The World and Everything in It: March 24, 2025

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

If a prison official trashes a grievance filed by an inmate, who decides what to do about it—a judge or a jury?

CHAMPAGNE: Call the warden and say, Hey, did you tear up the grievance? What happened here? You know, and they can make that determination. You don't need a jury to do that. Clogs up the federal court system.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Also today the Monday Moneybeat: the origin story, a regular segment born of a crash.

And the WORLD History Book, today the death of one of America’s greatest colonial pastors.

MURRAY: If you take eternity out of Edwards’s life, you could read it as a story of little success.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, March 24th. 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. Here’s Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Ukraine, Russia talks » Russian drone attacks killed at least seven people across Ukraine Sunday morning. The latest strikes came just hours before American diplomats are set to meet separately with both Russian and Ukrainian leaders in Saudi Arabia today.

U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff:

WITKOFF:  The agenda is, stop the killing, stop the carnage. Let's end this thing. You can't end things without communicating with both sides, understanding what each of them need, and then trying to bring them together.

Negotiators will continue work on the details on a limited ceasefire related to energy targets that both sides have already agreed to in principle. From there, they hope to expand that ceasefire.

National Security Adviser Mike Waltz:

WALTZ:  We're going to move to, uh, maritime. Both countries sit on the Black Sea. They have to trade and oil and gas and grain to literally feed their people and others. Uh, that will be the next step.

Steve Witkoff said he sat in on separate phone calls last week between President Trump and Presidents Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin. He said both expressed a desire to work toward a lasting peace.

Witkoff on Gaza / Iran » Meantime, in the Middle East, a lasting peace in Gaza remains elusive.

Witkoff said that earlier this month, he believed both Israel and Hamas had agreed on terms to renew an expired ceasefire. 

WIKOFF:  I even thought we had an approval from Hamas. Maybe that's just me getting, um, getting, uh, you know, duped. Uh uh. But uh, but I thought we were there and evidently we weren't. So this is on Hamas.

 All of this is happening as discussions about Iran are expected to take place this week. Axios reports a senior Israeli delegation is expected to visit the White House in the coming days to talk about Iran. President Trump has given Iran two months to negotiate a new nuclear deal.

He has warned Tehran that time is running out, and has threatened military action to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

Trump administration / judge fight » The Trump administration and many Republicans continue to take aim at federal judges blocking President Trump’s agenda. Trump advisor Jason Miller: 

MILLER:  I think that these radical judges who are undermining what President Trump is attempting to lawfully do to implement his policies, I think these judges are a threat to democracy.

Miller charges that some judges are overstepping their constitutional authority.

But Democrats say it is the White House that is not respecting the separation of powers. Congressman Jim Himes: 

HIMES: We see, uh, how this administration goes after the many judges and the many courts who are stopping the wild and illegal actions of this administration.

Some GOP lawmakers are pushing to impeach certain federal judges, but they lack the two-thirds majority needed in the Senate to do so.

Homan on deportations » The Trump administration has been locked in a high profile battle with District Court Judge James Boasberg. He placed a temporary injunction on President Trump’s use of the rarely invoked Alien Enemies Act … to deport high-risk illegal immigrants such as gang members.

He’s demanding information on deportation flights already completed. Border czar Tom Homan spoke Sunday about a flight that he says was loaded with members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, or TDA: 

HOMAN:  That plane was full of the uh, peoples designated as terrorists, number one. Number two, every, every Venezuelan migrant on that flight was a TDA member.

Trump officials note that the president has formally declared certain foreign gangs as designated terrorist organizations. Therefore, they assert that the president lawfully deported terrorists under the Alien Enemies Act, and that the judge wrongfully is interfering in U.S. foreign policy.

Judge Boasberg has called the Trump administration’s response to his demands “Woefully insufficient.”

Democrat infighting » Democrats in Washington are fighting over how best to fight President Trump’s agenda. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer: 

SCHUMER:  I knew when I cast my vote against, uh, the c uh, against the government shutdown, that it would be, that there'd be a lot of controversy and there was.

Schumer earlier this month reluctantly backed a Republican-authored funding bill to keep the government open. He said the alternative would have been worse.

Democrats wanted language inserted to limit the authority of the Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, to audit government spending. Some criticized Schumer, saying he surrendered the party’s leverage.

And the party’s socialist wing has launched a high-profile campaign to ramp up the fight against Trump. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders: 

SANDERS:  I'm trying to make it clear that the American people are not gonna sit idly by and allow Trump establish an oligarchic form of government where Musk and other billionaires are running our government.

Sanders has launched what he’s calling his “fighting oligarchy” tour with Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, holding rallies in numerous states.

Pope Francis » A weak and frail Pope Francis has returned home to the Vatican from the hospital after a five-week bout of pneumonia.

Dr. Sergio Alfieri says the pontiff survived a serious ordeal. 

ALFIERI: During his hospitalization, the holy father’s critical conditions presented two very critical episodes in which the holy father’s life was in danger.

The motorcade carrying the 88-year-old pontiff drove through the gates of Vatican City after a brief stop at St. Mary Major basilica, where the pope always goes to pray after a foreign visit.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: Legal Docket, plus the Monday Moneybeat and the WORLD History Book. 

This is The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this 24th day of March, 2025. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning! I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. It’s time for Legal Docket.

On Friday, Trump administration lawyers came before U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in a hearing. The issue was whether to extend a temporary block of deportations of what the White House calls Venezuelan gang members.

The judge and leading Democrats are highly critical of the president’s policies … and his zeal in pursuing them. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer:

SCHUMER: Donald Trump shows that he wishes to violate the laws in many, many different ways.

Judge Boasberg criticized President Trump’s lawyers as “intemperate and disrespectful” and possibly in violation of his orders. Additionally, he’s called the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act for deportations.. legally unfounded.

EICHER: Tensions rose further as Judge Boasberg accused the government of possibly violating his order last weekend when the administration flew 238 men to a supermax prison in El Salvador. Government attorneys have until tomorrow to make a convincing argument that the administration did not violate his order.

Against this backdrop, the administration is blasting the judge, accusing him of substituting his judgment for that of an elected president keeping a campaign promise. Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt.

LEAVITT: They are trying to dictate policy from the president of the United States. They are trying to clearly slow-walk this administration’s agenda and it’s unacceptable.

Trump himself has laid into the judge. This is from an interview with Laura Ingraham of Fox News:

TRUMP: He’s radical left. He was Obama appointed. And he actually said we shouldn't be able to take criminals, killers, murderers, horrible, the worst people, gang members, gang leaders, that we shouldn't be allowed to take them out of our country.

The Trump administration says it is considering invoking “state-secrets privilege” using a national-security rationale to avoid disclosing details about the deportation flights. A sworn statement from a Justice Department attorney confirmed that Cabinet-level talks were ongoing about invoking the privilege.

REICHARD: But Judge Boasberg has called that “woefully insufficient” and has said tomorrow’s hearing is where the administration will have to present its argument on state secrets. That’s in addition to its explanation why the White House believes it didn’t violate the order.

Amid the back and forth, and even the suggestion that the judge should face impeachment for overstepping his authority, Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare public statement. The Chief wrote that legal disagreements are handled in the usual appeals process, not through impeachment.

EICHER: Now let’s jump into our case for today, the U.S. Supreme Court hearing argument in a dispute between a prison and a prisoner:

ROBERTS: We’ll hear argument next in Case 23-1324, Perttu versus Richards.

Richards, the prisoner; Perttu, an officer at the prison.

Kyle Richards used the prison grievance system to make claims against officer Thomas Perttu. He says Perttu harassed and intimidated him, and then retaliated when Richards filed complaints. He says Perttu destroyed the paperwork and threatened to kill him if he didn’t stop filing grievances. But that grievance process is critical. Federal law requires all inmates to go through a prison’s grievance process before they can sue in court.

REICHARD: In the law, that’s known as exhausting administrative remedies. It’s been a federal requirement for almost 30 years, after Congress passed a measure aimed at preventing the abuse of the legal system by prisoners. Then-President Bill Clinton signed the Prison Litigation Reform Act in 1996.

The National Sheriffs’ Association filed a friend of the court brief in support of the prison. Greg Champagne served as its past president and is now sheriff of St. Charles Parish in Louisiana. I called him up to understand the background:

CHAMPAGNE: So the courts were actually pleading for mercy here to Congress, it wasn't so much sheriffs, because what's happening as you know, you know, inmates have a lot of time on their hands, and there's some inmates that, you know, they love just filing lawsuits. And prior to that time, some of them, that's all they do. They love just…putting a monkey wrench into the system and just filing suit after suit over issues like, you know, breakfast was cold. Some ridiculous things. And the federal courts, when they get those things, they have to dedicate, you know, a law clerk to it, a judge has to look at it. They can't just throw it away….I think the largest part of their dockets was really nuisance inmate lawsuits. So it was actually the courts who were asking for some relief from that.

EICHER: Sheriff Champagne says judges are well suited to decide the factual question in this instance:

CHAMPAGNE: I mean, why can't the federal judge, when he gets it look at have an evidentiary hearing, which is what the Fifth Circuit to at least two other circuits do. And they can say, you know, call the warden and say, Hey, did you tear up the grievance? What happened here? You know, and they can make that determination. You don't need a jury to do that. Those are expensive. It's time consuming. Clogs up the federal court system.

REICHARD: At the Supreme Court, Justice Elena Kagan pushed back on the argument that the judge ought to decide the matter and not a jury:

KAGAN: I mean if, like the warden tears up your grievance papers, somebody is going to say that the exhaustion process wasn’t available…And so then I think that the question ….is, okay, when that is the fact, that’s the crucial fact…it should be the jury that decides that question, shouldn’t it?

But Michigan’s Solicitor General Ann Sherman countered this is a threshold question, and judges can handle it.

EICHER: Lorie McGill, the lawyer for the prisoner, pointed to what happens when prison officials sabotage the grievance procedures. That renders the process unavailable, she says, and suggests it ought to be left to a jury to decide.

REICHARD: But Justice Samuel Alito echoed the same worries the Prison Litigation Reform Act meant to stop:

ALITO: Suppose you have a prisoner who's serving a lengthy prison sentence and files a grievance, and the State says: Well, you didn't exhaust. So the prisoner says: Well, yeah, I did exhaust. I put the --I put the grievance in the box or I handed it to a guard. So, at a minimum, he gets a trip to the courthouse. He gets a trip out of the prison.

MCGILL: Well, in our client’s case, everything was…

ALITO: I’m not talking about your client. I’m talking about other prisoners who may want to take advantage of this. So then there's a genuine dispute of material fact about whether he --you know, is he telling the truth? Is he not telling the truth?

EICHER: Inmate Richards has support from unexpected allies. The ACLU on the left and the Cato Institute on the right, both of them filed friend of the court briefs in his favor.

REICHARD: I called up Cato’s Mike Fox to explain the federal law as he sees it:

FOX: What it's in effect done is make it very, very difficult for people to actually bring claims forward. And of course, you know, the framers intended juries of ordinary citizens to be adjudicators of disputes between citizens and their government. And when a prisoner has a grievance with the correctional facility that they’re in, they are as a matter of constitutional law as a matter of the seventh amendment entitled to a jury trial.

But what of the concerns about frivolous lawsuits clogging up the system?

FOX: …one person's constitutional rights are not contingent upon someone else potentially abusing the system...And while you do forfeit certain rights when you're incarcerated, you don't forfeit all of them. …And by the way, if they did have a meritless claim and it got in front of a jury, the jury will see it for what it is. …

Sherman for the prison warned that a win for Richards would defeat the whole purpose of the Prison Litigation Reform Act and again open the floodgates of massive litigation.

But Justice Sonia Sotomayor seemed to be spoiling for a fight by going outside the record before the court: 

SOTOMAYOR: And I've gone back 12 years and had our library and my clerks search Second Circuit opinions, and in those 12 years, only five cases has there been litigation over whether or not there was exhaustion because only five cases was it interwound with the merits. I don't see where the floodgates have come up.

EICHER: But this case is not the 2nd Circuit, it’s the 5th. And it’s 2025, not nearly 30 years ago when Congress updated the law. So the question remains: Is exhaustion a procedural step for judges? Or is it a fundamental question of fairness that belongs to a jury? We’ll know most likely by the end of June.

REICHARD: Finally, the justices handed down two opinions on Friday.

The Court unanimously ruled in favor of Patrick Daley Thompson, former Chicago alderman and member of the Daley family. He’d been indicted for making allegedly false statements to the government about bank loans. 

The issue was whether a federal law criminalizing false statements applies to misleading but technically true statements. The justices held that the law requires statements to be outright false, not only misleading. 

So Thompson returns to lower court to reconsider his conviction in light of this narrower interpretation of the law.

EICHER: And that second decision, the court ruled 7-2 against a former associate of the Genovese crime family—Salvatore Delligati, better known by the mob nickname “Fat Sal.” He’d given a loaded gun to others to kill a suspected informant. He was charged under a law that mandates extra prison time for using a gun during a violent crime. Delligatti tried making the case that supplying a gun isn’t the violent crime, it’s the act of shooting someone to death that’s the violence. But the Supreme Court rejected the argument and said Delligatti’s action still involves the use of physical force.

So, lower court is affirmed and Fat Sal stays in prison, including extra time for use of a gun during a crime of violence.

REICHARD: And that’s this week’s Legal Docket!

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: The Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Well, it’s been five years that we’ve featured David Bahnsen: five good years, and we look forward to many more, Lord willing. But today, let’s have a look back on this fifth anniversary  at what started all this. And you may remember, it grew out of economic crisis, a pandemic and a set of policy choices that followed. Let’s turn back the clock: March 23rd, a Monday morning, the year 2020.

EICHER:… we’ll say it again: Worst week since the financial crisis of 2008. All the major indexes down for the week between 12 and more than 17 percent.

It’s not just the capital markets, though. When people are on lock-down, major sectors of the economy they depend on are locked, too.

And so I’d like to turn back to David Bahnsen … thank you for giving us some time. Good morning.

DAVID BAHNSEN: Hey, good morning.

EICHER: I saw an estimate, David, that we’re looking at 5 million job losses this year. $1.5 trillion lost in economic output. Just estimates, of course. What’s your sense of the future, assuming this passes? Do we just bounce back to normal or do you see economic life just being vastly different because of the shock?

BAHNSEN: Well, I would be really careful of anyone who gives too confident of an answer because of the variables that exist out there. …

Do I think that the second quarter unemployment and GDP contraction is going to be just unbelievably bad? Of course. … What I do believe is the sort of base case, not as bad as it could very well get and not as good as it could very well get is that you would see approximately $1.5 trillion of economic output lost. … Third quarter and fourth quarter of this year are so much more important right now than the second quarter because the second quarter we know is basically going to be lost.

EICHER: … let me just give you the freedom to say at this moment, any message that you think it’s important that each listener hear.

BAHNSEN: The last thing I would say is that through this uncertainty, there is one certainty out there and that is that God is in control and that our country has been through worse. … And we will come out of this thing OK as well. I don’t know when. I don’t know how. But I do know that in those periods of most uncertainty, when one looks to the lesson of history and the hope of the future, they should derive optimism and we will get through this.

EICHER: Financial analyst David Bahnsen, God bless you. Thank you for your time.

BAHNSEN: Thank you for having me.

That’s a very truncated bit just to give you a sense, and it’s really something to go back and listen to. I’ll put a link in the transcript to the segment and you can look at it and listen for yourself. But five years on and going strong, David, it’s been great.

DAVID BAHNSEN: One of the things I love telling people, when I run into folks who listen to The World and Everything in It all over the country, it now seems that I’m running into WORLD listeners everywhere I go, which is a lot of fun, but a lot of people don’t know that there was never a time that we formalized my doing this. We just started doing it five years ago, and here we are still going!

EICHER: Just the force of habit, I guess, you know, regular in practice, but never in design, right?

BAHNSEN: That’s right. I love telling the story and oftentimes I wonder if you even remember it, but I imagine both of us do. Five years ago now, is the anniversary of the moment at which COVID was really becoming a matter of public awareness. It was into markets, which is what caused you to reach out to me the week of March 9th on that Monday, and then on that Thursday, March 12th—both days the market was down a couple thousand points, and we hadn’t had lockdowns yet. There hadn’t even been a fatality that we knew was related to COVID. We would later find out some nursing home deaths we had already started.

But on that week, there was a famous Wednesday night where all at once it was announced that the actor Tom Hanks had been diagnosed with coronavirus. They canceled the remainder of the NBA season. Then, more famously, President Trump went and addressed the nation from the Oval Office. He announced that there would be no more travel for people from Europe into the country or from Asia. And so then the market responded by dropping violently, and it was beginning to feel like, okay, something here is going on.

That’s when you had asked me to come on and talk about the market impact. And I did it. And I think your intent at the time was a one-time guest deal, and that’s certainly how I took it.

But then the next week, Nick, is when the lockdown started. On Monday, March 16th, we set the third record in six days of the worst market day since Black Monday of 1987 that one would hold the market would be down 3,000 points—about 13% in one day—and then throughout that week the speculation began: Are we looking at millions of people who are going to die? Are we looking at a permanently shut down economy? What’s going on?

So I came on again to talk about it. And I think that was the last time you asked me to come on to talk about the COVID market. from there, we just came on every single week and here we are five years later.

EICHER: So talk about what you’re seeing, from your vantage point, and how it seems so consistent with what we hear: that there’s a real hunger for good, reliable economic news and how it relates to a theology of human flourishing ,maybe too big of a question there, but—

BAHNSEN: No, no, not, it’s not. It’s important! Because, you know, I guess it would be up to you and up to listeners to say where maybe some of the things I say encourage them at times.

But for me, I am incredibly encouraged by the fact that there are people who reach out all the time to say, “I’ve never been that interested in economics. I’ve never been interested in markets, but I now, as a person of faith, want to understand this more.”

Of course it’s my heart’s desire to do this in the context of a Biblical worldview. It’s the cause I’ve long devoted my life to, so I believe there are specifically Christian ways of thinking about the economy. The fact that on this podcast there are such serious believers that are continually saying they want to learn more, hear more, and they find something about it animating.

It may be different things for different people. There are folks who will disagree with things from time to time—and we obviously encourage that and try to interact with people around that. But I’m very, very encouraged by how much I hear from people of the WORLD faith community who are wanting to understand economics more.

I think we need more people to do so. There is an intense need not to take economics for granted, finance, business, markets, entrepreneurship. These things fit within the domain of the kingdom of God, and therefore we have specifically Christian things to say about them. I’m really blessed over the last five years by finding out that there are so many others who want the same.

EICHER: You’ve always brought things back around to first principles—whether we’re talking the importance of capital formation, driving productivity, just simply a theology of work—how would you say the last five years have strengthened your convictions, or even tested them?

BAHNSEN: There’s been ample opportunity to have those convictions tested! Out of the last five years, it became the impetus for me to write two different books, both of which I wanted to write before five years ago, but neither one of which I had plans to write.

That impetus came first, There’s No Free Lunch: 250 Economic Truths, where I realized in 2021, there was a huge need for us to reconnect our belief in free markets to the human person. And to connect God’s design for the human experience, what it was God wanted for creation, and that that being the story of economics, that we needed to reconnect these things. We needed to tell the story of how liberty (free markets) and virtue (morality) need to coexist. That these things are not separate from one another and that our economic vision is one of synthesizing liberty and virtue.

Then, of course, the book on work, Full Time, that also just became a huge passion for me around the idea of reconnecting purpose to work. And then work being this verb of economics, that things get done because humans work, and we work because that was God’s created design for our life. Both are economic messages, and both came about in the last five years.

And you know, Nick, both are things you and I have gotten to talk about here week by week over and over again.

EICHER: So we’ve looked back, now let’s look ahead, what do you think the next several years look like, based on what you’ve been able to accomplish here over the past five?

BAHNSEN: I think there’s a very intense need to defend a market economy along the lines of a Christian worldview. And not merely defend it because we think it will lower our taxes, it’s a more efficient way of allocating resources, and because we think it will create a better result.

I do think it’s a more efficient way of allocating resources. I do think it creates better results.

But I think it needs to be connected to a moral message, a spiritual message, one that is found in the creational truths of Scripture. So that is the great passion that I have.

Now, what is the alternative here? Because there were a lot of people in America, not of a faith community, defending a free market for many years. But see, Nick, I believe that history took a pivot in 2008, at the point of the financial crisis. The efficiency claims of free markets were called into question and I think that the moral claims were not there. There was not a strong Christian witness to defend a market economy.

Now there are a lot of people, especially young people, tempted by the idea that the state can centrally plan the economy and we don’t need all this free-enterprise stuff.

Now, the difference is a lot of people on the right would say, “Yeah, but we want the state to do it our way. Let’s not have DEI, let’s not have woke, but yeah, let’s still have the state kind of mastering the economy.” Then, of course, people on the left, they have their own different agenda that’s more progressive.

But my view is that for humans to flourish, to most obey God, to most build strong communities, and ultimately a strong civilization, the need of the hour is a fully Christian message about human action.

That is what I think we have to be working on for the next few years. I don’t think it’s going to be easy, but I do think we’re going to prevail in the end.

EICHER: As you say at your company: to that end, we work. David, I’m glad we took this time to reflect, look forward to talking to you next week, and the next week, and the next week.

David Bahnsen, founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group. David writes at dividendcafe.com for WORLD Opinions, and you hear his news and comment here each week. David, thanks!

BAHNSEN: We’ll have to celebrate a 10-year anniversary one of these days, Nick!

EICHER: I’m here for it!

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, March 24th. 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, the WORLD History Book.

Today, the inspiring life and untimely death of a beloved American pastor whose legacy still echoes today. WORLD’s Caleb Welde tells the story.

CALEB WELDE: At 26 years old Jonathan Edwards becomes pastor of Northampton Congregational Church in Massachusetts. It’s one of the largest, and most prestigious churches in the American colonies.

MURRY: Northampton was a town of about 200 houses, about 1000 or more people, men, women, children.

Edwards biographer Iian Murry at a 2003 pastor’s conference.

MURRY: Of course, there was only one church in the town, and everybody in Northampton literally went to church.

At 37, Edwards preaches powerfully during what will become known as the Great Awakening.

MURRY: One historian says, like a sudden bolt out of a clear blue sky, there came the Great Awakening… concern, spiritual hunger.

His preaching and writing earn him an international reputation as one of the foremost pastors and theologians of his time. He was at the pinnacle of his pastoral ministry when, in 1750, his congregation dismissed him due to a theological disagreement over communion.

Edwards argued that only professing Christians were eligible his church believed it was open to anyone.

Edwards loses his pulpit and platform. He moves with his family to the frontier town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts— about a hundred miles from the Atlantic coast.

He continues to write while leading a small mission church quietly ministering to Native Americans and frontier families.

MURRY: He was by temperament, retiring, reserved. Took exercise, horse riding, wood chopping in winter.

But then in January 1758 all of that changes.

Edwards receives a letter. It’s an invitation to serve as president of Princeton University. An even larger platform than he had in Northampton. Edwards is not interested.

NICHOLS: Everything within him wanted to say no.

Stephen Nichols is author of “Jonathan Edwards: A Guided Tour of His Life and Thought.”

NICHOLS: He was very much enjoying his pastoral ministry at Stockbridge…

Audio from Ligonier Ministries.

NICHOLS: He had some book ideas he wanted to write…

Edwards decides to ask a group of fellow ministers how they think he should reply to Princeton.

NICHOLS: They say he should go.

Princeton’s mission is to train ministers. When Edwards gets the news…

NICHOLS: He literally wept in his home at Stockbridge.

But he takes it as a call from God. He and his wife make a plan for her and the rest of the family to join him in Princeton later that spring.

MURRY: And one of his daughters says that as he went out of the house and stood on the road, he turned round and he said, I commit you to God.

When Edwards gets to Princeton, he settles into an upstairs room in the president's house. Smallpox is the talk of the town and the college. Doctors say the best thing to do is to get inoculated.

NICHOLS: Edwards took it to show the students that they had nothing to fear…

But then he reacts to it. Badly. His daughter Esther who is recently widowed also becomes very sick. His throat begins swelling shut. He calls his daughter Lucy to his bedside. Later she writes down what he says. 

MURRY: It seems to be the will of God that I must shortly leave you. Therefore give my kindest love to my dear wife, and as to my children you are now like to be left fatherless, which I hope will be an inducement to you to seek a father that will never fail you. 

Jonathan Edwards dies on March 22nd, 1758.

His death is barely noticed.

MURRY: It’s said when he died, most of the American papers only gave him one sentence.

He’d requested a simple funeral and almost no details have survived.

MURRY: Many of his books weren't read. He left a great church for a tiny church in a corner of New England.

When Jonathan Edwards was nineteen, he wrote a number of resolutions about how he intended to live in light of God’s grace.

These included, “Resolved, to think much on all occasions of my own dying and of the common circumstances which attend death.” He also wrote, “Resolved, that I will live as I shall wish I had done when I come to die.”

MURRY: The Bible says, What is man? And the answer it gives is this. I give it to you in Edward's words, he says, ‘Man is a leaf, a leaf driven by the wind, poor dust, a shadow and nothing. And of himself he says, he was an empty, helpless creature of small account and needing God's help in everything.

MURRY: You know, if you take eternity out of Edward's life, you could read it as a story of little success, a lot of disappointment.

NICHOLS: We shouldn't say this, but it's still something to speak of as an untimely death of Jonathan Edwards. He left a lot of things unfinished that I wish he had finished. Edwards didn't have a charmed life. Like you, his life was also touched by challenges and difficulties, but there was a theological truth he was able to hold on to. Redemption. God's salvation.

MURRY: Was it a failure? No. Edward says, I acted against all influence of worldly interest, because I greatly feared to offend God. In other words, he was living for eternity.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book, I’m Caleb Welde.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: the Trump administration takes steps to protect minors crossing the border. And, Illinois is considering a new law to regulate private education and homeschooling. 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: “[Then] Pilate took Jesus and flogged him. And the soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head and arrayed him in a purple robe. They came up to him, saying, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ and struck him with their hands. Pilate went out again and said to them, ‘See, I am bringing him out to you that you may know that I find no guilt in him.’” —John 19:1-4

Go now in grace and peace.

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