a cross between Venom and Spider-Man: Homecoming.

There’s certainly not enough to Blue Beetle to dispel the superhero fatigue audiences are feeling.

In the somewhat delightful category, next weekend, the sports biopic Gran Turismo officially comes out, but many theaters will be showing sneak previews this weekend.

Gran Turismo is based on the true story of race-car driver Jann Mardenborough who went from racing in video games to racing against professionals on some of the most iconic tracks in the world.

In the movie, Jann comes from a working class family in Britain, but he dreams of driving supercars. His dad loves him, but he also thinks Jann needs to get realistic about his future.

STEVE: Listen, son. You think you can play a stupid video game about cars and you’re going to become a race car driver?

While Jann stays busy playing the Gran Turismo racing game, a marketing executive, played by Orlando Bloom, hatches a daring plan to bring Nissan’s racing team some publicity. He starts a contest to find the best Gran Turismo players in the world, and then he gives them a shot at racing real supercars. To get them ready, he enlists the aid of a crotchety trainer played by the always entertaining David Harbour.

JACK: You really think you’re going to take a kid who plays video games in their bedroom—you’re going to strap them to a 200-mile-an-hour rocket. It’ll tear him to pieces.

Jann has to prove he has what it takes to not only drive, but also win.

The plot doesn’t necessarily hold a lot of surprises. It’s like Rocky with race cars. We get the training montages and inspiring talk from the coach.

JACK: You’ve raced it, what? Like a thousand times? Now do it in real life.

Gran Turismo derives a lot of its emotional punch from the fact that it’s based on a true story. But it seems the script plays a little fast and loose with Jann’s accomplishments. However, it’s kind of cool that the real Jann Mardenborough served as a stunt driver during filming.

Gran Turismo doesn’t include many surprises, but it manages to be surprisingly engrossing. At the screening I attended, the crowd actually burst into spontaneous applause three separate times. You don’t have to like video games to find this inspiring story entertaining.

A word of caution: Both Blue Beetle and Gran Turismo are rated PG-13 for action and language, and in both cases pervasive profanities push the boundaries of that PG-13 rating.

While I don’t expect either Blue Beetle or Gran Turismo to draw Barbie-sized crowds, either might do for someone looking for one last popcorn flick before summer ends.

I’m Collin Garbarino.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Up next: George Grant with this month’s Word Play. Today, he helps us to appreciate great words invented by great authors.

GEORGE GRANT, COMMENTATOR: According to most dictionaries the word authorism is defined as “the state or condition of being an author.” But the plural, authorisms, refers to a commonplace authorial practice: making up words. Authorisms are thus neologisms—words that weren’t in the dictionary when writers first coined them, but they wound up there as a result of popular usage.

John Milton was a prolific creator of authorisms. He was responsible for more than 600 new English words. He imposed new meanings on old words like space, goose, and fragrance; he transformed verbs into nouns and nouns into verbs such as stunning, enjoyable, and irresponsible; and he invented a veritable catalog of entirely new words including pandemonium, terrific, sensuous, liturgical, debauchery, and padlock.

William Shakespeare was responsible for at least 400 authorisms including apostrophe, aerial, and auspicious; bedroom, birthplace, and bedazzled; cheap, countless, and courtship; dewdrop, domineering, and dwindle—and that is just a small sampling from A to D.

William Tyndale, the father of the English vernacular Bible, minted more than 100 authorisms. Passover, scapegoat, Jehovah, showbread, and atonement were all his creations. He also gave us stumbling-block, taskmaster, modesty, long-suffering, and peacemakers.

The Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser coined blatant in his epic The Faerie Queen. It originally described a fantastic thousand-tongued monster, but it has come to mean anything that is glaringly, patently obvious. “Utopia” was coined by the Tudor nobleman who ran afoul of Henry VIII, Sir Thomas More. He used it as the name for a fictional island in his 1516 satire describing the ideal society.

Jonathan Swift gave us both yahoo and lilliput in his fantasy novel Gulliver’s Travels. Gargantuan comes to us from the 16th century novel, The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel, by François Rabelais. Cyberspace was minted by William Gibson, in his 1982 short story “Burning Chrome” and then, he made it the center-point of his 1984 blockbuster novel Neuromancer.

Of course, not every authorism becomes a part of our common parlance. Shakespearean words like armgaunt, impeticos, pajock, and wappened never really happened. These are called nonce words or occasionalisms—words that simply have not endured past their inception.

The literary critic, Donald Gordon, created an authorism in 1930 when he described a mystery novel as, “a satisfactory whodunit.” The word gained faddish currency, so much so that at least one pundit declared it was, “already heavily overworked,” and predicted it would “soon be dumped into the taboo bin.” But the word lives on—as do hosts of other made-up authorial whodunits.

I’m George Grant.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Friday, August 18th, and this is WORLD Radio. Thanks for listening! I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Today’s WORLD commentator recently took a short plane trip with his son, a pilot. Steve West says those trips always help him see the world in a new way.

STEVE WEST, COMMENTATOR: North Carolina’s small Lake Ridge airfield is quiet today, a breeze whistling through the open hangers by the single grass strip. But it won’t be for long. We just pushed my son’s 1947 Piper Super Cub out of the hanger, the red two-seater readied for flight.

SOUND: [Airplane]

I was 10 the first time I flew. My friend and I boarded an Eastern Airlines DC-3 en route to Washington, D.C. We took turns by the window, faces pressed to cold glass, propellers whirring, our seats vibrating. It was 1968. As we rose above the earth for the first time I sensed the expanse of place, beyond neighborhood and city, beyond home. I lost all bearing there in the air, didn’t know how to make sense of what I saw but wondered at its beauty.

In his book, Skyfaring, 747 pilot Mark Vanhoenacker is a poet of flight, using finely crafted language to capture the feel of seeing the earth from above. He says, “Flight is the cartographic, planetary equivalent of hearing a song covered by a singer you love, or meeting for the first time a relative whose features or mannerisms are already familiar. We know the song but not like this; we have never met the person and yet we have never in our lives been strangers.”

I haven’t felt this, but my son has. He told me once that he is most relaxed when he is in the air, his hand on the stick, feet on the rudder pedals, eyes scanning the horizon and the cross stitch pattern of farmland, the roads snaking their way confidently across the terrain.

For those who fly, the sky must be like coming home. You already know the song. Maybe the tug of elevation was buried deep in some gene, activated when your father tossed you in the air, primed by the helicoptering swings from an adult’s arms, was nurtured by the flight of stories, by high buildings and roller-coaster tracks to the sky, even by watching a balloon float high above.

The first flight must carry some sense of deja vu for these pilots-to-be, some echoing memory of soaring. And when you rise, when wheels are up and the ground falls away, you poke through the clouds and float over a bed of air, an ocean of billowing cloud-sea just below.

Earth-bound non-pilot that I am, all I can think is that it must be like hearing a favorite music album for the first time, like those first chords of The Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” Hearing it, I'm soaring.

I think, too, of a refugee from then-Communist Poland I once heard testify. When she first heard the Gospel in an Austrian refugee camp, she believed but then said, “It was what I had always believed.” Salvation was new, but it tapped something deep inside. She knew the song, but not like this; had met her Lord, but not like this.

Back with my son now, it’s time to fly.

SOUND: [Airplane]

We strap in, taxi to the runway end. Wheels up, we raise a window on the world.

BEACH BOYS: ["Wouldn't It Be Nice"] 

I’m Steve West.

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

David Bahnsen, Myrna Brown, Addie Offereins, Mary Muncy, Calvin Robinson, Onize Ohikere, Kim Henderson, Ryan Bomberger, Lillian Hamman, Jeff Palomino, Cal Thomas, John Stonestreet, Collin Garbarino, George Grant, and Steve West.

And a new voice on the program this week: WJI grad Karla Bean.

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

Plus, breaking news interns Tobin Jacobson, Johanna Huebscher , and Jeremy Abegg-Guzman.

And thanks to the guys who stay up late to get the program to you early: Johnny Franklin and Carl Peetz.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Our producer is Harrison Watters. Our production team includes Kristen Flavin, Benj Eicher, and Emily Whitten, with special help this week from WJI grad David Medina.

Anna Johansen Brown is features editor, and Paul Butler is executive producer.

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

Jesus said: “No one after lighting a lamp covers it with a jar or puts it under a bed, but puts it on a stand, so that those who enter may see the light. For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light.” Luke chapter 8, verses 16 and 17.

Be sure to worship in person with your brothers and sisters in Christ this weekend. Lord willing we will 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.