The World and Everything in It: May 12, 2023

PREROLL: The World and Everything in It is made possible by listeners like me. I’m Heidi Krubsack. I live in beautiful Salt Lake City, Utah and work as a nurse in an endoscopy lab. I enjoy discussing what I hear on this podcast with my mother who also listens. Happy Mother’s Day, mom! Enjoy today’s program.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning! Today on Culture Friday: book bans, pronoun hospitality, and bleeding church membership.

NICK EICHER, HOST: We’ll talk with John Stonestreet. Remember him?

Also today, two streaming options from the realm of science fiction. WORLD arts and culture editor Collin Garbarino has a review.

BERNARD: We do not know when it will be safe to go outside. We only know that that day is not this day.

And summertime reading with WORLD reviewer Emily Whitten.

BROWN: It’s Friday, May 12th. 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: Time now for the news with Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Border » The Title 42 immigration rule has officially expired. This is a day border towns and states have been bracing for for months with a massive surge expected.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Thursday:

ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS: We could see very crowded—as we are now—we could see very crowded Border Patrol facilities. I cannot overstate the strain on our personnel and our facilities.

The pandemic rule allowed authorities to expel some migrants before they could seek asylum. While that rule has expired, Mayorkas says migrants are required to first seek asylum elsewhere or schedule an appointment online before showing up at the border.

Texas National Guardsman are helping to man the border. But Major Sean Storrud says their role is limited.

SEAN STORRUD: All we can do is we can stand in their way. At no point are my soldiers going to use physical force with the migrants unless their safety or the safety of another soldier or law enforcement officer is placed in danger.

The Biden administration pushed to end the Title 42 rule. But the White House says Congress is to blame for the border crisis for failing to overhaul the immigration system.

House border bill » Meantime, on Capitol Hill lawmakers in the House passed a new border security bill just as Title 42 expired.

AUDIO: On this vote, the yeas are 219, the 213. The bill is passed. Without objection, a motion to reconsider is laid on the table.

The Republican bill passed on a partyline vote. It would, among other things, build more sections of border wall and implement tougher rules for asylum seekers.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy:

KEVIN McCARTHY: This bill secures the border from President Biden’s record crossings, record carelessness, and record chaos.

But the House’s top Democrat, Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, called it 

HAKEEM JEFFRIES: The Republican effort to try to weaponize and politicize the border as opposed to doing something meaningful about it.

President Biden called the bill “anti-immigrant” and vowed to veto it. But the bill will almost certainly die in the Democrat-led Senate.

FL immigration bill » And in Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis this week signed a sweeping immigration bill into law.

DESANTIS: This makes Florida the largest state in the country to do full E-Verify for employment.

The new law also ramps up penalties for human trafficking. It bars the use of tax dollars to provide official IDs to illegal immigrants and invalidates drivers licenses granted by other states to those in the country illegally.

Standing behind a lecturn emblazoned with the words “Biden’s border crisis,” DeSantis took aim at the president’s policies.

DESANTIS: This is a huge, huge dereliction of duty to ignore the security and the borders of your own country.

DeSantis is expected to announce a presidential campaign in the weeks ahead.

Biden fam bank accounts » The White House is lashing out at GOP lawmakers after Republicans on the House Oversight Committee came forward with explosive allegations this week, surrounding Biden family business dealings.

Committee Chairman James Comer:

JAMES COMER: We have discovered all of these LLCs that were hidden. We are trying to unravel this web that the Biden family created to try to disguise the center of these payments.

Comer presented what he said was evidence showing that the Biden family and business partners pocketed millions of dollars from for nationals in China and Romania while Joe Biden was vice president.

Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace says the Dept. of Justice needs to investigate whether foreign actors used the money to buy U.S. government influence.

NANCY MACE: Look at the number of shell companies, the millions of dollars being moved around, the access they had to the president, the vice president.

The White House shot back, accusing Comer and other Republicans on the committee of using—quote—“baseless attacks” to “score political points.”

EPA » The EPA is proposing strict new limits on carbon emissions from coal and gas-powered power plants.

Under the rule, almost all plants would have to cut or capture most of their carbon dioxide emissions by 2038.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan:

MICHAEL REGAN: It will bring substantial health benefits to communities all across the country, especially our frontline communities.

But critics say the proposed limits are not practical and would force some plants to close, eliminating jobs and hurting the economy.

Some Republican lawmakers say they’ll work to block the regulation.

Gaza » In the Middle East the death toll continues to rise from fighting between Islamic militants and Israeli forces. WORLD’s Josh Schumacher has more.

JOSH SCHUMACHER: Explosions lit up the night sky over Israel last night as the country’s missile defense system shot down rockets fired from the Gaza Strip.

The system takes out about 95% of incoming rockets, but some have still found their mark striking communities along the border.

Israeli forces launched another targeted airstrike in Gaza, killing the head of the Islamic Jihad group’s rocket command. But the strike also reportedly claimed the lives of a woman and child.

At least 30 people were confirmed dead on Thursday as ceasefire talks collapsed.

For WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

I’m Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: Culture Friday with John Stonestreet. Plus, making kids’ summer reading fun and formative.

This is The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s the 12th day of May 2023.

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

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. It’s Culture Friday.

Joining us now is John Stonestreet, the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. John, good morning.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

BROWN: John, here’s a new chapter (so to speak) in the debate over what’s appropriate in public or school libraries. The state of Illinois will become the first state to hold back funding from public or school libraries that remove certain books from circulation, and I’m not seeing qualifiers. But we know there’ve been battles over books aimed at young readers that emphasize sexually explicit material or that have graphic LGBTQ content.

Basically, the state will financially punish any library, it seems to me, that is sensitive to legitimate parental concerns. Public libraries, public schools, you cut off state money and they don’t survive. This is a new line in the sand, it seems to me, John. What do you say?

STONESTREET: Oh, absolutely. I mean, what a bizarre sort of thing. I mean, there's two ways really to look at this. Number one is, if there really are all of these requests to remove books, why are there so many books that are sexually explicit? The vast majority, the top 10 list from the American Library Association, are all sexually explicit material. Why are there so many more sexually explicit books being written? Why are there so many more sexually explicit books been written for children? Why are there so many more sexually explicit books written for children being put in public school libraries? And the vast majority of these requests are going to public school libraries. So to see this progressive pushback now, where you basically penalize parents in a new way, is really just another conflict that's being created. And at some level it is real, but it's really being created and fed between parental rights and children's rights. And when you create that conflict, what you do then is put the state or some state agency as the adjudicator of this conflict of rights, and rights, if they're really rights don't conflict if they're properly understood and properly ordered, right? That's the key, you know, and the rights of children have to take precedent over the rights of parents, but the rights of adults to be able to force feed ideology into the heads of somebody else's children is not really a right. You're just calling it a children's right so it's being misidentified, and misordered. Well, what happens when you create this conflict and, and really feed it between children's rights and parents rights, then it naturally leaves the state or some state agency as the adjudicator of that right, of those rights and of the one position to better protect children's rights than the parent. And that's a really scary thing. So this is not just what this move from Illinois is not just a chapter in this made up book ban crisis of 2023, which, for example, 2,571 total books and resources challenged last year out of 117,000 libraries like this isn't that much to begin with. Right, right. And it just points to the fact that they're all having to do with sexually explicit material that parents don't want, you know, to be accessible. The other thing I thought about this too, Myrna, is if that's all the request, in 117,000 libraries, then the real headline here is why aren't people reading more? Because apparently people don't care about what books are in the library nearly enough.

EICHER: That's a good point. John, Hey, long time, no talk to. How you doing?

STONESTREET: And that's been a while, doing well, thanks. Good to be back.

EICHER: I’m sorry to bring up an old story, but I found it so interesting and I wanted your thoughts on it, given that we haven’t talked in so long. Author Rosaria Butterfield, I know you know her, about a month ago had an online article in which she publicly repented of so-called “pronoun hospitality.” It wasn’t that she was just wrong, she said, she was confessing it as sin and as a well-known author and speaker, she needed publicly to repent. Specifically, and she laid this out, the sin of bearing false witness, sinning against the creation ordinance, failing to love my neighbor as myself, and much, much more. It’s very comprehensive, and she’s talked about this in other settings.

But Rosaria Butterfield is calling on other public persons to join her in this repentance, and I’m not seeing much of a stampede. Maybe you are seeing that. How’d that article go over in your circles, John, what’d you think?

STONESTREET: Oh, I thought it was a tremendous piece. And, and this is what happens when someone actually takes the notion of sin seriously. And see, this is the way this issue has corrupted our thinking in the church. It's actually turned around and corrupted our theological thinking. So we don't think about these issues, primarily. And you don't hear it from the pulpit where people are actually saying, you know, this is actually a Genesis 1 issue, this is actually a matter of telling the truth or not. So those who are willing to venture into this territory at all, which isn't nearly enough pastors and Christian leaders, do it, almost primarily by apologizing to the LGBTQ community for not being nicer. Now, look, do we have things to also repent for in our treatment of people that are struggling with sexual orientation or gender identity issues? Yeah. But we also have to repent whenever we've embraced the false ideas, the categories of identity, of humanness, that just really aren't true. This was a big part of my mind, for example of the entire debate over a piece of legislation that was attempting to secure religious freedom protections called Fairness for All. And I never thought it would work. And even if it did, in any sort of pragmatic sense for any period of time, it was still granting a category of existence that didn't actually exist, that violated you know, who Scripture says we are as human beings and how Scripture says we should behave as human beings. And I think Rosario is actually absolutely right. As I was reading the piece, what I just kept coming back to is, how different it was to read someone who was just so committed to thinking theologically, and and taking the notion of sin seriously. But I think the reason you're not seeing a line behind Rosaria Butterfield is is less having to do with people disagreeing over pronouns and more having to do with the inability of people to think about sin anymore. And so this is just an area in which the idea of how God actually created the world and our willingness to acknowledge that being described biblically as a big deal, and that our denial of creation is the example used in Romans 1 to describe what happens when we fully get captivated by sin. And Rosaria seems to be taking that seriously and others don't.

EICHER: You know, it might have been better John to ask a Southern Baptist but I do know that you're quite a, an astute observer of the religious scene. And I'd like to hear what you say about what Southern Baptists are calling this week the biggest single year drop in membership in more than 100 years.

Ryan Berge is a statistician and political science professor who studies religion. He says it's more than just even that. He says, “the scale of decline in the last three years is staggering in comparison: a total loss of 1.32 million members.”

Now, those are massive numbers to those of us who are in small denominations. But when you think about that from the perspective of let's say, the mainline Presbyterian Church, so the PCUSA, it has a total of 1.1 million members, the Episcopalians have 1.57 million members. And Berge says, “It's like the [SBC] has shed the equivalent of a smaller mainline denomination since the year 2020.” Now, this is all quantitative stuff, not qualitative. We don't know why from the numbers alone. But what's your sense of this is what do you think is going on here?

STONESTREET: Well, for the record in my, you know, lifetime of denominational tourism, you know, I had a stop over as a Southern Baptist, at least for a while. But you know, there's, I mean, Southern Baptist has been, you know, one of the largest religious bodies in the world for quite some time in its ability to spread across the globe missionally. And you're going to hear all kinds of punch lines, like you certainly going to hear those that say, oh, it's because you know, they didn't, you know, become affirming. You know, the problem is, is all these mainline denominations that have been affirming have been shedding members now for decades. And you know, the answer to the Southern Baptist issue here, if it indeed is an issue, and I'm not sure that it even is but if it is, is not to become more like NPR because what happens is, is when you basically your Sunday morning sounds like NPR, people choose NPR over getting out of bed on Sunday morning and every mainline denomination, and every church has learned that lesson in mainline denominations. Well, they haven't learned the lesson but they're an example of this. I think some of this is the COVID shakeup that you know, there is a big COVID shakeup, and they're not the only the ones that are seeing a decline. In fact, my understanding in a story that I looked at not too long ago, is that really it's the Assemblies of God that has seen a growth that is they're actually an outlier, you know, and some of this is a winnowing, I think there's clearly a lot of conflict that certainly is very loud and frequent on Twitter. And it's important to remember, Twitter's not the real world, but it does, I think it is pointed to something that is a real part of Southern Baptist life. The other thing is, you know, look, there's a hyper-secularization that has taken place across the West. And this is, this means that the Gospel comes across as less plausible to younger generation. So as an older generation, you know, dies off and the younger generation, you know, is it going to take its place? I mean, these are just math numbers that have to do with demographics, it has to do with shrinking populations, it has to do with missionary efforts being less effective. So look, I think this is part of a larger headline of the shakeup of religious affiliation, the willingness to religiously affiliate, the growth of, you know, non-sectarian religious identification, so the nondenominationals and, and then just the lack of return during COVID, which really was certainly a winnowing time. So it's probably not one thing, it's probably all these things all at once. And we're still talking about a juggernaut of a religious body that's very, very important. And city after city, community after community, and nation after nation and praise God for it. And, of course, their return to orthodoxy in the last generation is one of the most important religious stories in American history in terms of its impact, and so that's all part of the history of this denomination too.

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

STONESTREET: Thanks so much.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, May 12th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Sci-Fi on the small screen.

WORLD arts and culture editor Collin Garbarino has a review of two new science-fiction options—one of them aimed at kids, the other at adults.

COLLIN GARBARINO: I’ve said before that science-fiction stories often have more to do with our fears in the present than they do with our hopes for what’s to come. Crater and Silo are a couple of dystopian shows that have recently arrived on streaming platforms, and they capture some of our current moment’s uneasy vibe. But while they share similar themes their target audiences are very different.

Crater is a movie for kids, and it debuts today on Disney Plus. It’s a coming-of-age story about a boy named Caleb living in a harsh mining colony on the moon 234 years in the future. Caleb’s father recently died in the mines, and the orphan is about to be shipped off to humanity’s new utopian home on a distant planet. Before he leaves though, he needs to fulfill his father’s dying wish and travel to a mysterious crater far away from the lunar dome.

A motley group of friends help him steal a rover and come along for the ride.

BORNEY: This kid—he got caught messing around down here, and then they put him in a holding cell out by the terra complex and left him there for 60 years.

DYLAN: You’re doing it again.

BORNEY: Doing what?

MARCUS: You’re catastrophizing.

BORNEY: OK, that’s not even a word.

MARCUS: Of course it’s a word.

ADDISON: It’s totally a word.

These likable characters fit easily into those quirky stereotypes that have been staples of kids’ movies for years. There’s plenty of action, but the peril never seems very perilous, so most kids aren’t likely to get scared.

In some ways, Crater feels like a throwback movie from the 1980s with a gang of misfit kids embarking on a ludicrous adventure without adult supervision. In our day and age of social-media-imposed isolation, there’s something charming about a movie in which real friends defy authority to go outside and take some risks.

ADDISON: I still just don’t get exactly why you’re doing this.

DYLAN: I told you already, OK? His dad wanted him to—

ADDISON: Yeah, yeah, I know. I get why he’s doing it. Why are you?

DYLAN: Because he’s my friend.

Crater also touches on some current frustrations with 21st century capitalism in which working folk feel like the system is rigged to keep them from getting ahead while the hyper-rich build rockets to the stars. The moralizing feels a little heavy handed at times, but kids’ programming isn’t known for its subtlety. Even though I found some aspects of the plot questionable, I was surprised by Crater’s emotionally satisfying ending.

MUSIC: [Silo theme music]

Adults who want a little intrigue with their dystopian science fiction can check out Silo, the new series on Apple TV Plus.

In Silo, the earth is uninhabitable, and the last 10,000 human beings live in an underground silo, waiting for the day they can go outside. There’s a decided hierarchy here in which the further down the silo’s spiral staircase one goes, the further one travels down the social ladder.

Rebecca Ferguson stars as Juliette Nichols, an engineer living in the silo’s lowest levels charged with keeping the generator running.

JULIETTE: Everyone thinks their job in the silo is the most important, mine actually is.

In an unlikely turn of events, the low-status Juliette finds herself thrust into leadership despite a history of questioning authority.

A string of murders has set the community on edge, and order becomes precarious. The silo experienced a rebellion 140 years earlier that destroyed its cultural memory. A lack of trust could spark another rebellion that might jeopardize humanity’s existence.

Silo is rated TV-MA for some bad language and adult themes. The characters use foul words, but the language isn’t as pervasive or gratuitous as, say, Apple’s Ted Lasso, and like other Apple series, Silo doesn’t have any nudity.

I really liked Silo’s look and feel. The series has a sober mid-century aesthetic that roots the story in a world of scarcity and brutalist architecture. Bureaucrats use old CRT monitors, and paper seems to be one of the silo’s most valuable commodities. This bleak existence feels recognizable as both our future and past simultaneously.

BERNARD: We do not know who built the silo. We do not know why everything outside the silo is as it is.

Societies need trust and the free flow of information to survive, but are those who hold the reins of power trustworthy to share what they know? Silo contains a slow-burn mystery that suggests a conspiracy is at play. The show doesn’t hurry in revealing the nature of the cover-up or who’s behind it.

BERNARD: We do not know when it will be safe to go outside. We only know that that day is not this day.

This haunting and engrossing series critiques totalitarianism and classism. And the show asks us to think about how easily good people can allow bad things to happen when they fail to question the status quo. Which is more desirable for society? Inventive curiosity? Or good-natured docility? Our own recent pandemic lockdowns loom over the claustrophobic silo, giving these questions a disquieting sense of relevance.

I’m Collin Garbarino

NICK EICHER, HOST: In recent weeks Israeli customs has confiscated some dangerous contraband. 

SOUND: [SOMEONE GOING THROUGH SUITCASES]

Hear that? Agents are opening suitcase after suitcase packed with nothing but Fruit Roll-ups. Americans went to Israel trying to sneak in more than 600 pounds worth of this candy that in Israel is much-in-demand but low in supply.

Driving demand was this Israeli social media influencer on TikTok. 

INFLUENCER: My fruit roll-ups, and I'm gonna have some ice cream inside. 

Ice cream turns fruit roll-ups crisp, which, if you know anything about Fruit Roll-Ups, well, it just seems impossible.

SOUND: [CRUNCH]

Israeli stores can’t keep them in stock. And that’s creating a black market, where prices are known to reach $6 for a single Fruit Roll-up.

So those suitcases at 650 pounds of product, I’m estimating they had well over $100K street value on less than $10K in real cost.

Be warned, 11 pounds is the maximum limit for bringing in food. Don’t do it. We’re not clear what happened to the smugglers.

Anyway, the Israeli Health Ministry is cautioning people about the sugar concentration and are publicly recommending cucumber roll-ups instead.

I’m not seeing it. People who eat candy-wrapped ice cream treats aren’t in the market for cucumbers.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, May 12th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Up next: summer reading. For many families, school’s out, or about to go out, and it’s time to stock up on books for the break.

Now, many kids get bogged down with school reading lists and never seem to enjoy the books or benefit from what they read.

EICHER: But that’s where one collection of fables can help. WORLD reviewer Emily Whitten says this one teaches solid Christian truth in a way that kids of elementary ages will love.

MICHAEL DOWLING: It was a rainy day. Too rainy for even a frog to go out and play. “I’ll stay inside and write a story,” thought Frog. He took a pen and a piece of paper and started to write, “Once upon a time.”

EMILY WHITTEN, REVIEWER: That’s author Michael Dowling reading his recently updated book, Frog’s Rainy Day Stories and Other Fables. He’s reading there from the first story in a 76-page picture book including 9 Christian fables. While the art has a light-hearted feel, the morals deal with deep Christian truths—like God’s authority as Creator in our lives. For instance, in Frog’s tale, the letters refuse to form words in Frog’s story.

DOWLING: Suddenly, something strange started happening. The letters were marching toward the end of the page. “Stop!” shouted Frog. “I’m using you to write a story.” O rolled out front and looked up at frog. That’s just the problem. We’re sick and tired of being used. 

It’s the humor that makes this book work. You can almost hear Babylon Bee-type social commentary as the letters rebel.

DOWLING: “And another thing,” said a, “why am I lowercase when O is uppercase? We should all be equal.” “And we should all be rich,” added p. “RICH! RICH! RICH!” “Fame and fortune! Fame and fortune!” yelled the letters, marching again to the edge of the page. “Wait!” said Frog. “You were created to make words. If you don’t make words and stories, what are you going to do?”

Dowling says the fables grew out of his own spiritual struggles. Even after he became a Christian as an adult in the 1970s, it took a long time to root out unbiblical thinking.

DOWLING: After that, it was a process of renewing my mind, and counseling with pastors. It took a long time to shift my mind to God is real and in charge and I’m not God.

Sarah Dowling, Michael’s wife, is the illustrator of the book. But she says her career as a fine artist didn’t make illustrating the book easy. It took a while to find the right approach.

SARAH DOWLING: Beaver was the one. I figured if I could get beaver, I could get the rest of them. You could ask my son, I probably had 50 beavers laying around the studio.

She initially thought that because the ideas were serious, the illustrations should be, too. She considered doing formal wood cuts. But then, a clerk at a Charleston arts and craft store helped her find a more whimsical approach.

SARAH: Out of the blue, he says to me, have you tried this new product that we got? And he takes me over and it’s like this little chunk of watercolor with charcoal in it. I took it home and worked on the beaver and it created some real character in the fur. The charcoal did. I said, that’s it. And so the beaver started to take form.

Elizabeth Urbanowicz is the founder of Foundation Worldview—an organization that offers Christian worldview curricula, podcasts, and other resources. Last November, Urbanowicz recommended the Dowlings’ book for 8-12 year olds as part of her monthly book club. (And by the way, I do recommend the Foundation Worldview book club if you’re looking for more summer reading.)

As for the Dowlings’ book, Urbanowicz says she came to appreciate it during the COVID lockdowns.

ELIZABETH URBANOWICZ: So I just turned my car into like a traveling library and I went around, you know, to visit different families in my church and I just, you know, sit out on the front lawn with kids and just read to them. And so this was one of the books that I brought along with me and got to read to lots of different families of, you know, of kids in my church. So it was, yeah, it was exciting and the kids were really engaged with the stories.

Urbanowicz likes the Biblical worldview concepts—both in the stories and in the quotes and discussion questions. She points to the moral learned by Frog’s rebellious letters.

URBANOWICZ: The moral for that at the end is, we were made for a much larger story which we miss out when we seek our own glory. And so I think that's so important to teach our kids in our culture that's just so individualistic, you know, like you do you so long as it doesn't bother anyone else. But if we don't align ourselves with how God has designed us, we miss out on so much, you know, because God is the one who designed us and created us.

Urbanowicz does have one criticism. She says one of the stories—Miss Hen’s Boyfriends—doesn’t do a great job of portraying the moral it tries to teach. But that’s a small problem in an otherwise excellent resource. Kids ages 8-12 can engage the book independently, but she says ages 4 and up can find something to like here.

URBANOWICZ: I love this book so much because I think all of those little things, you know, that you've talked about like the illustrations and the humor, which just might go over, some people's heads really help solidify the lesson for both young kids, older kids and adults.

Frog’s Rainy Day Stories and Other Fables by Michael Dowling is a unique picture book for all ages that’s both thoughtful and entertaining. If you take the time to read it with your kids or grandkids this summer, I hope it will brighten your rainy day.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Emily Whitten.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Well, it’s time to say thanks to the team members who helped put the program together this week: Mary Reichard, David Bahnsen, Albert Mohler, Bonnie Pritchett, Whitney Williams, Onize Ohikere, Jenny Rough, Joel Belz, Emma Freire, Cal Thomas, Maria Baer, John Stonestreet, Collin Garbarino, and Emily Whitten.

Thanks also to our breaking news team: Kent Covington, Lynde Langdon, Steve Kloosterman, Mary Muncy, Lauren Canterberry, and Josh Schumacher.

And our guys on the night shift: Johnny Franklin and Carl Peetz, who stay up late to get the program to you early

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Our producer is Harrison Watters with production assistance from Benj Eicher, Lillian Hamman, Juliana Chan Erikson, and Bekah McCallum.

Paul Butler is our executive producer.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Psalmist writes: Make me understand the way of your precepts, and I will meditate on your wondrous works. My soul melts away for sorrow; strengthen me according to your word! Put false ways far from me and graciously teach me your law! I have chosen the way of faithfulness; I set your rules before me. Psalm 1-19, verses 27 through 30.

Let’s worship the Lord this weekend! w Lord willing, we’ll meet you right back here on Monday.

Go now in grace and peace.

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