The World and Everything in It: January 30, 2024

PREROLL: The World and Everything in It is made possible by listeners like us. My name is Mary Stella. I live in Midlothian, Virginia. I have the best job ever as a full time singer songwriter and therapeutic entertainer in the elder care communities in and around Richmond. And I know you're going to enjoy today's program.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning! The U.S. cuts funding to a UN agency with ties to the attack on Israel by Hamas.

AUDIO: Any UNWR employee shown to have been involved or abetted in what transpired on Oct 7th be terminated immediately.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Also today, a constitutional crisis at the Southern border. And, music for seasons of suffering.

AUDIO: I really wanted to take the listener on a journey. It starts off with a lot of questions, a lot of doubt.

And WORLD Opinions commentator Hans Fiene with a theological definition for the political term, “evangelical.”

REICHARD: It’s Tuesday, January 30th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

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

REICHARD: Now news with Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Drone attack latest » Secretary of State Tony Blinken on Monday echoed President Biden’s vow that the United States will respond “decisively” to a deadly weekend drone attack against U.S. troops.

BLINKEN: We’ll do so at a time and a place of our choosing.

Biden administration officials are not tipping their hand as to how or when that will happen. But they are making one thing very clear:

KIRBY: We are not looking for war with Iran. We’re not looking to escalate here.
SINGH: We don't seek a war. We don't want to see this widen out into a broader war.
RYDER: Our focus is not to escalate this into a broader regional war or conflict. No one wants that. So that's going to continue to be our focus.

Iran-backed militants attacked an outpost in Jordan where US service members were stationed, killing three American troops and wounded dozens of others.

Officials now say there was no attempt to shoot down the enemy drone, and that was likely because U.S. troops mistook it for an American drone until it was too late.

Austin at Pentagon » Defense Sec. Lloyd Austin said Monday, “The president and I will not tolerate attacks on U.S. forces, and we will take all necessary actions to defend the U.S. and our troops.”

His remarks came as he returned to work at the Pentagon after weeks of working from home, and from a hospital room before that.

AUSTIN: At this important time, I’m glad to be back at the Pentagon. I feel good and am recovering well, but still recovering. And I appreciate all the good wishes that I’ve received thus far.

Austin had to be hospitalized last month due to complications following surgery for prostate cancer.

Stoltenberg in Washington » At the Pentagon, the secretary welcomed NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg.

STOLTENBERG: Thanks so much Sec. Austin. It’s good to see you again.

The secretary general is in Washington for a series of meetings at the Pentagon and the Capitol. As expected, those talks center largely on supporting Ukraine in its battle to push out Russian invaders,

STOLTENBERG: Our support to Ukraine is not charity. It is an investment in our own security, because the world will become more dangerous if President Putin wins in Ukraine.

He said failure in Ukraine could embolden China, which is engaged in a massive military buildup.

And he added that NATO is now holding its biggest military exercise in decades, involving some 90,000 troops.                                                                                                                                                    

UNRWA » The European Union wants an independent investigation of a United Nations agency now in the throes of a major scandal.

At least a dozen countries have cut off funding to U.N.’s Palestinian relief agency after allegations that some of its staff took part in the October 7th terrorist attack against Israel.

European Commission Spokesman Eric Mamer:

MAMER: This is a different audit to the investigation launched on the actual allegations, this is broader.

According to Israeli intelligence, U.N. workers helped kidnap a woman, assisted in a massacre at a kibbutz, and celebrated the attack.

The embattled U.N. agency, known as UNRWA has already fired at least nine of the workers connected to the attack and is conducting its own internal investigation.

U.N. Spokesman Stephane Dujarric:

DUJARRIC: While that’s going on, people need to survive and we need continued support for UNRWA and all our humanitarian work.

In Washington, the House Foreign Affairs Committee is set to hear testimony today from    experts and witnesses connected to the allegations.

Gaza cease-fire talks » Meantime, the Biden administration is cautiously optimistic about negotiations for a possible cease-fire between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas.

CIA Director Bill Burns recently traveled to Paris to sit down with officials from Israel and Qatar as they work to iron out a deal.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

KIRBY: Don’t want to sound sanguine here. There’s a lot of work left to be done. We don’t have an imminent deal to speak to. But based on the discussions we’ve had over the weekend and recent days, we feel that it’s moving in a good direction.

Any cease-fire arrangement would involve the release of more Israeli hostages held by Hamas.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered tempered optimism. He called the weekend talks constructive, but he also said significant gaps remain.

Tax doc leaker sentence » A man convicted of leaking the tax returns of former President Donald Trump and others will spend years behind bars. WORLD’s Josh Schumacher has more.

JOSH SCHUMACHER: A judge sentenced former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn to 5 years in federal prison.

District Judge Ana Reyes said she imposed the maximum sentence possible due to the extraordinary nature of the crime and its impact on the nation's system of government.

Littlejohn pleaded guilty late last year to leaking the tax records of Trump and other wealthy individuals.

For WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: Rethinking how the U.S. provides aid to Palestinians. Plus, music from Christian artist in the U.K.

This is The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 30th of January, 2024.

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

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

First up: aid workers as terrorists?

As you just heard, members of the U.N. agency putatively responsible for Palestinian refugees have been linked to the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel. That agency is UNRWA, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric:

DUJARRIC: The Secretary-General has been briefed by the Commissioner-General of UNRWA Philippe Lazzarini regarding extremely serious allegations which implicate several UNRWA staff members in the terror attacks of October 7th in Israel. The Secretary-General is horrified by this news and asked Mr. Lazzarini to investigate this matter swiftly and to ensure that any UNRWA employee shown to have participated or embedded in what transpired on October 7th or in any other criminal activity, be terminated immediately and referred for potential criminal prosecution.

EICHER: The U.S. and eight other countries have suspended funding for UNRWA. National Security Council Spokesman John Kirby told reporters more may be coming.

KIRBY: We'll certainly consider additional, you know what, depending on the investigation, whether that requires any additional changes in the way we support UNRWA going forward.

REICHARD: Over in Congress today, a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee will hold a hearing to discuss what those changes might look like.

EICHER: Joining us now to talk about it is Richard Goldberg. He’s a Senior Advisor for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He was previously a National Security Council official and has submitted testimony to the House as part of today’s hearing.

Richard, good morning.

RICHARD GOLDBERG, GUEST: Good morning.

EICHER: Let’s start with the basics. What was UNRWA created to do, and how does it work differently from other U.N. refugee agencies?

GOLDBERG: Yeah, really important question. There are two agencies in the world that deal with quote-unquote refugees. There's the main UN refugee agency, we call that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, that deals with 10s of millions of refugees with just, you know, 10,000-15,000 people, international aid workers that are working towards helping people who are fleeing a conflict, who are moving around internally in the conflict, get back to their lives as quickly as possible, whether that's repatriation return to their homes, some sort of post refugee, post IDP status.

Then there's this other organization, just for this group of people that are called in quotes, "Palestinian refugees," and it's called the UN Relief and Works Agency. It's not international. It has 30,000 people, all Palestinian, working for it. They're not refugees, they haven't been fleeing conflict. These are people who were part of a refugee population of 700,000 or so back in 1948-1949, when Israel was founded. Remember, there was about an equal number of Jewish refugees who were kicked out of Arab countries at the time, they were all absorbed into Israel and the United States. And yet this group of individuals were told don't go back to your home, don't go anywhere else. Stay in refugee status, because the Arab armies will be coming back to liberate you, will be coming back to fulfill the vision of destroying Israel. So this organization became a political manifestation of the Arab war against Israel going back to 1948 all the way until now.

So what do we have here? We have this one unique set of an organization separate from all other refugees in the world, where we pour billions of dollars, knowing that money is going to flow to potentially terrorist organizations, into schools that train, indoctrinate kids to grow up for conflict and not for peace, and keeping them in a refugee status instead of actually saying, how do we grow their economic and political potential. And what you hear today, this breaking news of these 12 individuals who there's now evidence participated in the October 7 massacre, that's a feature, not a bug.

REICHARD: You submitted testimony for today’s subcommittee hearing. I’ll quote from it: “UNRWA is one of the most reckless discretionary spending programs in history.” How do you mean?

GOLDBERG: Well, remember, when we give foreign assistance to an NGO, when USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, puts out some money for a contract for development work, we have to run all the people involved in that organization through our intelligence community to verify if there's any hits for potential terrorism. We don't require that of U.N. agencies. We certainly don't require that of UNRWA, even though it operates in an area where we know there's many, many, many terrorist organizations operating and therefore the risk is very high that your money will be flowing there.

But zoom back out. From an oversight of U.S. taxpayer dollars, I worked many, many years as a staff associate for the appropriations committee that works on all these foreign assistance programs. And your number one question is, where's the money? How's it being spent? What's the oversight? How do we know we're getting good value for our money? There's no board of directors that UNRWA has for us to weigh in on who its leader should be. This is an independent agency. They just say give us the money and go away. Between 1950 and 2018 when the Trump administration halted our funding for UNRWA, US taxpayers committed $6 billion to UNRWA. Do you know how much money we've committed since 2021, when the Biden administration restarted funding? A billion dollars in just three years. Because UNRWA says the sky is falling, they need cash immediately, the population has grown, the need is growing. That's not sustainable as a program on its merits. We have tried for 20 years to get an independent expenditure audit of UNRWA's books, they won't allow it. They say the U.N. has a single audit principle, only the U.N.'s board of auditors can look at the books. Well, that's a red alert.

So if you look at the efficiency of dollars, the lack of accountability, both governance-wise, financial auditing-wise, plus the terror finance problems, plus the education system, you know, raising people to hate, to commit something like October 7, do I need another example of why this is broken for the U.S. taxpayer? It just makes no sense. It is likely one of the worst programs we have ever funded in the US government history. And it has to stop.

10:11 EICHER: What do you think Congress can do about it?

GOLDBERG: Well, first of all, don't keep putting money into UNRWA. If we want to build up leverage to actually have change, we need to work with our allies to withhold funding and say that money is going to go into other organizations that can do true humanitarian work that we trust in other areas of the world. And we're going to set up metrics for success. Success is saying we've now raised this many people out of poverty. We've now given this many political rights to people who live in Palestinian areas.

It's not success to add another hundred thousand people to a refugee roll and say that the refugee problem has gotten worse, an imaginary refugee problem, because Israel is a problem. The Israeli forces are not anywhere near the camps that UNRWA runs in Lebanon. And yet for the last several months, there have been terror firefights going on between random Palestinian terror groups killing each other. Why is it anywhere UNRWA goes, terror infrastructure follows?

So we have a problem here. We have other trusted agencies and organizations we've worked with in other parts of the world that can do education, that can do health care delivery, and can do it in a way where you don't keep sending people into despair and poverty and hate, and instead give people the path to self sufficiency and self responsibility.

REICHARD: Richard Goldberg is a senior advisor for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Thank you for your expertise!

GOLDBERG: Anytime.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: A constitutional crisis.

Last week, a split U.S. Supreme Court ordered Texas to allow federal agents to remove barriers that Texas had installed on the border.

NICK EICHER, HOST: This goes back to a lawsuit Texas filed last year against the federal government. Following the Supreme Court’s order, Texas National Guard installed more razor wire in a part of Eagle Pass, Texas, called Shelby Park.

Meanwhile, some Democrats are calling on the Biden administration to double down and take federal control of the Texas National Guard.

REICHARD: The whole situation raises questions about the limits of presidential versus state power…and joining us to talk about that aspect of the story is Richard Painter. He was the chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration. Painter is now a law professor at the University of Minnesota teaching corporate security and business ethics and is working on a forthcoming book on presidential power.

Good morning professor!

RICHARD PAINTER: Good morning. Thank you for having me, Mary,

REICHARD: We're so glad you came on. Well, this crisis makes a lot of people feel that nobody’s in charge and chaos reigns. We've heard from law professors like Jonathan Turley that Texas is in the wrong here from a purely legal standpoint. What do you say?

PAINTER: Well, this is a very difficult situation. For as many years we've had disputes between the states and the federal government over who has power to do what with respect to immigration. I believe George W. Bush was the last president who really worked toward a bipartisan solution to our immigration issues. And what we've had since then, is states that disagree with the approach of the President have gone their own way. We have liberal states that set up these sanctuary cities where they will not enforce immigration law and actually instruct their law enforcement officers not to cooperate with the INS. And now we have Texas going in the other direction, and seeking to beef up enforcement against illegal immigration in its own way in a manner that collides with the law enforcement, immigration control responsibilities of the federal government.

Ultimately, the federal government has to have a substantial amount of control over immigration policy if we're going to have an effective control of our borders, and not have states going out on their own and coming up with different policies in California than you might have in Arizona and Texas. The United States as a whole needs to have a uniform and effective immigration policy. But that's just the policy argument for having preemption by federal law. Whether federal law actually does preempt once again, is a question of statutory interpretation applied to the specific instance of what a state wants to do in that case.

EICHER: Let’s turn to a statement released last week from Texas Governor Greg Abbott. He threads the needle this way: the federal government broke its pact with the states with President Biden's dereliction of duty in enforcement of immigration laws. That’s led to what Abbott calls invasion which in turn has led to an overwhelmed border patrol and consequently to drug cartels controlling our border. That’s directly implicated in the deaths of thousands of people. That's a summary of Abbott’s statement. Richard, what legal authority does Abbott really have to secure his state border?

PAINTER: Well, it appears that the Supreme Court is saying that he has quite limited legal authority, at least with respect to installing the barbed wire fences. The governor of Texas believes that the President is not adequately enforcing our immigration laws. We're going to have left wing mayors and cities and some governors elsewhere who think that we ought to have more sanctuary cities and go in the opposite direction. And my concern is that this could lead to chaos.

REICHARD: Do you see corollaries in our legal history like this?

PAINTER: I would hope that the governor of Texas does not actually disobey an order of a federal court. It's absolutely critical that the orders of the federal courts be complied with. We don't want to be back where we were in the 1950s when President Eisenhower had to send troops in to enforce federal court orders in Arkansas, and other states that would not desegregate their schools. So whether we agree or disagree with the Supreme Court order, the orders of the court must be complied with. And then the next step is to resolve this issue politically, and the Biden administration needs to effectively enforce the immigration laws. That's part of his job as president, and the voters are going to have an opportunity to hold him accountable.

REICHARD: Why do you think Biden is not enforcing the law? On day one of his taking office, he rescinded the executive orders that President Trump issued that did take better control of the border.

PAINTER: Well, the some of those policies worked, and some didn't. I mean, this was a, we've had challenges at the border for a very, very long time. And the each administration has tried to solve this in their own way. It concerns the balance, when you have people who are seeking asylum, we have statutes that that provide for asylum in some circumstances. And whether or not President Biden is in good faith applying those statutes or to expansively applying those statutes is a political question. But I get back to what's absolutely critical, is if the court issues an order, we do comply with it. There is no other way to have a functioning democracy.

REICHARD: Well, I mean, there's no doubt I don't think you would, you would disagree with this, that the the numbers are much higher now. I mean, I remember quoting a million million cases backlog and immigration courts now it's over 3 million. And that's just in the last decade or so. If you had a chance to talk to President Biden directly, what would you say?

PAINTER: Well this is a this is a crisis. We are a country of immigrants but on the other hand, we cannot just have everybody come in here whenever they want, without screening out potential terrorists and others and drug dealers. But to have this taken over by the political extremes, people talking about, well, we got to have open borders and all that on the far left, and then some of the racist rhetoric on the extreme right, I think has been very, very destructive and contrary to our traditional American values.

REICHARD: Well, the next hearing is on February 7, before the Fifth Circuit, so we will be revisiting this again soon. Richard Painter is a law professor at the University of Minnesota with expertise in presidential power in particular. Richard, thank you so much.

PAINTER: Well, thank you for having me.

NICK EICHER, HOST: The fictional Ted Lasso had no respect for Britain’s national beverage.

TED LASSO: You know, I always figured the tea was just gonna taste like hot brown water. You know what? I was right. It's horrible. No thank you. Woman: Welcome to England.

There’s another controversy brewing between the US and UK now that a nonfictional American steeped herself in it. Chemistry professor Michelle Francl claims salt will make your tea better.

FRANCL: And it turns out that chemists now know that the sodium ions in the salt block bitter receptors and reduce our perception of bitterness.

Yada, yada, yada. U.K. broadsheets were embittered, so the U.S. Embassy in London sweetened things by assuring that salty tea is not official policy,” adding: diplomats will continue to make tea properly— by microwaving it.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: International incident!

EICHER: It’s The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, January 30th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: 

And I’m Mary Reichard.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: songs for times of suffering.

London-based singer-songwriter Praise Lubangu graduated from Cardiff University in Wales and went to work as a chemist. Yet her musical gifts combined with life’s difficulties eventually took her in a completely different direction.

EICHER: WORLD Reporter Steve West recently talked with the 26-year-old artist about her musical and personal journey and the healing that her music has helped bring.

MUSIC: [“SIRENS”]

STEVE WEST: Praise Lubangu had the great blessing of growing up in a Christian family, the child of Congolese immigrants, but in her early teen years there were other voices competing for her attention, like her peers or those in the media.

LUBANGU: Though I do have amazing parents, who were always speaking life and truth into me, because I was spending a lot more time outside of the home, those voices started to become a lot louder …

Eventually Lubangu joined a startup music distribution business helping independent artists gain a hearing for their music. She often collaborated with artists. But in October 2023 she released her debut album, titled In Times Like These. She describes it as growing out of an intense spiritual struggle in her family’s life triggered after her sister developed epilepsy.

MUSIC: [“BLEED”]

In an era of streaming music, many albums become simply a collection of singles. But the songs on In Times Like These are thoughtfully arranged and sequenced by their creator. Early songs work on a horizontal level connecting with human experience, while later songs train our gaze upward.

LUBANGU: So I really wanted to take the listener on a journey. It starts off with a lot of questions, a lot of doubt, but then there's a bit of a turning point in the middle. You can kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel …

MUSIC: [“MAKE IT HOME”]

Both the album as a whole and individual songs have a psalm-like quality lyrically. Much like our prayers gain shape from the Psalmist’s movement from lament or longing to praise, these songs are rooted in human experience but come round to reminders of who God is.

MUSIC: [“MAKE IT HOME”]

LUBANGU: I thought it was necessary to have those songs where it just allows you to think “oh, there is someone else who thinks like I am, or yes, I am struggling at this time” — similar to the way David would pin things in the Psalms, you know, he starts off with “God, where are you” and ended “but yet, I will praise you.”

MUSIC: [“MAYBE”]

Placed right at the center of the album, the song “Maybe” represents a turning point for Lubangu—and for the listener.

MUSIC: [“MAYBE”]

LUBANGU: It was exactly one of those songs that provided a lot of healing for me. Even though I'm using words like “maybe,” I’m reminding myself of truth, reminding myself of who God is. And that his strength is made perfect in weakness.

MUSIC: [“MAYBE”]

In Times Like These draws from many sources musically and lyrically. It features a handful of other voices besides Lubangu's, including several performers. She also shares three encouraging voice recordings by her mom and friends, including one prayer and a vision with a charismatic flavor not all Christians will appreciate.

But we hear echoes of classic Christian voices, too, like London pastor Charles Spurgeon who wrote in one sermon, “I have learned to kiss the waves that throw me up against the rock of ages.” That line inspired the words of Lubangu’s song, “Maybe.”

LUBANGU: During the time of COVID, I think, probably for a lot of us, we found ourselves asking a lot more questions and wanting to go deeper in our faith. I found that the more that I started to listen to these sermons and teachings and things like that, and also just spending more time privately in the word, things started to become a lot more clear and make sense.

The album climaxes with its final track, “Candlelight”, inspired by some imagery from a sermon by 17th century pastor Jonathan Edwards’.

MUSIC: [“CANDLELIGHT”]

LUBANGU: As the Word says, with him, there's no shadow of turning. “You make the sun look like candle light” is directly an inspiration from that Jonathan Edwards quote of, of how God is just infinitely better, there's no real competition there in terms of who God is and what we see in our lives today.

Produced independently, this album is another that has flown under the radar of reviewers and mainstream Christian music. Maybe that’s all the more reason to listen.

MUSIC: [“CANDLELIGHT”]

LUBANGU: I would love for people to know that the Lord is truly their father, that he wants to know what is on their heart. That's basically the aim of the project, and to know that their suffering is not in vain and that there is hope.

MUSIC: [“CANDLELIGHT”]

I’m Steve West.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, January 30th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next: evangelical voters.

WORLD Opinions commentator Hans Feine says that when talking theology in public, it’s important to get the definitions right.

HANS FEINE: The less clearly you define your terms, the more pointless a debate will be. If, for example, a Roman Catholic and a Southern Baptist debate whether baptism saves without sharing a common definition of both “baptism” and “saves,” both sides will end up barking slogans at each other and neither side will win any converts.

Likewise, if you wish to argue that Donald Trump “is connecting with a different type of Evangelical voter”, you won’t make a terribly convincing argument if you have no clear definition of “evangelical.” Unfortunately, that’s precisely the path Ruth Graham and Charles Homans take in their recent New York Times article.

Graham and Homans profile a handful of these “new” evangelicals who share a few things in common, namely a fervent desire to see Donald Trump reelected and a lack of regular church attendance. There’s Karen Johnson, who hasn’t attended a worship service in years and who sees Trump as both “our David and our Goliath.” There’s Cydney Hatfield, who prays to God every night but doesn’t attend church and describes Trump as “the only savior [she] can see.”

Graham and Homans tell us, “Evangelicalism has long had an individualistic strain that resists the idea that personal faith requires church attendance.” But that raises an important question: are these new evangelicals or not evangelicals? Certainly, evangelicalism is a tradition with murkier boundaries than Catholicism or Presbyterianism, but which section of David Bebbington’s Evangelicalism Quadrilateral has room for the Proud Non-Churchgoers? 

Bebbington argues that to be an evangelical, one must hold to four markers: conversionism, biblicism, activism, and crucicentrism or being cross-centered. Conversionism means believing that “lives need to be transformed through a ‘born-again’ experience and a lifelong process of following Jesus.” Being cross-centered means evangelicals stress “the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross as making possible the redemption of humanity.” So, how does someone who sees Trump as more of a messiah than the actual Messiah have a place in that tradition?

In 2021, Gregory A. Smith of Pew Research Center noted, “white Americans who viewed Trump favorably …in 2016 were much more likely than White Trump skeptics to begin identifying as born-again or evangelical Protestants by 2020.”

In other words, President Trump didn’t change the views of pre-existing evangelicals as much as he made the label “evangelical” appealing to those outside the tradition. Throughout Trump’s presidency, those who loved Trump but weren’t regular churchgoers watched hostile media voices use “evangelicals” as a slur meaning “deplorable Christians who support the Bad Orange Man.” And, as is often the case in the religious realm, the maligned began positively adopting the slur. 

American Lutherans–the tradition to which I belong–have never identified themselves as part of the modern evangelical movement. But I’m tired of seeing Christian-scented Trump worshippers falsely labeled as “evangelicals” in order to discredit faithful Christians, many of whom hope to bring about godly policies through an ungodly politician. Words have meaning, and if we’re interested in anything deeper than scoring cheap political points, we should let “evangelical” retain its historic and theological definition.

I’m Hans Feine.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: Congress is working on a bipartisan border deal … we’ll hear from a Senator about what’s required to fix border policy on Washington Wednesday.

And, not that there’s a connection between Washington and hot air, we’ll take you to a hot air balloon festival in Natchez, Mississippi. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

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

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 that, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household.” And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief. —Mark 6:4-6

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.