The World and Everything in It: November 24, 2025

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JENNY ROUGH, HOST: Good morning!

Today on Legal Docket: three Supreme Court cases where the fight is not mainly around the merits, but something more basic.

KAGAN: The plaintiff’s point of view is the thing that should matter because the plaintiff is the master of her complaint.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Also today Monday Moneybeat: David Bahnsen on affordability, jobs, and GDP, and what they say about the political road ahead.

And the WORLD History Book. Today: G.K. Chesterton on faith, fairy tales, and Cinderella.

AUDIO: A long time ago, a lonely little girl named Ella lived with her stepmother and her two stepsisters.

ROUGH: It’s Monday, November 24th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Jenny Rough.

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

ROUGH: Up next, Kent Covington has today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Ukraine » Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he is feeling very optimistic about the prospects for peace in Ukraine after meeting with Ukrainian diplomats in Geneva Sunday.

RUBIO: Because this continues to be, uh, a working process. Um, you know, the, the, I don't want to declare victory or finality here. There's still some work to be done, but we are much further ahead today at this time than we were when we began this morning and where we were a week ago for certain.

 Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky did not go into detail over the weekend about a U.S.-led 28-point peace plan. But it would reportedly require Ukraine to give up more territory in the east of their country and limit the size of their military.

Officials in Kyiv definitely have concerns about the proposal. But the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andrii Yermak said:

YERMAK:  Ukrainian people deserve and want this peace more than anymore anyone in this, uh, planet.

Some U.S. senators say that Secretary Rubio told them the plan was a Russian wishlist and not the actual plan. But the State Department says that is false. And Rubio himself stated on social media that the US drew up the plan as a framework for negotiations after input from both Russia and Ukraine.

The secretary said discussions would continue today and perhaps deeper into the week.

Bessent on Inflation » Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says consumer prices are heading in the right direction heading into the Christmas shopping season.

BESSENT: Some are gonna come down in weeks, some are gonna come down in months. We just had the, in terms of affordability, we just had the best month in the housing market due to affordability, due to increased supply in October.

And he says the cost of a Thanksgiving dinner this year will be the lowest it’s been in four years.

The government did not produce inflation numbers for October due to the govt shutdown. But inflation in September ticked up slightly, from 2.9 to 3%.

Some analysts say President Trump’s sweeping tariffs are likely keeping inflation from falling to the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.

But the president insists the tariffs are good for the nation and the economy. And the White House is exploring a plan to cut $2,000 checks to most Americans, funded by tariff revenues.

Some critics say that might just further fuel inflation, but U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer counters:

GREER: I’m not too worried about inflation, right? This is not some kind of ongoing new welfare program or something like that that would exacerbate any inflation. You know, if it's a one time, uh, check or something like that, uh, you know, I think American families would probably welcome that.

But many Republicans say that money should go toward paying down the $38 trillion national debt.

Barrasso on avoiding another government shutdown » Lawmakers have plenty of work to do over the holiday season to prevent another government shutdown. That’s the word from Republican Sen. John Barrasso:

BARRASSO: We need to get these appropriation bills done by the deadline date. We have five more to go, which will fund 88% of the government. Again. We need to get America back on track. We got more work to do. We're heading in the right direction.

The longest-ever government shutdown ended nearly two weeks ago, but it could happen again if new funding isn’t passed by the end of January.

At the same time, lawmakers are once again debating healthcare, with Obamacare subsidies are set to expire at the end of 2025.

Democratic held out for six weeks, insisting no funding bill would pass until Republicans agreed to extend those subsidies before eight Senate Democrats crossed the aisle to reopen the government.

Operation Charlotte’s Web » Immigration authorities say they’ve taken a lot of criminals off the streets lately in Charlotte, North Carolina.

But Mecklenburg County Sheriff Gary McFadden is pushing back, questioning the need for the operation.

MCFADDEN: How many have a violent past? How many were productive citizens? How many were contributing - to this community?

But Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino says federal authorities are prioritizing hardened criminals, and that they’ve arrested nearly 400 people so far in what they’re calling Operation Charlotte’s Web.

BOVINO: So that operation continues. It's going to continue. Uh, there's a lot of bad people and bad things in Charlotte.

Protests broke out recently in response to the operation. Around 30-thousand students were absent from school at the start of last week.

Nigeria » The Trump administration is expanding its push to counter violence against Christians in Nigeria.

The president had warned the U.S. could go after Islamic militants with “guns-a-blazing.” But the State Department says beyond possible military action, the administration is enacting a broader strategy, both carrot and stick.

That includes potential sanctions if the Nigerian government doesn't step up counterterrorism efforts. But it also includes intelligence sharing, and new assistance programs for Nigeria.

That comes as schools and churches in Nigeria continue to face deadly attacks.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: a few Supreme Court cases that answer the same fundamental question on Legal Docket. Plus, the Monday Moneybeat and the WORLD History Book.

This is The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Monday the 24th of November.

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

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: And I’m Jenny Rough. Time now for Legal Docket. Today we consider three Supreme Court cases that turn on a deceptively simple question: Whether a court has the power to hear a case?

Take some absurd ideas just to illustrate the point: A traffic court, for example, has no authority to hear a case about a possible violation of the U.S. Copyright Act. Federal courts cannot hear cases about certain matters of family law. For the most part, that’s for the state courts.

That is the heart of what lawyers call jurisdiction.

EICHER: Before we get into the current cases, it may help to remember that questions like this have been with us from the very beginning of the American Republic.

Leading figures of the founding era argued over them.

It’s a shame we have no audio from these great debates.

ROUGH: Yeah, it is, but popular culture has re-created those debates. Take HBO’s John Adams miniseries for example.

There was this great moment in the series that captures a real disagreement between Adams and Thomas Jefferson about the nature of binding law and the role of a constitution. Maybe you remember this small scene, it begins with a pensive Jefferson.

JEFFERSON: I am increasingly persuaded that the earth belongs exclusively to the living and that one generation has no more right to bind another to its laws and judgments than one independent nation has the right to command another.

EICHER: Adams was taken aback.

ADAMS: But surely the Constitution … is meant to establish the stability and the long term, ah, legality essential to the continuation of civilized society. 

ROUGH: That made for great television, but this was not an idle philosophical conversation.

Jefferson and Adams famously clashed over the judiciary — President Adams’s last-minute judicial appointment of William Marbury before he left office, and Jefferson’s refusal to be bound by it — led directly to one of the most important Supreme Court cases in American history. One that every law student studies: Marbury versus Madison.

EICHER: And that case turned on the highly technical question of jurisdiction. The Supreme Court said it simply did not have the authority to hear Marbury’s claim. But that narrow ruling became the foundation for something enormous: the doctrine of judicial review, the Court’s power to strike down laws it finds unconstitutional.

ROUGH: So even though jurisdiction may sound dry or procedural, the stakes can be very high. Today, we have, as I said, three cases where everything turns on that kind of question.

Let’s start with a lawsuit about contaminated food, Hain Celestial versus Palmquist. It began in early 2021. Audio here from a CBS news program.

AUDIO: A disturbing new congressional report out later today finds more cases of manufacturers selling baby food with high levels of toxic heavy metals. The report describes dangerous levels of toxins including arsenic, lead, cadmium, and mercury in popular baby food products.

EICHER: For years, Sarah and Grant Palmquist fed their young son organic baby foods, specifically the brand Earth’s Best. Later on, he would develop autism. Tests would reveal heavy metals in his system. So the Palmquists sued Hain Celestial, that’s the foodmaker. They also sued Whole Foods, the retailer.

The parents live in Texas. And they wanted to pursue their case in state court. But Hain wanted the case in federal court.

ROUGH: Lawyers in this area know that state and federal courts can feel very different. Plaintiffs often prefer state courts for strategic reasons: more familiarity, local juries, looser rules of evidence.

Defendants often prefer federal courts because of features that are the opposite: jury pools that are broader, legal rules that are stricter.

That preference battle leads straight into what’s known in the law as diversity jurisdiction. Federal courts can hear cases between citizens of different states—but only if every defendant is from a different state than every plaintiff.

EICHER: Whole Foods is based in Austin, Texas. If Whole Foods stayed in the suit, the case stayed in court in Texas.

But a trial court dismissed Whole Foods as “ fraudulently joined” saying the parents added Whole Foods only to block removal to federal court.

With Whole Foods out, the trial happened in federal court, and Hain won.

ROUGH: The Palmquists appealed, and the appellate court said: Whole Foods was a proper defendant. So the case should’ve stayed in state court all along. It ordered a new trial — in state court.

EICHER: And now on appeal at the Supreme Court, Hain argued a new trial is unnecessary. The parents had their day in court, and they can still pursue a separate lawsuit against Whole Foods in Texas.

ROUGH: But Justice Sonia Sotomayor wasn’t sure that was the way to fix the mistake. Here she is in an exchange with the lawyer for Hain, Sarah Harrington:

SOTOMAYOR: This plaintiff wanted to be in state court. It sued two parties. Your client and Whole Foods.

SARAH HARRINGTON: Right.

SOTOMAYOR: All right? It wanted to litigate. It couldn’t because someone that it had the right to include, Whole Foods, was dismissed erroneously. … It was deprived permanently of its opportunity, tactical opportunity, to try this in state court. … It had a tactical advantage it was erroneously deprived of.

HARRINGTON: I don’t think that’s right, Justice Sotomayor. Being able to sue in state court isn’t a tactical advantage.

SOTOMAYOR: Oh, absolutely. I mean, we wouldn’t have all the removal arguments that we encounter if it wasn’t.

ROUGH: Hain’s attorney argued it would be a waste of resources to have another trial. But that didn’t sit well with Justice Neil Gorsuch.

GORSUCH: What do we do about the fact that the problem here was created by your client through an improper removal? I mean, in terms of fairness, you know, your hands aren’t exactly clean here.

EICHER: On the other hand, perhaps the plaintiffs acted unfairly, too. They could have moved sooner in the process to appeal the trial court’s decision to dismiss Whole Foods. They chose not to. Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

BARRETT: That makes it seem like your choice was to take a wait-and-see approach and then decide whether you liked the result or not before you chose to fight it.

ROUGH: But Hain’s attorney emphasized that plaintiffs lost on the merits of their food contamination case. They failed to prove the toxic substances caused their son’s condition. So a do-over wouldn’t matter.

But Justice Elena Kagan pushed back to remind Hain how litigation is designed to work.

KAGAN: From the plaintiff’s point of view, the thing that went wrong is that the plaintiff is the master of her complaint. She clearly structured a suit in order to bring it in state court. That was why she joined these two parties perfectly legitimately in order to have the suit in state court, rather than in federal court where it was. And the effect of this district court misjudgment was not that two parties were separated. It’s that the suit was tried in the wrong place from the plaintiff’s point of view. And the plaintiff's point of view is the thing that should matter because the plaintiff is the master of her complaint.

So that’s “diversity jurisdiction,” our next case, quickly, has to do with personal jurisdiction—the court’s power to make a legally binding decision about the person being sued.

EICHER: Vista Pro Automotive filed for bankruptcy. And went after Coney Island Auto Parts for unpaid invoices. But Vista Pro incorrectly addressed the complaint, and Coney Island never responded. Eventually, a bankruptcy court entered a default judgment against Coney Island and ordered the company to pay about $50,000 in outstanding debt.

ROUGH: For purposes of this case, assume two points:

One: The bankruptcy court lacked personal jurisdiction to enter the judgment because service was improper. Meaning, Coney Island did not receive the right kind of notice that it was being sued.

Point two: A judgment entered without personal jurisdiction is considered void.

Those are not the disputes. The dispute is whether there’s a time limit for asking a court to set aside a void judgment.

EICHER: Vista Pro says yes, there is: a federal rule requires challenges to come within a reasonable time.

Coney Island says no, there isn’t: you can’t put a time limit on something that was void from the get-go.

ROUGH: Justice Samuel Alito asked how others have handled this conundrum. You’ll hear him use the term “void ab initio” … that just means void from the beginning.

ALITO: What have the courts of appeals and the commentators … said about this question and whether there’s a reasonable time limitation on seeking relief from a judgment that’s void ab initio?

Most others favor Coney Island. This case arose in the Sixth Circuit, and it’s the only one that imposes a time limit. So this decision will resolve the split among the federal appeals courts.

Finally, a case on appellate jurisdiction. Most of the time, an appeals court can only hear an appeal after the case is finished.

EICHER: But most of the time is not all of the time. There are times when a party can appeal a decision to a higher court while the case is still in progress.

In this last case, Alejandro Menocal was detained at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Colorado run by a government contractor known as GEO Group. He and others claim GEO forced them to work in violation of federal law.

ROUGH: GEO argued it was simply following ICE orders. Because it was acting in the government’s place, it argued it should receive the same immunity the government gets. The trial court denied that claim. GEO tried an immediate appeal, but the appellate court said it lacked jurisdiction to hear the challenge while the litigation was in progress.

EICHER: Justice Alito said that if it were the government bringing the case, it could get an early appeal. So why should the contractor be treated differently?

ALITO: Well, when GEO is doing exactly what government officials can do and generally have done — running facilities like this. So imagine you had brought these claims against ICE and specific ICE officials. ICE and the officials could raise sovereign immunity, they could raise qualified immunity and Westfall Act immunity, and if the district court denied any of those, then they could get an interlocutory appeal. So why shouldn't the rule be the same?

ROUGH: If GEO is immune, the case would not move forward. But Alejandro Menocal and the other detainees argue GEO is only entitled to bring its argument as a defense during trial.

Interestingly, the Trump administration supports the detainees’ legal position here.

To return to the place we started, from the days of Marbury versus Madison until now, the law around jurisdiction has evolved. And these current cases get into the weeds of it. But if you listen carefully enough you’ll hear the echoes of those original arguments between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams continuing on.

JEFFERSON: You have a disconcerting lack of faith in your fellow man. Mr. A, and in yourself, if I may say.

ADAMS: Yes, and you display a dangerous excess of faith in your fellow man. Mr. Jefferson.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket.

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

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s time now to talk business, markets and the economy with financial analyst and advisor David Bahnsen. David heads up the wealth management firm the Bahnsen Group, and he is here now. Good morning to you.

DAVID BAHNSEN: Good morning. Nick, good to be with you.

EICHER: David, The New York Times carried the strangest political headline of the week: Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani—“the fascist and the communist”—suddenly acting like two guys from Queens starring in a buddy movie.

And what a movie! I was following the White House feed Friday afternoon with the two of them laughing together in the Oval Office, patting each other on the arm, batting away tough questions, and bonding over the very thing they supposedly agree on:

New York’s cost of living.

The two commiserated about sky-high utility bills, real-estate costs, and the need for more housing construction in New York—all issues Trump campaigned on, and all issues Mamdani built his own political rise around.

So Marjorie Taylor-Greene is out and Zohran Mamdani is in—left-wing socialist and the right-wing populist suddenly unified. Is there a single economic theme in here you want to comment on?

BAHNSEN: Yeah, I mean, I think that there is an economic theme behind the fact that many on the right and the left are, of course, looking to governmental solutions and governmental policy as part of the economic ills. I don’t know that the friendly rendezvous in the White House is necessarily indicative of that.

I think it has a lot to do with President Trump’s media savvy, that he didn’t want to get… you know, Mamdani is a really clever guy. He’s energetic, he’s young, he’s quick on his feet, and I don’t think President Trump wanted to go into an adversarial situation with cameras rolling with a young, media-savvy guy like Mamdani. So I think he played a little excessively nice, and I don’t know that’s necessarily just because there’s more policy overlap than I wish there were.

I think it was more everybody being careful to avoid a gotcha moment on camera. But all that said, I am concerned that there is more and more of the economic framework on the right that is actually more compatible with Mamdani, where it used to be that the economic framework of the right existed to oppose things like greater price controls, rent controls, governmental ownership of certain elements of production, things like that. So overall, I wouldn’t say I’m very encouraged by any of it.

EICHER: David, the GLP-1 gold rush seemed to hit a new peak this week. Eli Lilly — a 150-year-old Indiana company — became the first health-care firm ever to reach a trillion-dollar valuation, almost entirely on the strength of weight-loss drugs. Big Pharma is getting fat on getting Americans thin. Is this a durable economic story, or just a very expensive moment on the way to something else?

BAHNSEN: Well, look, the one that’s a bigger competitor than Louis Novo that makes Ozempic is down over 50% this year, while their sales are up, I think, 130%. So it’s actually been a debacle of a performance from those peak levels.

And Lilly is a very different story, because while it has one of these big weight loss drugs—I believe it’s called Zepbound—that is a competitor to Ozempic, Lilly is a multi-multi-drug and category pharmaceutical company, where some of these others, they’re really kind of living off of one drug, and they lack that diversification. And that’s what you’re going to end up seeing, much like what Lilly has done de novo.

Amgen has a product in development. Pfizer’s working on one. Merck is working on one. So competition ends up pushing a lot of these stock prices down, but that the medical technology exists for these different weight loss drugs is out there, and it’s created a bubble. It’s created a burst, and there’s still at this point some winners.

But no, I mean, I think that there is a lot of downward pressure to think about too, because not only are you getting pressure for reimbursements in terms of the insurance companies, but now you have competition as well, and they can’t all win at once at the same level.

EICHER: David, in Dividend Café you were pretty direct about the two stories that matter most: jobs and GDP. On jobs, you said you’re somewhere between mildly cautious and genuinely concerned—not a collapse, not a panic, just a labor market that is clearly softening.

Then on GDP, you’re equally sober: you’re expecting economic growth to come in at maybe 1.8 to 2.1 percent for 2025 … and it does fall roughly in line with the muted 2-percent trend of the post-crisis economy. Not strong, not collapsing. But a long way from the campaign promises.

If that is the trajectory, it is hard to imagine either the White House or Republicans being thrilled heading into the midterms.

BAHNSEN: No. And I would say it’s actually a little worse than that, because the big expectation was that there would be something. And so if you just sort of hold the line and it doesn’t get better, doesn’t get worse… and we already see this in the polling, by the way, that the voters do seem dissatisfied.

Now, sometimes that can just be because of impatience, or there are other factors outside of anyone’s control. But I think in this case, a lot of it is self-induced. For example, manufacturing employment is going down, and many people were told the tariffs are going to bring manufacturing jobs back. There’s less factory construction.

And it isn’t like, well, you know, we’re seeing a few of these things go backwards, but at least we’ve gotten prices lower. The year-over-year inflation rate is higher now than it was when Biden left office—not by much, but by a little. And some of those things are tariff-related.

And you know who agrees with me on that is the White House, because they’ve come out and said, okay, one of the things we’re going to do to address affordability is we’re going to get rid of the tariffs that we put on coffee and bananas and certain grocery items. And I’m very glad they’re doing it. I think they’re doing the right thing to get rid of them, but those were self-induced policy mistakes.

So the question going into 2026 is going to be what wins out in the upside opportunity of some of the foreign investment that’s supposed to be coming into the country as a result of some of these trade deals, versus the downside of constrained trade and a $300 to $350 billion higher tax on the U.S. economy from these additional tariffs. Those two things are in a tug-of-war, and I’d be very skeptical of anybody—including myself—who, if they were to claim that they know how it’s going to play out. I don’t know how it’s going to play out, but I think that that’s the tension.

And I think that that’s, as you point out, Nick, it’s in a backdrop of already a sort of unsatisfactory level of economic activity. We know the Fed’s going to be cutting rates more, but there just isn’t a great catalyst to see improvement in affordability or much pickup in economic growth. And so that muddle-through place from the baseline we’re at is going to leave some unsatisfied at this point.

EICHER: Before we go, one more thread from Dividend Café—and it loops back to that Trump–Mamdani moment: Affordability. You noted that housing remains one of the biggest constraints in the entire economy. Want to touch on that before we wrap?

BAHNSEN: Yeah, because I think that with housing—much like almost everything in Mamdani’s policy portfolio and where President Trump stands now—trying to address things going in a midterm year, one of the scariest things is that when politicians say, “Okay, we’ve got to go do something,” where sometimes what they’re going to do is going to make it worse.

And so some of the ideas that have been thrown out because of housing—every politician recognizes we have an affordability issue with housing—but then you throw out ideas like a 50-year mortgage, or you throw out Vice President Harris’s idea about supplementing down payments. These are all things that are not only going to not make it better; they will make it worse. And that’s what I get worried about.

So for example, people say groceries are too expensive, rent is too expensive in New York City, let’s go try the 1970s playbook. That all makes it worse. You have to incentivize more production, and you can’t build more housing stock when people believe they’re going to come in and take away your ability to make money with rent freezes.

We’ve talked about this before. You know they’ve made it very difficult for landlords to want to be landlords. And so on a federal policy level, I just want the administration to be careful that they don’t, in the name of doing things to address problems, do things that make it worse.

And there’s an expression that we portfolio managers have that turns the popular idiom “Don’t just stand there, do something.” Very often the best thing to do is “Don’t just do something—stand there.”

EICHER: All right. David Bahnsen—founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group. He writes at DividendCafe.com and at WORLD Opinions. David, hope you have a great week.

BAHNSEN: Thanks so much, Nick. Good to be with you.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: Today is Monday, November 24th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Jenny Rough.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Up next, the WORLD History Book.

It’s been ten years since Disney released its live-action remake of the film Cinderella. In a world of revisionist remakes, critics described this film as “refreshingly traditional” and remarkably faithful to the original. The tale is much older than Disney, of course. The story has been a classic for more than three hundred years.

ROUGH: One of the children listening during those years was a boy named Gilbert Keith.

We know Gilbert Keith today as G.K. Chesterton.

So now, his thoughts on fairy tales, faith, and Cinderella. Here’s WORLD correspondent Caleb Welde.

1936 OPENING: Now here’s a theme that never grows cold, always dear to young and old

CALEB WELDE: In G.K. Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy, he writes this of his childhood: “The things I believed most then— the things I believe most now are the things called fairy tales.”

1940 NARRATOR: A long time ago, a lonely little girl named Ella lived with her stepmother and her two stepsisters.

As a boy, Chesterton listened to the story about a girl faced with the facts. Her mother was dead, and her father remarried a cruel woman who treated her terribly.

CHESTERTON: Fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already.

Jon Gauger as the voice of Chesterton.

2015 DISNEY: ROOSTER, NEW MORNING SOUNDS, UPLIFTING MUSIC

CHESTERTON: What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of evil.

2015 DISNEY: Good morning, Miss Ella! Good morning, Tom!

Ella rejects self-pity and bitterness, and she emerges from a painful childhood beautiful. Her stepmother has her working with the servants.

2015 DISNEY: ELLA HUMMING, CHICKEN SOUNDS: What a lovely Chantecler. Well done. Thanks.

But Ella thanks the chickens for the eggs and endeavors to love her stepmother and sisters.

CHESTERTON: Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

She remains strong in the face of many trials. But then her stepsisters begin calling her by a new name: Cinder-Ella the dust and ashes of her existence a metaphor of death. It’s a low point of the story. But not the lowest.

1940 NARRATOR: One day the prince of the realm gave a ball and invited everyone in the Kingdom. How Cinderella did long to go.

But Cinderella wasn’t to go: At least, if her stepmother had any say in the matter. And she did.

Queue the fairy godmother.

1934 CINDERELLA: GODMOTHER: Go fetch me a pumpkin, a large one my dear, six mice and two lizards, and bring them right here.

CHESTERTON: When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turned to horses.

2015 DISNEY: MICE TURNING TO HORSES SOUND

ELLA: But how did you?

CHESTERTON: We must answer that it is MAGIC.

For Chesterton, fairy tales take him back to Eden.

CHESTERTON: These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green.

Everything in Eden was surprising including the rule. In Cinderella, the rule isn't forbidden fruit it’s a curfew that cannot be broken.

CHESTERTON: Cinderella received a coach out of Wonderland and a coachman out of nowhere, but she received a command. If Cinderella she says, "How is it that I must leave the ball at twelve?" Her godmother might answer, "How is it that you are going there till twelve?"

2015 DISNEY: LIZARD: Miss Ella.

Ashes. exchanged for glory Ella arrives at the Ball and looks up.

CHESTERTON: The chief pleasure is surprise.

Towers that vanish upwards above the loneliest star are the creations of humility. For towers are not tall unless we look up at them.;

2015 DISNEY: ELLA: I’m frightened Mr. Lizard. I’m only a girl– not a princess.

LIZARD: And I’m only a lizard– not a footman. Enjoy it while it lasts!

CHESTERTON: The lesson of Cinderella is the same as that of the Magnificat. EXALTAVIT HUMILES.

For those of us with rusty latin that’s: “He has exalted the humble.”

As for Ella’s stepmother, the proud are cast down.

CHESTERTON: The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven. The crime we must not forgive at all.

2015 DISNEY: Ella: “I forgive you.”

CHESTERTON: Christianity divided the crime from the criminal. There was room for wrath and love to run wild.

In Cinderella that love leads to marriage as Ella and the Prince live happily ever after. Modern critics of fairytales decry such tidy happy endings claiming they’re not realistic or that they raise unrealistic expectations. But for G.K. Chesterton, happy endings remind us of ultimate reality our future hope.

CHESTERTON: My ideal was fixed before the foundations of the world. My vision of perfection assuredly cannot be altered; for it is called Eden. You may alter the place to which you are going; but you cannot alter the place from which you have come. In the upper world hell once rebelled against heaven. But in this world heaven is rebelling against hell. At any instant you may strike a blow for the perfection which no man has seen since Adam. No unchanging custom, no changing evolution can make the original good anything but good.

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

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: Tomorrow: States weigh legalizing assisted suicide, as pro-life advocates warn of the logical outcomes. And, we open the pages of the first Bible published in American colonies. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Jenny Rough.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

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

The Bible says: “...Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” —Philippians 4:6, 7

Go now in grace and peace.

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