The World and Everything in It: December 29, 2023

NICK EICHER, HOST: Hey Carl? 

CARL PEETZ: Yeah, what’s up?

EICHER: Yeah, don’t run the usual preroll music this time, okay? 

PEETZ: Roger that. You’re good to go.

EICHER: Alright. [clear throat] Well, today’s our last reminder of the December Giving Drive.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: There’s all day today, followed by a busy New Year’s weekend … to make your gift of support. 

EICHER: You depend on WORLD, and WORLD depends on you. I do hope we count on you as we enter 2024. 

BROWN: wng.org/donate. Please make your gift today. 

PEETZ: And heeere we go.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning! Today on Culture Friday we’ll ask John Stonestreet to reflect on the top culture stories of 2023 and revisit a prediction from a year ago.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s ahead on Culture Friday.

And, remembering a handful of the artists, musicians, and entertainers who died this year, including the old parrothead himself.

BUFFETT: Contrary to popular belief, I’m not on the beach everyday with margaritas.

BROWN: It’s Friday, December 29th. 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: GOP Primary roundup » Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is still facing blowback for omitting slavery from a discussion of causes of the Civil War during a town hall earlier this week.

Haley said government and individual freedoms sparked the war, but later clarified that she was looking at the war’s broader causes.

HALEY: Of course, the Civil War was about slavery. We know that. That's unquestioned. Let's not forget what came out of that, which is government's role, individual liberties, freedom for every single person.

Florida Governor and fellow GOP candidate Ron DeSantis wasted no time in criticizing Haley for her comments.

DESANTIS: I just think that this shows this is not a candidate that's ready for primetime. The minute that she faces any type of scrutiny, she tends to cave and I think that that's what you saw.

Haley and DeSantis are both vying to be the Republican alternative to former President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential primaries.

The latest Quinnipiac University poll shows the pair tied for second place,  each grabbing an estimated 11 percent of party support.

Trump Colorado » Meanwhile, things just got more complicated for the Republican frontrunner late yesterday as a second state kicked former President Donald Trump off the 2024 primary ballot.

Maine’s secretary of state declared the former president ineligible…based on her interpretation of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—and its ban of anyone engaged in insurrection from holding elected office.

Secretary of State Shenna Bellows concludes that Trump’s activities on January 6 20-21 amounts to insurrection.

The former president denies any wrongdoing.

Her decision comes after Colorado disqualified Trump earlier this month based on the same argument.

But the Colorado secretary of state Jena Griswold said yesterday that Trump’s name would remain on that state’s ballots while the GOP appeals the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Griswold urged the justices to rule quickly. The state’s primary election is scheduled for March 5th.

Boebert district switch » Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert says she’s ditching the third district ahead of the 2024 election cycle.

The controversial Republican released a video on Wednesday confirming her bid to replace retiring conservative Congressman Ken Buck in the state's fourth congressional district.

BOEBERT: I know all too well how damaging the Liberals have been to our entire state here in Colorado. Republicans will hold the third and I'll proudly represent the fourth and Republicans will be stronger for it. The future of our country is on the line.

Critics say Boebert is making the move to a more conservative district to help guarantee re-election after narrowly winning her seat in the last cycle.

FTC sues Grand Canyon University » The Federal Trade Commission is suing the nation’s largest Christian university over what it calls *deceptive advertising. WORLD’s Lauren Canterberry has more.

LAUREN CANTERBERRY: The FTC in a lawsuit filed Wednesday claims that Grand Canyon University misled students about the cost of its doctoral programs.

The commission also accused the school of misrepresenting itself as a nonprofit organization and of engaging in illegal telemarketing.

Grand Canyon Education Inc. which conducts marketing services for the school and University President Brian Mueller are also named as defendants.

The Phoenix-based university says in a statement to WORLD that the allegations are unfounded and it is recognized as a nonprofit by the IRS and state of Arizona.

The university also claims they are part of a larger attack by the Biden administration on: “institutions to which they are ideologically opposed.”

The school is currently appealing a fine levied by the U.S. Department of Education over similar allegations.

For WORLD, I’m Lauren Canterberry.

Ukraine funding and Lavrov comments » Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says his country has become more unified since it invaded Ukraine and is at war with what he calls the collective West.

Lavrov’s comments come after the U.S. approved what officials said on Wednesday could be the final package of military aid to Ukraine unless Congress approves more funding.

The Pentagon is sending about $250 million dollars worth of weapons and ammunition from its stockpiles including missiles, artillery, anti-armor systems, and ammunition.

LAVROV (Speaking Russian): They agreed to have another meeting in January and in February to hold a Peace Summit, where (Ukrainian President Volodymyr) Zelenskiy's formula will be approved.

Lavrov claiming that major Western leaders are planning to approve Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s peace plan in the coming months.

Russia controls nearly a fifth of Ukrainian territory as the two-year anniversary of the invasion approaches.

SOUND: [Chain saw]

UK Storm Gerrit » Britons clearing fallen trees Thursday  and dealing with other damage in the wake of Storm Gerrit.

The official U.K. forecaster called it a supercell thunderstorm with a strong rotating updraft.

The wind blew trees down on cars, even pulling roofs off houses and blowing away garden sheds in northwest England’s Manchester. Police there heard numerous reports of a localized tornado.

Stalybridge resident Dominic Halpin:

Halpin: So, I just sat in bed, and I heard this noise, this rumbling and it got louder and louder, and for 30 seconds it was literally just mayhem.

London’s Heathrow airport canceled over a dozen flights Wednesday night due to the storm.

An American Airlines flight made a safe landing in London as strong winds buffeted the jet during a rough descent.

In Scotland some train lines were suspended and a few roads were blocked by snow. Elsewhere, the storm brought heavy rain and travel disruption for drivers.

I'm Paul Butler.

Straight ahead: Culture Friday with John Stonestreet. Plus, remembering notable people in arts and culture who died this year

This is The World and Everything in It.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 29th of December, 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. Today, a 2023 Culture Year in Review.

The year began with a Chinese spy balloon.

RYDER The balloon continues to move eastward and is currently over the center of the continental United States. Again, we currently assess that the balloon does not present a military or physical threat to people on the ground at this time.

It would cross the United States and once it was over the Atlantic Ocean. The U.S. military would shoot it down.

And LGBT pride night in the National Hockey League suffering the same fate after a Russian Orthodox defenseman said Nyet to wearing a rainbow warmup sweater. Ivan Provorov, then of the Philadelphia Flyers.

PROVOROV: I respect everybody and I respect everybody’s choices. My choice is to stay true to myself and my religion.

BROWN: The following month, the sparks of a hoped-for revival on the campus of Asbury University in Kentucky.

AUDIO: President Brown sent out an email saying that worship was still going on and that anybody who felt called to join could do so, and I was there for 12 hours that day.

What began as a regular chapel service in the dead of winter would go on for 16 days straight.

EICHER: A horrific attack in March in the Nashville suburbs at Covenant Christian School … where an attacker fatally shot three adults and three young students before police killed the shooter.

CHIEF DRAKE: There were maps drawn of the school in detail of surveillance, entry points, etc.. We know and believe that entry was gained through shooting through one of the doors.

Faith and courage was one theme, another theme centered on motive which was kept out of the public eye until policemen leaked parts of a manifesto portraying a killer driven by rage over white privilege.

BROWN: Vermont became the first state in the U.S. to allow suicide tourism, opening itself up to nonresidents to come and take advantage of its liberal laws and receive a doctor-assisted suicide.

WELBY: God save the King!

EICHER: Across the pond, the U.K. got a king, and the keeper of the Anglican faith saw the state church allow priests to bless same-sex marriages.

Also, Britain’s National Health Service blocked parents from attempting to get treatment for their very sick child who would die shortly afterward despite the promise of treatment from Italy.

BROWN: From sea to shining sea, Florida’s Ron DeSantis and California’s Gavin Newsom sparred over abortion, education, crime, and COVID. Then the governors met on a debate stage.

DESANTIS: He's just throwing stuff out to see what sticks against the wall. This is a slick, slippery politician whose state is failing.

EICHER: Drug overdoses would remain at record highs again in 20-23. A-I would come of age this year, and by the end the year … The New York Times would sue ChatGPT.

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, that’s quite a list!

EICHER: Yeah, anything float to the top for you, John, from that list? Or do you have your own top cultural story for 2023?

STONESTREET: Oh, I think I have my own, although that's a heck of a list. And it's hard to remember that all those things happened in 2023. And a lot of them are really big stories. Man was the spy balloon really in 2023? That was the one that threw me right off the bat. I was trying to do the math. Wow. No, I think that the major story of 2023, or the one that I think even though it was international, revealed so much about where the world is, and so much about where the United States is, and so much about the ideas that we have talked about, at various times, and with various stories, including, for example, the covenant Christian school shooting in Nashville, and why we don't have a manifesto yet, and what explains any of these things is the October the 7th attack on Israel by Hamas. And then we had the response by so many folks within Western elite institutions. So if you want to know, for example, whether or not these Western institutions have in fact been captured by what we've called here, the critical theory mood that we know who the good guys are and the bad guys are going in, I think this was one of those incidents and then the ongoing response and that just revealed an awful lot about you know, look, if the idea of chronological snobbery. Do we think that somehow folks today are better than folks in the past simply because we have technology? The answer's no. If we think that the world still has an appetite for what it takes to suppress real evil like that, for most of the world, the answer is no. Do we think that the critical theory, remember, remember how much we were told in 2021 that, oh, this is an academic theory, you don't really understand it. And I said, you know, look, I agree like, you know, nobody read the postmodern philosophers either. But in the 1990s, what we had was Kurt Cobain and Britney Spears and the Matrix movie. In other words, people who never read Derrida and Foucault there was this mood, this postmodern mood that had overtaken and I thought the same thing about the critical theory mood, and I think that the whole Israel Hamas thing has revealed that. And then, of course, we had the debacle. And this was another part of the story that you didn't list, which is the three university presidents, the three presidents before Congress, basically saying that calling for the genocide of the Jewish people does not count as bullying and harassment. I just think that this incident, and it's not really an incident, right. It's this entire story about Israel and Hamas has revealed so much, not just about Hamas, and not just about Israel, but about the rest of the world and where the West is.

EICHER: You know, there was also something of a life theme in the top stories in 2023. You had the advance—and maybe that’s the wrong word—maybe unraveling is better. But assisted suicide took deeper root in the culture. The denial of treatment we mentioned in the U.K. Authorities there, arresting people simply for praying outside abortion centers. You mentioned the critical theory mood, there was also kind of a pro-abortion mood in the country in 2023, so it wasn’t a great year for life.

STONESTREET: No, and we didn't even mention there, Canada. And you know, every story that comes out of Canada after the medical assistance and dying legislation passed, what are we in year three? It just feels like things have escalated there so quickly. I think there's a connection, by the way, between the critical theory mood that we've seen on the life issue, but you're right, and I'm not sure that people changed as much as there has been an exposure of just morally where people are, and so committed to kind of this internally referential idea of identity and morality. You know, I just think that the relativism that that reflects, and it's a relativism not just of morality, but of reality. Carl Trueman's very helpful book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self has kind of given folks like us categories to talk about these things like what is really at the root of this ideologically. And it's basically when we make ourselves the center of the universe, this really has taken place. And so we solve, you know, I think, troublingly six or seven states in a row, including some otherwise, conservative red states, just absolutely refuse to place further restrictions on abortion when the vote went to the people. So you just put it all together, and I do think that this reveals that the understanding the embrace that people have, that there are moral norms and moral realities outside of our hearts, outside of our own minds, outside of our own kind of sense of self as being rejected. To the extent that even if that allows us to take another's life, that's the sort of quote-unquote, rights we want, or at least the options we want to have in place.

BROWN: My question for John makes good on a promise we made last year. One year ago today John, I asked you if 2022 would go down as the year we all were gaslit on the question, what is a woman?

Here was your bottom line:

STONESTREET: It's something actually that Romans one talks about, is that when you choose to worship something other than God, the creation rather than the Creator, then you just lose touch, you lose any sense of, of permanence, any fundamental reference point by which to define reality and to orient yourself.

Let's schedule a date for a year from now and see if we've settled on this definition of woman.

I think we've hit the limit. So that's the deal a year from now, we'll gather together somebody, remember, we had this conversation, and we'll just see if the culture is going to rein us back in on this kind of insanity.

So, here we are, one year later. What say you, John?

STONESTREET: I mean, that's scary to hear your own voice. And interesting, though, you're right. Last year's word was gaslit. This year's word was authentic. To me, it's so, it's true. It's so interesting. And, and then, you know, a child of the 90s, I was like, Well, that was the word of the decade in the 90s, right? It was such a postmodern, sort of, we need authenticity. And, you know, it's like the 90s called wants its word of the year back, but I think we have some really interesting developments. where there is at least a decent amount of pushback. It's not as much as it needs to be. I don't think it's as much as it needs to be particularly from people of faith, particularly people who should have vested interest in this and they haven't expressed the pushback. But if you think about, you know, the closing of the the Tavistock clinic, think about the closing of the gender clinic in St. Louis, you think about the abandonment, at least by some companies of DEI sorts of officers, which is the office where a lot of this is being driven. You think of, you know, Dylan, how do you say his name Dylan Mulvaney or Dylan, whatever, the Bud Light story, and, you know, that kind of disappeared, and then you have sports bodies that are pushing back and at least trying to put a little bit of clarity, at least in the United States, on athletics, not as many as need to be but basically realized that this is an unworkable problem. You had courageous folks like, you know, Riley Gaines, and Billboard Chris and the Daily Wire folks that I think basically said, Yeah, you really can push back on this and, and I think he had a whole lot of people going, I'm just not on board, you know, with this stuff, Bill Maher, Barry Weiss, people that aren't politically on the same side as others in this area. I think we have to quote myself, a year later, we have some evidence that this conversation went so far, and there's a little bit of reining back on this insanity. There's a lot more work, I think, to be done on this. But it is interesting to hear myself and go, I wonder what's going to happen. But I think there's some signs of hope here, at least enough that, you know, for example, parents who don't want to offend their neighbors, pastors who don't want to offend anybody that have been really hesitant to be really clear on this should have enough courage to say yeah, I can be really clear on this now.

BROWN: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thanks, John, happy new year.

STONESTREET: Happy New Year to you guys!

NICK EICHER, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: a closing argument.

I’m going to link an extraordinarily long piece in The Economist … 17-thousand words … written by James Bennet, the former editorial page editor of The New York Times. It’ll take you about an hour to read if you’re not distracted.

It’s about the crisis of confidence in the news media. You probably wouldn’t agree with every word in the piece. I didn’t, either.

But it’s an unblinking look at the culture change that happened at The New York Times … that I look at as a microcosm of the state of the American mainstream news media, the crisis of confidence. Americans have almost no confidence in the news media, and the news media have returned the favor, lacking confidence in the public that it supposedly serves.

I say that simply to note that I think WORLD is uniquely positioned for this moment.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Nick, I see that. I think we’ve built a structure here and a core team that’s ready to take off and fly. I know people are weary of the bias of the mainstream media. I know I am. I come from the mainstream media.

But I’m noticing that things have gotten worse as the media have doubled down on the bias.

There’s an obvious anti-life bias, whether that’s at the beginning of life or at the end.

An anti-Creation bias, where we find not journalism but propaganda to prop up the assault on the very meaning of male and female.

And an anti-human bias, where individuals are not judged on merit but divided by membership in an ethnic group. That’s all over the media today.

EICHER: It is both impossible and unwise to summarize 17-thousand words into just a few, so what follows here is not an attempt at summary … it’s just an observation that rings so true to me from Bennet’s piece in The Economist. He laments that the ideology of The New York Times newsroom springs from the root idea that—and I’m quoting here—

“… there is no such thing as objective truth; that there is only narrative, and that therefore whoever controls the narrative – whoever gets to tell the version of the story that the public hears – has the whip hand. What matters, in other words, is not truth and ideas in themselves, but the power to determine both in the public mind.” 

In other words, just a power game.

Well, we don’t see it that way. We know there is objective truth and our job is to tell it. WORLD’s No. 1 core value is this, the words of our founder Joel Belz: Every day, earn their trust.

That’s our closing argument for the December Giving Drive. If we’ve not earned your trust, we don’t deserve your support. If we have, please make your gift today and help us take advantage of this pivotal moment for the American news media, a strategic moment.

BROWN: Your support can absolutely make a difference … so please make that difference today or before the last grain of sand makes it through the hourglass that is 2023. wng.org/donate. That’s wng.org/donate.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, December 29th. 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: WORLD arts and culture editor Collin Garbarino with notable deaths in 20-23 in arts and culture. ***

MUSIC: [Banana Boat (Day-O)]

In 1956, Harry Belafonte’s husky voice and exotic calypso music vaulted him into stardom. But the lyrics in the Banana Boat song demonstrated Belafonte’s roots in civil rights activism: he liked to say that he was simply an activist-turned-artist. Here’s Belafonte in a 1981 interview with Good Morning America.

BELAFONTE: The stardom and the public response was a coincidence to something else. I’ve always been opposed to injustice, having been a victim of it.

Belafonte was close friends with Martin Luther King Jr and gathered with fellow activists at his Manhattan mansion. He often used his wealth to bail civil rights leaders out of jail. Audio here from a 1972 interview with the BBC.

BELAFONTE: Or at least I felt it was incumbent upon me as well as many others to involve ourselves in trying to reshape the national priorities and the national attitude towards blacks and the black experience.

Belafonte became the first African American producer to win an Emmy Award. He died on April 25th at 96.

Next, singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffet also left an anthology of catchy island tunes behind after he passed away on September 1st.

MUSIC: [MARGARITAVILLE]

Buffet’s first album in 1970 was a flop, but he began to see some commercial success after moving to Key West, Florida in 1972. Buffet’s lyrics glorified the life of a beach bum, and his songs made listeners want to kick back in the sand. He eventually became a household name thanks to the 1977 release of “Margaritaville.”

MUSIC: “Wastin’ away in Margaritaville, searchin’ for my lost shaker of salt …”

Other hits such as “Cheeseburger in Paradise” and “It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere” revealed his unique island twang. In 1989 The Washington Post quipped that Buffet’s music was “a combination of tropical languor and country funkiness.” Here’s Buffet in a 1982 interview with Entertainment Weekly.

BUFFET: Contrary to popular belief, I’m not on the beach every day with a margarita.

Buffet died from cancer at 76 years-old.

Next, author Cormac McCarthy passed away at 89 on June 13th. McCarthy was a recluse who regularly declined interviews. He once said that everything he knows is already on the page. McCarthy’s Western crime novel No Country For Old Men was adapted into a movie and is regarded as one of the best films of 2007.

MCCARTHY: This country’s hard on people. You can’t stop what’s comin’.

In 2007 McCarthy won the fiction Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Road. It describes a brutal, post-apocalyptic journey of a father and young son.

In a rare 2014 interview, McCarthy spoke with Oprah about his writing process.  

MCCARTHY: You always have that hope that today I’m going to do something better than I’ve ever done.

McCarthy was hailed as one of the greatest American novelists.

Japanese author Kenzaburo Oe also made major contributions to the literary world. He was most famous for writing about personal and national tragedies: the bombing of Hiroshima and his own disabled son born with a brain hernia. Here’s Oe in a 1999 interview at UC Berkeley.

OE: I didn’t choose the story of a handicapped son, or we didn’t choose the theme of a handicapped boy’s family. I wanted to escape from that if it were possible, but something choosed me to write about it.

In 1994, Oe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his book: A Personal Matter. It explored Oe’s struggle with his son’s condition and his eventual acceptance of it.  

OE: All of literature has some mystic tendency. So when we write about our family, we can link ourselves to the cosmos, our cosmos. But I wanted to link myself and my family with society.

Oe died on March 3rd aged 88.

Next, we remember actor Matthew Perry, who played Chandler Bing on the popular sitcom Friends. Here’s Perry in his first interview on the set with Entertainment Tonight.

PERRY: We just kind of sit around and make fun of each other and laugh and have a good time.

In his 2022 memoir, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing,” Perry candidly admitted to hating himself, having a fragile ego, and battling drug and alcohol addiction for 40 years. Perry talked about his struggles with ABC News last year.

PERRY: By the time I was 18, I was drinking every day.

He eventually earned over a million dollars per episode of Friends while spiraling deeper in addiction.

PERRY: I guess the weirdest thing I did was, on Sundays, I would go to open houses and go to the bathrooms in the open house and see what pills they had in there and steal them.

Perry was undergoing ketamine therapy to treat his addiction. He accidentally overdosed on the drug at home on October 28th at 54 years old.

Actor Ryan O’Neal also battled substance abuse over the course of his career. Born in 1941 in L.A., O’Neal caught his big break in the soap opera “Peyton Place.” He went on to star in several critically and commercially successful films, including such as Love Story, the biggest film of 1970, and What’s Up, Doc? alongside fast talking Barbra Streisand.

STREISAND: What’s up, Doc?

O’NEAL: I beg your pardon?

STREISAND: We’ve got to stop meeting like this.

But stardom plagued O’Neal, who was a serial womanizer and alcoholic. The media dogged him for his tumultuous and strained relationships with his family, including his connection to Farrah Fawcett. In a 2011 interview with Piers Morgan, O’Neal blamed his children for their estrangement from him.

O’NEAL: My pride is here too.

O’Neal and his daughter Tatum made some steps toward reconciliation before he died on December 8th from prostate cancer at 82.

Next, Irish singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor’s troubled past led to her controversial persona. She frequently spoke out against sexual abuse because of her own experiences. In 1992, she tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live to protest misconduct in the Catholic church. She spoke with CBC News about the controversy in 2010.

O’CONNOR: To me this isn’t about you or me or anybody else—it’s about the victims.

The incident caused a major uproar in the U.S. and her career took a dive. But she didn’t seem to care.

O’CONNOR: It’s about these poor children who actually went through the violence and horror that we can’t even begin to imagine.

O’Connor frequently shaved her head and wore modest clothing in performances to protest exploitation in the music industry. In 2018, O’Connor converted to Islam, saying that all other scriptures were redundant aside from the Quran. She wore a hijab only occasionally, claiming there were “no rules” when it came to Muslim dress. She died on July 26th aged 56.

And finally, Peter S. Fischer first began his literary career in editorial work, but developed a passion for writing screenplays at 35 years-old.

AUDIO: What happened?

It’s the fish! They’ve been poisoned!

Fischer co-created the hit murder mystery show: Murder, She Wrote, in 1984. The series ran for 12 seasons and won two Golden Globes for Best TV Drama two years in a row. Star of the show Angela Lansbury also won four Golden Globes for her performance. After retirement, Fischer wrote over 20 murder mystery novels set in the backdrop of the Hollywood Golden Age. He died on October 30th aged 88.

For WORLD, I’m Collin Garbarino.

*** with research and writing from WORLD Radio intern Emma Perley

NICK EICHER, HOST: Well, now it’s time to thank the team who put the program together this week:

Mary Reichard, Anna Johansen Brown, Bonnie Pritchett, Leah Savas, Steve West, Juliana Chan Erickson, Joel Belz, Addie Offereins, Leo Briceno, Janie B Cheaney, Jenny Lind Schmitt, Onize Ohikere, Emma Perley, Cal Thomas, John Stonestreet, and Collin Garbarino.

Special thanks to our breaking news team: Lynde Langdon, Steve Kloosterman, Kent Covington, Travis Kircher, Lauren Canterberry, Christina Grube, and Josh Schumacher.

Thanks also to our breaking news interns: Tobin Jacobson, Johanna Huebscher, and Alex Carmenaty.

And 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 Senior producer is Kristen Flavin and Paul Butler is Executive producer.

Additional production assistance from Mary Muncy, Lillian Hamman, Bekah McCallum, Benj Eicher, and Emily Whitten.

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 says, “On that day the Lord their God will save them, as the flock of his people, for like the jewels of a crown they shall shine on his land.

For how great is his goodness and how great his beauty! Grain shall make the young men flourish, and new wine the young women.” —Zachariah 9:16, 17

Worship with brothers and sisters in Christ in Church this last weekend of 2023…and Lord willing we’ll meet you in the New Year 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.