The World and Everything in It: January 10, 2025

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning!

Today on Culture Friday: Facebook does an about face on freedom of speech .

Also: when free thought is not that free.

NICK EICHER, HOST: John Stonestreet is standing by, and a quick heads up, I’m going to ask him about a sensitive story parents might want to hear about outside the earshot of their kids.

Later on, reviewer Max Belz is back with a suggestion for classic movie night:

THE MAN WITH NO NAME: I gotta tell you before you hire me … I don’t work cheap.

A very young Clint Eastwood in A Fist Full of Dollars.

And Word Play with George Grant.

BROWN: It’s Friday, January 10th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

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

BROWN: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Jimmy carter » Political leaders from both sides of the aisle gathered in the Washington National Cathedral Thursday to pay their final respects to the late former President Jimmy Carter.

All five living presidents were there for Carter's national funeral.

President Biden delivered the eulogy:

BIDEN: Jimmy Carter's friendship taught me and through his life taught me the strength of character is more than title or the power we hold. It's a strength to understand that everyone should be treated with dignity, respect.

The late president's grandson, Jason Carter, spoke of his grandfather's lifetime of service to the community.

JASON CARTER: My grandfather spent the entire time I've known him helping those in need. He built houses for people in needed homes, he eliminated diseases in forgotten places. He waged peace anywhere in the world, wherever he saw a chance. He loved people.

Carter service in Plains » After the ceremony, Carter’s body was taken to his hometown of Plains, Georgia, where WORLD’s Lindsay Mast reports:

LINDSAY MAST: The flag-draped casket of America’s 39th president arrived here in Plains… hours after the service in Washington.

Carter was born near this town of about 500 people in 1924 … and lived most of his life here.

He was away for his time in the US Naval Academy and military service, and of course … for the four years he lived in the White House. He came back home after leaving office in 1981.

Carter’s family and friends held a private service Thursday at Maranatha Baptist Church, where Carter taught Sunday School.

A short time later, he was buried at home next to his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn.

For WORLD, from Plains, Georgia, I’m Lindsay Mast.

Trump sentencing » President-elect Donald Trump will be sentenced today in a Manhattan courtroom in his New York business fraud case, just 10 days before he’s sworn in as president.

The US Supreme Court turned away a request by Trump’s lawyers to step in and halt today’s sentencing after state courts also refused that request.

The judge in the case, however, has signaled that he’s leaning toward "unconditional discharge" at sentencing, which would mean that Trump would not face incarceration, fines, or probation.

California wildfires » In southern California, firefighters are still battling a series of raging fires in the Los Angeles area. LA Fire Chief Kristen Crowley:

CROWLEY:  It is safe to say that the Palisades fire is one of the most destructive natural disasters in the history of Los Angeles.

Thousands of firefighters are battling several different blazes, which have killed five people and scorched some 30,000 acres.

U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General C.Q. Brown says the Defense Dept is pitching in:

BROWN:  There's 10 U. S. Navy helicopters as well as 10 guard helicopters.. They can also help with the ground search and rescue incident response awareness and the medical support. Um, those Marines will be in place the next 24 to 48 hours.

There is some good news to report as the weather has been cooperating a little more. Winds have died down enough to allow aerial drops on the flames.

President Biden declared Thursday:

BIDEN:  Today I'm announcing that the federal government will cover 100 percent of the cost for 180 days. This is going to pay for things like debris and hazard material removal, temporary shelters, first responder salaries.

Authorities say the cause of the fires is still under investigation.

9/11 mastermind » Federal prosecutors have made an emergency appeal to try and stop a plea deal for the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks from being finalized today. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin has that story.

KRISTEN FLAVIN: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two co-defendants had agreed to plead guilty to their roles in the September 11th, 2001 terror attacks…. if the death penalty was removed as a sentencing option.

The plea agreement quickly sparked widespread public outrage … prompting Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to withdraw the deal.

But … a military court ruling revived the plea agreements last month. The court found that Austin did not have ultimate veto power over his department … and that the deals were still valid.

Prosecutors have asked an appellate court to halt today’s plea proceedings … arguing that limiting the sentencing options for the terrorists … deprives Americans of justice.

For WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin.

Judge strikes down Biden Title IX changes » A federal judge has struck down the Biden administration’s Title IX rule changes.

Title IX a provision within civil rights law designed to safeguard the rights of women and girls in education and school sports.

The Biden administration wanted to redefine that provision to, among other things, allow males who identify as women to compete on women’s or girl’s sports teams and use their locker rooms and bathrooms.

But after a wave of legal challenges U.S. District Judge Danny C. Reeves in Kentucky ruled Thursday that the administration overstepped its authority.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: Culture Friday with John Stonestreet. Plus, the history behind our calendar, and the marking of time.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 10th of January.

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. So we’re 10 days into the new year and that should give you a picture of how long it took for us to do the accounting on the December Giving Drive. It was two big factors, one I mentioned last week and one I didn’t. What I said last week was that because we’re in temporary quarters, counting up what came in the mail the last few days of 2024 just took that long—a lot longer than it normally would.

What I didn’t say, because I didn’t know, was this: There was so much of it! So many checks to count.

All tallied up, WORLD Movers exceeded the giving from last year and I don’t know why we’re surprised!

Our director of development Debra Meissner is on the line.

Deb, I sound like a broken record saying I’m surprised, but our WORLD Movers don’t sound like broken records they break records, and this year, they broke another December Giving Drive record! I don’t know why we’re surprised.

DEBRA MEISSNER: Nick, I shouldn’t be, but I just want to give a shout out to these extraordinary people. This is a group of—you know, they are listeners or readers or viewers—they make up our donor base and even though as you know they went over and above and they're giving to WORLD after September storms that did not stop them from giving generously in our December Giving Drive.

I wish I could read to you every card, every letter, every encouraging email that came in with these gifts. These folks are fiercely supportive of the excellent work that you guys produce every day and they are eager to sustain it.

We share these notes internally, and as you know, and our entire staff is just humbled and encouraged, and so grateful that the Lord continues to provide through the people who believe in our mission. And that's encouragement to all of us. So if you are one who has partnered with us this past year from the bottom of our heart, we thank you.

BROWN: Thank you indeed. We can’t do this without our WORLD Movers, and I’ll say it again: With our WORLD Movers, it feels like there’s nothing we can’t do.

EICHER: Thank you indeed. We can’t do this without our WORLD Movers, and I’ll say it again: With our WORLD Movers, it feels like there’s nothing we can’t do.

MEISSNER: Thank you for that and honestly, if history has shown me anything it's that you and the editorial team will definitely make the most of these funds.

EICHER: Debra Meissner, our director of development.

BROWN: It’s Culture Friday. Joining us now is John Stonestreet … president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Good morning!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning!

BROWN: John, big changes for META, announced this week from the top, META CEO, Mark Zuckerberg:

ZUCKERBERG: So, we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expressions on our platforms. More specifically, here’s what we’re going to do…we’re going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X.

Zuckerberg calls it getting back to their roots, but I’ve heard some other theories. Is it an AI manipulation, an early April Fool’s Joke—

STONESTREET: [Laughs]

BROWN: —is free speech really coming back? And why the change of policy now?

STONESTREET: Oh, there’s so many jokes that come to mind about, you know, Elon Musk being an alien and Zuckerberg being a robot and those just write themselves. I’m going to leave those to the comedians.

I think the best take, as is often the case, was from the Babylon Bee, whose best headlines are when they just describe what actually happened. The headline on this story: “Tech exec who swears he’s not suppressing free speech promises no longer to suppress free speech.”

But, you know, in the larger scheme of things, this is significant. You can’t really see this outside of the reversal of companies that we talked about right before the end of 2024, backing off DEI policies and DEI hires and things like that.

You can’t see this separately from the election results and what I think was a clear pushback by the American people, particularly in institutions when it proves to be harmful. What came to light in those congressional hearings with Zuckerberg was just damning, for Facebook and for the decisions that they made.

I do think that it’s important, though, to hesitate before we make any pronouncements of conversions.

I think that, you know, a lot of these folks, they follow the bottom line. There is a difference between the pragmatist who’s trying to maximize profits for a company or maximize distribution for a product like Facebook, and people who are true believers.

I don’t think Zuckerberg was ever a true believer in those policies. He just thought it was the most promising way forward. And now he doesn’t think they’re the most promising way forward. So the human motivation there maybe emerges past whatever rumors there are of that, you know, that he’s some sort of cyborg.

BROWN: Interesting story a colleague brought to my attention:

Three prominent members of the so-called “freethought” organization ,the Freedom from Religion Foundation, spiked publication of an article that went against the party line on transgenderism. Leaving the group were biologists Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, and psychologist Steven Pinker. They protested the removal of an article by Coyne, in which he pointed out that sex is binary, and expressed a view about men who identify as women being sexual predators.

This was way over the line, way too much freethinking, apparently.

The group’s leader emphasized its commitment to LGBTQ rights, prioritizing its broader opposition to Christian nationalism, which is seen as the bigger threat.

Well, John, a house divided against itself cannot stand. We heard that somewhere.

STONESTREET: Yeah, it is a remarkable thing to see the exposure, not just of these radical ideologies, but also just kind of the exposure of “the science is settled”-narrative that really is a subplot. Which, by the way, folks like Coyne and certainly Dawkins and the new atheists were guilty of perpetrating, right? Basically dismissing any inferences of design as being clearly non-scientific.

And we know this because the “science is settled” on Darwinism, that was so 1990s. I mean, if there’s one thing the science isn’t settled on anymore, it’s the Darwinian theory of how life came about. It seems to be wholly inadequate for the sorts of things we now know.

The “science is settled” is exactly the wrong thing to say about science, because true science isn’t settled. True science is a process of observing and extrapolating and repeating. When we get more data, more information comes into play, sometimes even unexpectedly, you have to take that into consideration.

Otherwise, it’s not science. That’s part of the story, too. But look, we’ve been hoping that some of these quote-unquote “conversions”—and that’s too strong of a word for what we’re talking about right now—but we’ve been hoping that some of that stuff would happen.

So let’s welcome it. I don’t want to be too cynical. You know, it’s tempting to be the “I-told-you-so” religious Christian voice. But I think we need to be thankful for it.

I think we need to point people beyond it to the source of the truth that now is being exposed. Thank God for these small wins. It’s not to me as exciting as when Richard Dawkins admitted he really likes Christmas carols and to go to church on Christmas, but hey, it's in that ballpark.

EICHER: A word to the listener. What I have to bring up now is a story that is going to be inappropriate for the younger listener. So if you have young ones are nearby, please be advised. John, you know what I’m talking about here with Islamic gangs in the UK?

Terrible stories.

STONESTREET: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

EICHER: So, just an extra second or two of delay to press pause if you need to.

There are reports of a horrifying pattern of abuse, exploitation, and sexual assault of vulnerable young girls in Britain—carried out, allegedly, by gangs mostly comprised of Pakistani Muslim men.

Many victims, some as young as five, were silenced through intimidation, while authorities failed to act—fearing accusations of racism and risking votes from Muslim communities.

Former U.K. Home Secretary Suella Braverman—who is of Asian descent—didn’t shy away from identifying the horror of these gangs, saying, “The perpetrators … hold cultural attitudes completely incompatible with British values.”

We mentioned Elon Musk earlier; he’s been all over this and has laid the blame for the coverup at the feet of the prime minister. For his part, the prime minister’s part, he denies it.

What can we say about this at this point, John?

STONESTREET: Yeah. Look, these reports are horrifying and I want them to not be true on every level—because it just means a level of cultural breakdown that’s way worse than even all the grumpy British writers that have been writing about British cultural breakdown for the last decade understood. And let me talk about what that cultural breakdown looks like on a couple levels.

One is certainly the interference of political forces into the family, the state basically usurping the authority of parents. The second aspect of this is that a culture that was so clearly steeped, historically, in a particular framework of right and wrong, would allow this level of wrong to take place. So you think about the world that Charles Dickens wrote about, you think about the world that William Wilberforce and the Clapham group engaged, and the moral revolution that took place. and then you hear about this and you say there has been a culture squandered.

And then the final thing that has to be said is that look, Islam is safer for the world when it secularizes. The closer that Islam is to its true religious identity, the more dangerous it is, particularly to the west, and you look at Islam on its own terms, and this is the sort of behavior that has defined Islamic literalism for centuries. This is not coming out of the blue. This is not coming from these folks because they’re immigrants.

That’s going to need to be corrected. This is Islam. And that we need to be really clear on that that our national identities are not as important as our religious identities in terms of true believers.

That’s another aspect of what has now entered western culture to a degree that we just haven’t experience before. Immigration is a factor in that, a big factor in that. But this has to do with the religious worldview of Islam and the historical behavior that has to do when you follow a prophet like Mohammed.

It has to be said this way, and the corrupting influence on Western culture, I mean, this is to a degree that is leaving everyone a little speechless. And I understand why a lot of people were incredulous. Like can you really believe that this took place to this scale?

I can’t. I hope this is not true.

EICHER: Even if some of the reports are even half true … it’s still one of the worst things I can imagine.

STONESTREET: Look, it’s going to have to be overexaggerated by a factor of a lot for it still not to have all of these I think implications that I just walked through.

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

STONESTREET: All right, thank you both.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, January 10th.

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: a classic movie from 1964 with worldwide appeal. Here’s movie reviewer Max Belz.

MAX BELZ: Like jazz or baseball, westerns are an American creation. And they’re a creation that resonates around the world.

Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars came out just over 60 years ago. Clint Eastwood stars as the laconic and extremely cool "Man with No Name." He rides into San Miguel, a windswept and forlorn town that looks like it's on the edge of the earth, a town in the grips of a violent feud between two outlaw families.

It’s a spaghetti western. That is, a movie made by an Italian studio and based in the epic setting of the American West. That was a common practice in the 60s and all of the English dialogue is dubbed since most of the actors spoke Italian.

MAN: Everybody here has become very rich or else they are dead.

After arriving, the Man with No Name joins one clan as a hired gun but feeds information to the other gang. 

MAN WITH NO NAME: I gotta tell you before you hire me, I don’t work cheap.

Soon, he’s embedded himself in each of the groups and plays them off against each other in a flurry of gunfighting. The movie has its share of bloody shoot-outs and the violence earned it an R rating.

AUDIO: [Gunfire, shootout]

Two sequels–For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly–came later in the 60s, but A Fistful of Dollars is a remake of a Japanese movie by famed director Akiro Kurosawa, set in feudal Japan featuring a wandering samurai. That movie in turn is based on an American movie from the 40s. It’s a story that echoes across cultures. First an American noir thrown back to feudal Japan, then reappearing in the American West.

The settings of these stories are lawless. 

AUDIO: [Horse whinnying]

In A Fistful of Dollars, no one lives freely, and the town is a cloud of theft and murder. So why does this story find a place in different cultures and time periods? 

MAN: See that’s what I want to talk to you about, he’s feeling real bad. Huh? My mule. See, he went and got riled up when you fired those shots at his feet.

The Man with No Name is a renegade who can destroy all the bad guys by himself. He’s strong enough to vanquish two gangs at once. In he rides to bring order and lay down the law, but he’s not beholden to this particular place. He's a man with no name, no home--an outsider rambling in and setting it right. He’s a law unto himself and the expression of that law.

Fistful of Dollars draws strong parallels to the crucifixion and resurrection. After one of the gangs beats the man with no name and pierces his left hand, he sneaks out of the town in a coffin. He recovers in a cave and returns to the town a few days later nearly invincible, even stronger than he was before. Though he’s beaten beyond recognition, he rises again to defeat his foes.

Clint Eastwood is exceptionally cool in this movie. He only speaks when he needs to, unfazed by danger. The score by Ennio Morricone is stirring, cuing different parts of the story like an opera. The movie has an exaggerated quality too with hyper close-ups and overdone emotions. But it’s a style, and you get used to it.

MAN: There you are. Now take this money. It’s enough to live on for awhile. Now get across the border. Put some distance between yourselves and San Miguel as possible. How can we thank you for what you are doing? Don’t try. Just get going before the Rojos get here.

The character of an outsider setting things right pleases viewers across cultures, times, and places because we wish for such a hero. It’s like Odysseus returning home and scaring off the suitors to win back Penelope. So with The Man with No Name we have a character, who like Jesus Christ himself, enters the fray, but stays above it. And who battles the enemy so there can be peace, and who delivers judgment in the same stroke as he offers protection and freedom.

I’m Max Belz.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, January 10th. 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, the first Wordplay for 2025, first one of the new calendar year.

Today, George Grant considers ideas of a different sort, the history of calendars.

SOUND: NEW YEARS COUNTDOWN

GEORGE GRANT: Have you ever wondered why we celebrate the New Year in January? Why should the year begin for the Northern Hemisphere in the dead of winter? Why not in the Springtime as leaves begin to appear again in the trees and the flowers begin to bud? The answer is perhaps surprising—and more than a little complicated.

There are about forty different calendar systems currently in use in the world. Some of these systems replicate astronomical cycles according to fixed rules, others are based on abstract, perpetually repeating cycles of no astronomical significance. Some carefully enumerate every unit of passing time, others contain structural ambiguities and discontinuities.

The common theme of each system is the desire to organize the calendar to satisfy the needs and presuppositions of society. Besides serving the obvious practical purposes, this process of organization provides a sense, however illusory, of understanding and managing time itself. Thus, calendars have provided the basis for planning agricultural, hunting, and migration cycles, for divination and prognostication, and for maintaining cycles of religious and civil events. Whatever their scientific sophistication, or lack thereof, calendars are essentially social covenants, not scientific measurements.

In 46 BC, Julius Caesar inaugurated a new calendaring system starting in January, a month named for the mythical god of beginnings, Janus. But the system made the year too long by several minutes—thus adding nearly a day each century. So, in 1582 Gregory XIII resolved to correct the problem by introducing a new calendar and issuing a bull requiring all Catholic countries to follow October 4 with October 15 that year. By the end of the 20th century, most of the world had conformed their civil calendars to the Gregorian reforms. But, other calendars still persist.

In 2025, Chinese New Year, or Chūnjié, will be celebrated on January 29. The Islamic New Year, or Hijri, is on June 25. The Eastern Orthodox New Year, or Ras el-Seni, is on January 14. For Coptic Christians, the New Year, or Nayrouz, is celebrated on September 11. The Jewish New Year, or Rosh Hashanah, is on September 22. Some Celtic traditions still celebrate the New Year on Samhain, this year on October 31, while others celebrate it on Hen Galan, January 13.

What a mess, huh? Things can get rather chaotic when we try to pinpoint exact dates in history. There are inevitable contradictions and variations—not necessarily because people have remembered wrongly, but because they have remembered differently. Like languages, vocabularies, and grammars, calendars are worldview projects. And as Francis Schaeffer reminded us, “Worldviews matter. Ideas have real world consequences.”

In any case, happy New Year—whenever it is you celebrate it.

I’m George Grant

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

David Bahnsen, Max Belz, Leo Briceno, Myrna Brown, Paul Butler, Janie B. Cheaney, Kristen Flavin, Emma Freire, George Grant, Travis Kircher, Lindsay Mast, Mary Muncy, Onize Oduah, Jeff Palomino, Emma Perley, Mary Reichard, Leah Savas, John Stonestreet, and Cal Thomas.

A new voice this week: WORLD Opinions contributor Anne Kennedy.

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

Thanks to the guys who stay up late to get the program to you early: Johnny Franklin, Carl Peetz, and Benj Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Harrison Watters is our Washington producer. Editorial assistance once again this week from Lauren Dunn.

Les Sillars is WORLD editor-in-chief.

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 Jesus saying: “For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” —Matthew 12:50.

Be sure to worship with your brothers and sisters in Christ in church on the Lord’s Day! And, Lord willing, we’ll meet you right back here on Monday.

Go now in grace and peace.

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