The World and Everything in It: August 25, 2023

PREROLL: The World and Everything in It is made possible by listeners like us. Hello. My name is Steve Nye. I've been married to Darlene for over 43 years. We're parents of three, grandparents of 11. We live in northern Virginia, and I'm blessed by God to be a member of the Colson Fellows class of 2023. I hope you enjoy today's program.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning!

Today on Culture Friday: the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington is coming up this weekend. But have organizers left behind the moral force of the movement? And the cultural phenomenon that is Rich Men North of Richmond.

NICK EICHER, HOST: We will talk it over with John Stonestreet on Culture Friday.

Also today: The Hill. It’s a new baseball biopic starring Dennis Quaid.

AUDIO: And no matter how he does in that game tonight, he has overcome that terrible burden that he has had to carry his whole life.

Listener feedback today, and World Opinions Commentator Ted Kluck says college football has much more in common with dystopian fiction than you might think.

BROWN: It’s Friday, August 25th. 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, Paul Butler with today’s news.

PAUL BUTLER, NEWS ANCHOR: Trump » Former President Donald Trump has been booked in the Fulton County, Georgia, jail on charges that he and 18 of his associates illegally attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state.

Trump has denied any wrongdoing and says the prosecution is politically motivated.

SOUND: [Trump supporters]

Supporters of the former president gathered outside the Fulton County Jail. They held signs saying he won the election and calling the charges against him a “witch hunt.”

The former president’s legal woes came up at this week’s GOP presidential debate, which he did not attend.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie:

CHRISTIE: Donald Trump said it's okay to suspend the Constitution. Now, the vow you take is to preserve, protect and defend not suspend.

Most of the other candidates said they would support Trump if he won the GOP presidential nomination, even if he is convicted of a crime.

Trump’s bail had been previously set at $200,000 dollars.

COVID-19 » The Justice Department says it has recovered almost one and a half billion dollars of stolen COVID-19 relief funds, and that it is determined to recover more.

U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco addressing investigators who helped cracked the case:

MONACO: Collectively you've pursued civil investigations into more than 3,000 individuals and entities for alleged misconduct in connection with pandemic Relief Loans, totaling more than $7 billion. And together, we've seized nearly $1.4 billion in stolen relief funds.

Earlier this week, the Department announced that in some of its latest actions it had secured convictions or guilty pleas from almost 120 of the roughly 370 people it brought charges against for allegedly defrauding COVID-19 relief programs.

Prigozhin » U.S. officials say they suspect foul play in the death of the leader of Russia’s mercenary Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder:

RYDER: I'll say right up front. First of all, our initial assessment is that it's likely Prigozhin was killed. We're continuing to assess the situation.

Prigozhin died in a plane crash in Russia earlier this week along with nine other people. U.S. officials described the crash as the intended result of an explosion.

But Ryder did say the cause of the explosion was likely not a surface-to-air missile, contrary to some reports.

Prigozhin staged a brief and mostly peaceful uprising against the Kremlin in June.

PUTIN: [Speaking Russian]

Russian President Vladimir Putin saying that he knew Prigozhin for decades. He called the general-for-hire a talented businessman and said that Prigozhin made, in Putin’s words, serious mistakes in life.

BRICS recap » The BRICS coalition of emerging economies says Argentina and five other countries are joining the group.

The original members of the bloc are Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. They are welcoming multiple Middle Eastern and African nations, including Iran and Saudi Arabia.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres spoke at the BRICS summit this week in Johannesburg.

GUTERRES: The climate crisis is spiralling out of control. A global cost of living crisis is raging. Without a global architecture to deal with them and geo political divides and conflicts are multiplying with profound global implications, especially the impacts from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Leaders such as Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov took the opportunity to express anti-Western views at the summit.

California shooter » The shooter at a biker bar in Southern California on Wednesday was an ex-police officer. Three people were killed in the shooting.

Orange County Fire Chief Brian Fennessy:

FENNESY: Paramedics treated and transported six people to a local Trauma Center, five of which had reported gunshot wounds. The other four or two of the six people we transported are in critical condition. This tragic incident weighs heavy on our community and the first responders.

Deputies arrived at the scene just two minutes after the first 911 call came in and exchanged fire with the suspect, who was later announced dead at the scene.

The Orange County district attorney’s office identified the shooter as a former police sergeant for Ventura County. His estranged wife is one of the surviving victims.

Ukraine in Crimea » Ukraine continues to target the Crimean Peninsula as part of its counteroffensive against Russian forces.

Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Officials in Kyiv said yesterday that their special forces launched a raid on the region Wednesday night.

The news came as Ukraine celebrated Independence Day yesterday.

ZELENSKYY (Ukrainian): Today we celebrate the 32nd anniversary of our independence - the independence of Ukraine. This is a value for each of us. And this is what we are fighting for.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy saying the country is still fighting for independence.

Zelenskyy says Russia must agree to return all of Ukraine’s territory before he is willing to engage in peace talks.

I’m Paul Butler.

Straight ahead: Culture Friday with John Stonestreet. Plus, a faith-based baseball movie.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s the 25th day of August 2023. 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 John Stonestreet, the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. John, good morning.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

BROWN: John, this weekend is the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington.

Several days ago, a story crossed the wire about preparations for that anniversary. The piece quoted a co-chair of the famous Poor People’s Campaign, the Rev. William Barber.

He says, the spirit of the March on Washington is much broader today than it was then. Listen to this: Many different faith groups, he says, are “pro-civil rights and pro-LGBT community — that care about immigrants and women’s rights and voting rights. Any efforts today that are not engaging all these issues on an every-day basis is not truly moving in the spirit of the March on Washington.”

And you know what they mean by “women’s rights,” they mean abortion.

Interestingly, AP noted this: “It is perhaps a sign of the times that there is no single faith-based group listed among the organizations serving as co-chairs [of the anniversary].”

So, John, what happens when you rip the moral authority out that powered the civil-rights movement? What are you left with?

STONESTREET: Well, I think you kind of buried the lead there, because that's exactly what a statement like this does is it rips the moral authority out that powered the Civil Rights Movement. I mean, look, Dr. King was very, very clear on what he understood powered the calls that he made for racial justice at that time. And that was an understanding of the human person, as created in the image of God and therefore created in a particular way with rights. When you start adding in some of these other causes, not only are you allowing something that doesn't relate to hijack the cause, you then don't have any ground for it. Because, you know, take, for example, the evergrowing acronym of LGBTQ IA This is fundamentally, in all of its forms, a denial of some aspect of the fact that we were created by God in a particular way with a particular design. That's exactly what Dr. King went back to, and made his argument based on that. And, and so you do rip out the moral authority, and even more than the moral authority, any kind of solid foundation upon which to build a movement, you know, in the first place.

I think it's also important to note, historically, we don't have anybody who's actually done this yet, but in particular, the trans rights movement has never been able to make an argument on its own from the very beginning. Most of the so called rights movements of today hijack the Civil Rights Movement, and hijack it in a way that Dr. King absolutely would not have been okay with. I think it's also a an important thing to note that at least some of Dr. King's relatives descendents believe that he would not have supported abortion as a right of women, and he would have had a different view. So, look, I think that it's going to undermine the cause. And it's going to compromise the history. And I think they're incompatible and inconsistent to put these, you know, various, quote unquote, rights movements together with the civil rights movement.

EICHER: Speaking of moral authority, John, here's a big cultural story. Out of nowhere a country song hit the top of the Apple iTunes chart, "Rich Men North of Richmond," by an artist called Oliver Anthony.

MUSIC: [RICH MEN NORTH OF RICHMOND]

I'll play some playable parts, had to edit around it, as I know you'll appreciate.

MUSIC: Livin' in the new world / With an old soul / These rich men north of Richmond / Lord knows they all just wanna have total control / Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do / And they don't think you know, but I know that you do.

It's touted as an angry working man's anthem, lots of words we won't repeat here. But suffice it to say he's fed up with DC, these are the rich men North of Richmond. He's fed up with high taxes and high prices.

But more than that: He's fed up with welfare. He's fed up with low-pay jobs. He's fed up with hopelessness. And I did take note, this song was in the setup for the Republican debate on Wednesday night.

So anyway, this is a real cultural phenomenon. It's tapping into something, John, and I wonder what you think of it?

STONESTREET: Well, first, I think he's a talented guy. And it really, he really does have that kind of old school country crooner's voice, which you don't hear much in country anymore. And as a fan of, you know, the golden age of country music, it resonated and, but you are, you are right. It's not a song you can necessarily play at least for very many lines. You know, I think there's a couple things to note. I think it's been interestingly compared to JD Vance's book that was very, very important in the year 2016 in the run up to the election, Hillbilly Elegy, which is basically trying to articulate at some level, what's happening on the ground in an awful lot of America. The part of America that most people are telling us the news every day have never visited, have never met anybody from there, have no sort of ability to relate to.

Now, I went to college in East Tennessee, the sort of place that this man could be singing about pretty easily. I grew up in Virginia. So I grew up in a town where, you know, we could have talked about the northmen, north of Richmond pretty easily. Where I went to college in Tennessee, if a young person were graduating from there and wanted to teach in an inner city context, they would student teach in a little town called Graysville, Tennessee. And that is the kind of situation that was described in Hillbilly Elegy. That's the sort of community that this man who has this song north of Richmond came from. And the reason you would go student teach there is because the situation was very similar on the ground, very little upward mobility, very little cultural motivation to think about the future, a high rates of fatherlessness and broken homes, high rates of addiction to substance abuse, opioids, alcohol, you had high dropout rates, high teen pregnancy rates. In other words, there are an awful lot of cultural factors that are present in some of the poorest white communities in America, or poorest rural communities in America that almost look identical to those in the urban centers.

And so I think we just need to be really clear that when we talk about, for example, the collapse of the family, it has a devastating effect, whether you're talking about downtown Chicago, or you're talking about downtown Graysville, and there's not a downtown Graysville. We're talking about the same effect on lives, we're talking about the same inability to cultivate young people to think about the future. And so I guess I don't want to take everything about this song as gospel truth. But yet at the same time, the hate that it's receiving even from other Christian publications, saying things that were just bizarre critiques of a real life on the ground situation that people were dealing with. And yet I think we have to think about it from a Christian worldview, not just a disaffected, angry, impoverished perspective.

EICHER: So do that, John. I don’t expect you’ll hear a CCM song address these kinds of themes, but doesn’t the Christian worldview speak directly to them?

STONESTREET: Well, I think so. I mean, I think, by the way, anytime, that we allow people to either see themselves, or to see other people as perpetual victims, as if what they deserve to be is the objects of our compassion or our scorn, rather than actual subjects within their own story - and I owe that thought, by the way to my friend, Michael Miller at the Acton Institute - then we're fundamentally thinking about people the wrong way. And when you have systemic issues like this man singing about, you know, working more hours than you should, so that it separates you from your family for, you know, the kind of pay that he describes, which we can't repeat here. You know, you're talking then about a way of shriveling dignity. But if you turn around and then just say, Well, everybody's a victim of the state, and there's nothing we can do for our own situation. I mean, look, we've seen that take place in terms of how different parts of America respond to natural disasters, there are people who can't help themselves. But when you treat an entire community as if it should only be helped by the federal government, like we've seen in past calamities, you're dehumanizing an awful lot of people and it actually leads to the actual dehumanization, in real terms of an awful lot of people.

So it starts with seeing people as made in the image and likeness of God, describing them as God describes them as not just consumers, not just victims, not just objects of pity, but actually people with dignity. And part of that dignity is the ability to work and to contribute and move forward, then you also got to then look at communities and take seriously, you know, where the family is in those communities, you have strong family, and then a community, you have an upwardly mobile community. If you have a community in which the majority of young people, the future, are being raised by one parent not two, are in fatherless homes, then you have a community that's been categorized into not having strong trust, not having strong reliability, and all kinds of other things. In other words, it's an unsustainable future. That's, of course, what we're dealing with in many major cities, is in the poorest of the poor zip codes in America, you're talking about now three to four generations of the vast majority of homes being fatherless. That is a very similar phenomenon that you see in towns like Graysville, Tennessee and certain parts of Appalachia. And it's because you know, what people in downtown Chicago have in common with people in you know, these mountain communities in Appalachia is that they're all made in the image of God. So the analysis can work both ways. So so that that's where I would start the analysis with a thought about who people are, what gives them value and what's the role and significance of the family.

BROWN: John Stonestreet, the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. Thanks John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, August 25th. 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. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: faith-based films at the theater.

2023 has turned out to be a big year for movies with religious themes. The films titled Jesus Revolution and His Only Son posted better than expected box-office sales in the spring, and Sound of Freedom positively exploded this summer.

EICHER: And now, actor Dennis Quaid is back with his second faith-based drama of the year, called The Hill. Arts and culture editor Collin Garbarino didn’t care much for Quaid’s first effort. But what about this second one?

COLLIN GARBARINO: The new faith-based sports biopic The Hill, starring Dennis Quaid, arrives in theaters today. It tells the story of Rickey Hill and his brave attempt to beat the odds to play professional baseball.

JAMES: We receive your bounty, Lord, to better fortify our bodies and minds, so that we may serve you. We pray in the name of your son Jesus. Amen.

ALL: Amen.

Quaid plays James Hill, a small-town pastor in Texas who has plenty of zeal for the Lord. He has a son named Rickey who has plenty of zeal for baseball. The movie begins in the 1960s when Rickey is just a boy and the Hill family faces difficulties. James fights with less-pious members of the congregation, and he and his uncomplaining wife struggle to keep food on the table.

But problems don’t bother young Rickey who spends his hours batting rocks with a stick—a skill for which he shows much talent.

RAY: You telling me that you hit this rock over them trees and into my windshield with that lousy stick? That’s a couple of hundred feet, easy.

Rickey can’t play baseball with the other boys because a debilitating health condition has left him in leg braces. The first half of the movie showcases Rickey’s determination to overcome his physical limitations to pursue the sport he loves.

RAY: You know what a prodigy is?

YOUNG RICKEY: No, sir.

RAY: Well, look it up. When you get them legs healed up. I’ma be the first guy at the gate to buy a ticket.

The second half of the movie jumps forward to 1975. Colin Ford plays an older Rickey. He’s finishing up high school and he’s proved to be a slugging sensation. But his childhood struggles come back to haunt him as he takes his shot at the big leagues.

The determination to overcome physical obstacles is only part of the story. Rickey’s father refuses to countenance his son’s desire to play baseball. This conflict between Rickey and James becomes the heart of the film. Rickey has a quick mind and easily memorizes scripture. His uncompromising father wants him to become a preacher, thinking baseball wastes Rickey’s gifts.

NED: I don’t mean any disrespect, but certainly you can see whenever he plays, he’s a phenom.

JIM: I’ve never seen him play.

NED: You’ve never seen him play?

JIM: No.

The Hill has much to recommend it, and it’s a much better movie than Quaid’s somewhat cringey On a Wing and a Prayer that came out earlier this year. The story hits the familiar beats of the coming-of-age films and sports dramas that many of us grew up on. That shouldn’t come as a surprise considering the guy who wrote Hoosiers and Rudy, had a hand in the script. The movie also contains less objectionable content than most sports dramas. The PG film contains smoking, a depiction of drunkenness, and one hastily covered vulgarity.

The production values are better than the typical faith-based movie, and the acting is solid, though Quaid seems about 20 years too old for the role.

However, The Hill suffers from some of the same theological problems that plague many faith-based movies, including Quaid’s On a Wing and a Prayer.

JIM: And no matter how he does in that game tonight, he has overcome that terrible burden that he has had to carry his whole life.

The movie uses David and Goliath as its guiding motif. Little Rickey is David, and he’s flinging stones at his Goliath-like adversity. The message is clear: You too can be a David if you have enough faith. A more faithful interpretation of the story puts Jesus in the place of David with the rest of us as Israelites cowering back at the camp. By merging metaphor with the reality of victory in Jesus, The Hill slips into the familiar trap of promoting a prosperity gospel.

The movie trots out the usual list of motivational Bible verses taken out of context. And it misconstrues them as promising faithful Christians might have material and temporal success.

RICKEY: But tomorrow, Lord, be at my side. I cannot do this alone.

The movie bills itself as an inspirational story that teaches us to never let go of our dreams. After all, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. With enough faith, I can even make it to the big leagues.

True to the genre, we see the underdog struggle and then prevail in the end. Rickey makes the most of his shot. Roll the credits. Except the movie ends the story of Rickey Hill much too soon.

The real-life Rickey Hill never made it to the majors. He gutted it out for a few years in the minor leagues before his debilitating condition forced him to quit. In interviews, Hill said he fell into suicidal despair after poor health robbed him of baseball. That’s the story we needed to see—how faith responds to failure. When our world crumbles and everything’s been taken away, it’s then that the Christian faith offers its most powerful testimony.

I’m Collin Garbarino.

MUSIC: “Oh man, this is really living. Just try and relax. Yeah, cool it, fall apart in my backyard..."

NICK EICHER, HOST: Up next, listener feedback for the month of August. We begin today with a handful of corrections. Listener Audra Langston wrote in saying she loved our August 2nd story on the pool-crashing bear.

However!

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: She told us that was no grizzly. That’s how we ID’d the bear, but it was a black bear, which is a relief to everyone involved.

MUSIC: [LOOK FOR THE BEAR NECESSITIES]

EICHER: If only this next correction were that simple.

Yeah, our story on the 75th anniversary of JAARS missionary aviation, August 10th.

Guatemalan missionary Steve Sywulka wrote in to set the record straight on the life of JAARS founder William Cameron Townsend. We said he started in Mexico, but Townsend actually began there where he learned Cakchiquel—that’s a Mayan language, not Spanish. We also reported that he translated the scriptures, and he did, but not all of them. It was only the New Testament—not the whole Bible. We apologize for the errors.

BROWN: By the way, a few people wrote in about what the “R” in JAARS stands for. We said “Relay,” but several listeners said “Radio.” Well, it’s both.

The mission recently changed its name to mark the diamond anniversary of the Jungle Aviation And Relay Service replacing “Radio” which it had used for three quarters of a century.

EICHER: The next correction comes from the August 14th History Book. Executive Editor Paul Butler misidentified the location of the phrase “the tongue is a fire.” It’s in James chapter 3.

BROWN: One final correction today, in Tuesday’s newscast we mentioned what appeared to be flooding around Los Angeles Dodgers’ Stadium. Turns out the aerial footage looked like a flood, but it was just a wet parking lot.

EICHER: On to a few listener responses to our program. The first one is a critique of commentary from yesterday by Cal Thomas on falling educational standards. Public school teacher John Childs called in to take issue with Cal’s call to action:

CHILDS: My wife and I are both followers of Christ. Looking back through history, wherever there has been war or plague or natural disaster Christians have been the ones who pursue and lean into that—to love our neighbors and to bring the good news of Christ. And I don’t think the answer is to run away from public school but to take the values in the Light of Christ to a dark place that needs it. Thank you.

BROWN: All right, several listeners welcomed back Andree Seu Peterson after hearing her on August 8th.

Pam Dunlap of Garfield, Arkansas, says she missed Andree’s eloquent, poetic, and thought-provoking commentary. And Karen Lindia adds, quoting from her letter: “Her wisdom is timeless, and pointed. We need that.” I think we do, and we have let Andree know.

EICHER: Mervin Fisher is a regular listener to the program, and he wanted us to know that he’s a huge fan of George Grant:

FISHER: He does a great job in his wording. And being myself an amateur linguist and having an interest in etymology, I especially enjoy his monthly piece. Just continue to do the great job you guys do in bringing christ-centered opinions and news reporting, definitely a very needed in today’s culture in society. Thank you.

One more piece of feedback before we go today. This one is for our daily video news program for kids: WORLD Watch. And we’re happy to have the program director and host with us, the inimitable Brian Basham. I’ll not try to replicate your good morning greeting, but I do wish you a good morning!

BRIAN BASHAM: I'm going to give you one anyway. Good morning! If you didn't get your coffee this morning, you can have one of those instead.

BROWN: Brian, we wanted to make sure you got to hear this comment from one of your viewers, Maegan Roper. She says her kids not only love the program, they’ve grown:

ROPER: They are more aware of and interested in the world around them. They’ve taken an interest in other countries, people groups, and cultures. They’re becoming more confident in their conversational skills with adults as well. I’ve witnessed them having substantial and meaningful conversations on current events issues with grandparents, aunts, and uncles, and it’s super fun!

BASHAM: Wow! Isn't that beautiful! I love that! 

EICHER: Brian, we wanted to wish you a happy fourth anniversary for WORLD Watch. Congratulations on four years of a great program. 

BASHAM: I appreciate that, guys. I can't believe we've been going for that long. It feels like we literally just started. Both of you guys have been involved pretty much from the beginning. Nick, you used to help write it at the beginning. And Myrna, you've been doing reports, and guest hosting, and working with our young reporters and help develop them the whole time. It's been, ah man! amazing. It's so fun to share it. 

EICHER Absolutely. You know, Brian, going all the way back to the old days. For a guy like me, the old days are just yesterday. Time flies! Brian, there are lots of listeners to this program who love WORLD Watch, but there are also many who've never tried it before. So, why don't you tell a little about what you're doing to make it possible for new viewers to come into WORLD Watch.

BASHAM: Yeah, sure! We always have people who say, "Hey, I'd love to share this with somebody. It's a subscription service, so sometimes that makes it a little more difficult. Well, here's the cool thing. Right now you can tell your friends to go to WORLDWatch.news. Just go to the website, and you can actually try the show out free for three months. So, if you sign up, we're going to give it to you free for three months.  And what's cool about that is it won't let you watch the show from this point on. But everything that we've ever done is on that website. And so, we hear a lot of families that come on the show a little later on within the last year, within the last couple years. and they tend to binge watch the news. Can you imagine listening to the news from three years ago? The reason for that, by the way, the way we put it together, it's a lot of fun. So there's a ton of learning that happens there. We edit it, and we present it in a really fun way. You might spend a weekend binge watching the news with your kids. it's really fun.

EICHER: That is totally high praise for a news program, that something like that is binge worthy. And it is binge worthy, so good stuff, Brian. 

BROWN: Yes!

BASHAM: Hey, man! I appreciate it. 

EICHER: Hey, thanks for dropping by. I appreciate it. 

BASHAM: You bet! You guys have a great one.

BROWN: Thanks, Brian!

Well that’s it for this month’s Listener Feedback. Thanks to everyone who wrote and called in. If you have comments to share with us you can send them to editor@wng.org. And if you’re writing, why not take a moment and record your comments on your phone and send those along as well. We’ve included instructions on how to do that on our website: wng.org/podcasts.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, August 25th. 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. Up next: college football. This Saturday kicks off the NCAA college football season. WORLD Opinions writer Ted Kluck explains why picking your favorite team actually matters.

TED KLUCK, COMMENTATOR: Every male friend group has the guy in it who likes to send messages about college football realignment and how to fix the college football conferences. In my case, it’s my best friend from college (now middle-aged), and his son (a young adult), with whom I’m on a group chat. Whenever they talk about realigning conferences, I respond with the John Nash “A Beautiful Mind” meme, which is a way to honor their effort and their sweet, innocent naiveté in thinking they can fix college football.

Still, some conference swaps are less reasonable than others. What do I mean by that? It makes sense for Indiana and Purdue to be rivals, but it makes no sense for Illinois and Oregon State to be rivals. And it was recently leaked that Stanford and Cal—both schools near the Pacific Ocean—may join the Atlantic Coast Conference.

“This feels like something satirical out of [the novel] Infinite Jest,” I texted my friends.

Of course, feeling apocalyptic about college football is just a convenient way to avoid feeling apocalyptic about the actual world, where there are far more depressing things than imagining the UCLA fan base traveling to West Lafayette, Indiana for an exciting November matchup. Two of these far more depressing things include the fact that you can legally change your gender in California in only two months, and you can also steal up to $950 before the police are even interested. This also feels darkly satirical.

In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace wrote prophetically about an indiscriminate future– pretty much like now–where entertainment and marijuana were both available nonstop. In Wallace’s world, the entertainment, the zonk out, ended the world … not an atomic bomb.

Wallace has, I think, been canceled for sexism, but I’m not exactly sure. It’s hard to keep up.

Still, in some ways, we now live in that world, and are raising kids in it. Wallace was writing about a world where nothing mattered, and where the naming rights to years on the calendar were auctioned to corporate entities. For example, 2023 might become The Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment. If the name of a year on a calendar doesn’t matter, it also doesn’t matter if I ever leave my home or ever show up to my job or ever stop entertaining myself to death. As it turns out, the runway to nihilism was shorter than any of us bargained for.

It occurs to me that for decades, college football hung together on the very loose pretense that geography mattered. Now it hangs together on legalized gambling. I worry about this for myself, but I’m old and cynical and can pretty quickly compartmentalize it. But what about kids? Games not mattering to them is just emblematic of a whole bunch of other things not mattering either–like their biological sex and the Judeo-Christian ethic of “Thou shalt not steal”.

We need things to matter. We need our lives to be about more than hurrying home (or never leaving) so that we can zonk out. We need to glorify God and enjoy him forever—and really mean it.

I’m Ted Kluck.

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

Mary Reichard, Jenny Rough, David Bahnsen, Alex Carmenaty, Mary Muncy, Travis Kircher, Erick Erickson, Onize Ohikere, Bonnie Pritchett, Janie B. Cheaney, Hunter Baker, Carolina Lumetta, Leo Briceno, Juliana Chan Erickson, Cal Thomas, John Stonestreet, and Collin Garbarino.

Plus, three new voices: European journalist and WJI instructor Evert van Vlastuin … associate correspondent Caleb Welde, and World Opinions contributor Ted Kluck.

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.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Our producer is Harrison Watters. Our production team includes Kristen Flavin, Benj Eicher, Lillian Hamman, Bekah McCallum, and Emily Whitten.

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.

The Bible records that when the son complained that his father rejoiced at the return of a prodigal son, the father told him: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.” Luke chapter 15, verses 31 and 32.

Be sure and worship with your brothers and sisters in Christ in church 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.