The World and Everything in It: October 18, 2024

PREROLL: Well, hello, Katie McCoy here. I always enjoy visiting with you on Culture Friday. I’ve been thinking a lot about the law as a moral teacher, and I can’t wait to unpack that idea. Talk to you in just a few minutes.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning!

We’re looking forward to that conversation with Katie McCoy real soon. 

NICK EICHER, HOST: And we’ve got a lot to talk about: media bias, gender identity, and the most legally ambitious constitutional amendment in the country. Today on Culture Friday.

Also today, 30 years ago three media moguls started an animation studio to compete with Disney. WORLD Arts and Culture editor Collin Garbarino considers how they transformed an industry.

BROWN: And I’ll review a new folk music project featuring ten church favorites.

CHRIS GRIFFIN: Classic, timeless text. And it seemed like a natural fit for us to do.

It’s Friday, October 18th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

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

BROWN: Up next, Mark Mellinger with today’s news

MARK MELLINGER, NEWS ANCHOR: Sinwar killed, what’s ahead » How will the death of Hamas’s top leader affect the warfare in the Middle East?

That’s what world leaders are asking after Israel killed Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of last year’s October 7th attack on Israel, during a strike in Gaza.

U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller…

MILLER: The world is a better place with Sinwar gone from it, and it gives us an opportunity we didn’t have as long as he still called the shots for Hamas. Now what that will mean, we’ll have to wait and see in the days ahead.

President Biden says he congratulated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and that he’s now more hopeful about working out a cease-fire in the Gaza war sparked by last year’s Hamas attack.

The president’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, says Sinwar’s death removes an obstacle to peace and that Israel has dismantled most of Hamas’s military capabilities.

SULLIVAN: We do know that Hamas does not pose the kind of threat it posed to Israel on October 7th, or anything close to it.

Sullivan says the White House will be talking to Israel about how to end the war, secure the release of hostages, and move to a new era in Gaza where Hamas is no longer in control.

Israel says this is a moment for Hamas to surrender and release hostages.

Swing state campaigning: Harris in WI, Vance in PA » News of Sinwar’s death is also resonating on the campaign trail, where Vice President Kamala Harris said it creates an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza.

Both major parties’ tickets are rumbling through key swing states, fine-tuning their closing messages to persuadable voters.

In La Crosse, Wisconsin, Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, stressed her middle class roots.

HARRIS: I will always put the middle class and working families first. It’s where I come from, and I will never forget where I come from.

Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance was in Pittsburgh where he told voters what a new Trump Administration would do to strengthen the economy.

VANCE: If you want to lower prices on American families, the most important thing that we need to do is unleash Pennsylvania energy workers. Drill, baby, drill. That’ll lower prices for all of us.

With about two and a half weeks to go, polls indicate the presidential race is about as close as it could possibly be.

Trump keynotes Al Smith Dinner, Harris skips out » It’s a night of levity the leading presidential candidates usually share, but not this year.

Donald Trump keynoted the annual Al Smith charity dinner in New York Thursday while Kamala Harris, citing the need to maximize her campaigning time, became the first presidential candidate to skip it in 40 years.

That left the host, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, disappointed.

DOLAN: It’s a shame because the nature of the evening is to bring people together. The nature of the evening is civility, patriotism, humor.

The Trump campaign suggested the pro-abortion Harris might be avoiding an uncomfortable night with the Catholic charity.

Harris did send a pre-recorded video.

North Korea amends constitution to call South Korea ‘hostile state’ » North Korea confirms it’s amended its constitution to define South Korea as a “hostile state.”

This comes just days after the North blew up rail links that connected the two countries, which are still officially at war.

AUDIO: [Yang Moo-Jin speaking in Korean]

Yang Moo-Jin, a university president in South Korea, calls this move North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s survival strategy, saying the dictator can control his own people better if connections between the countries are cut off and there is no competition between them.

Kim Jong Un is now calling the longstanding goal of peacefully reuniting the two Koreas… a thing of the past.

Zelenskyy says N. Korea has 10,000 troops for Russia » North Korea is preparing to mobilize about 10,000 soldiers to join Russia in its fight against Ukraine.

That’s what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told NATO defense ministers in Brussels. Citing Ukrainian intelligence, Zelenskyy said North Korea has sent technical personnel and officers to Ukraine, but so far, they haven't been deployed to the battlefield.

He says if North Korea does step into the conflict…

ZELENSKYY: This will be the second, I think it's already the second country which is involved this war against us.

Zelenskyy has been meeting with leaders from the U.S. and Europe in recent days trying to drum up support for his so-called victory plan to end his country's war with Russia.

Teen smoking at new low » Teenagers are snuffing out the cigarettes. WORLD's Travis Kircher has more.

TRAVIS KIRCHER: New numbers released yesterday by the Centers for Disease Control show cigarette smoking hit an all-time low among U.S. teenagers this year.

The data also shows a 20 percent drop in the estimated number of middle or high school students who recently used at least one tobacco product.

That includes cigarettes, e-cigarettes, nicotine pouches or hookahs.

That number dropped from 2.8 million to about 2.2 million, a 25-year low.

Officials cite a wide range of reasons for the drop. They include the rise in price of tobacco products, tighter age restrictions, and more aggressive enforcement against anyone caught selling to teens.

For WORLD, I'm Travis Kircher.

I’m Mark Mellinger.

Straight ahead: Katie McCoy weighs in on what’s behind some of today’s hottest debates. Plus, the hymns we have in common.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 18th of October, 2024.

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

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

It’s time for Culture Friday, and joining us now is author and speaker Katie McCoy.

Good morning!

KATIE McCOY: Good morning, Nick and Myrna!

EICHER: Katie, there’s a plagiarism scandal story around a book under Kamala Harris’s name a decade and a half ago, Smart on Crime, the title. Conservative investigative reporter Christopher Rufo discovered passages in the book that were straight up copied from public sources, including Wikipedia. Which is a little like a copy of a copy.

Not to worry though: The New York Times reviewed the offending passages, called up a plagiarism expert, and concluded they involved only factual descriptions and statistics and not the original ideas of other authors. Therefore, the ruling on the field is reversed, this is not serious plagiarism, according to the New York Times.

According to The Wall Street Journal, though, this dismissal is further evidence of why the public doesn’t trust the news media. An opinion piece in the Journal cited a Gallup survey that found less than a third of Americans trust the media to report accurately.

Now … you come from the academic world, Katie. You’ve got a Ph.D., you used to teach at the college level, I think we can call you a plagiarism expert. What do you say? No big deal?

McCOY: Well, it should be a big deal. Now, I’ll set aside for the moment that in all likelihood, the vice president had a ghostwriter for that book—most people of great fame and notoriety do. But that’s really not the story here.

I think the story is that the nature of the offense is being seen through the lens of the political leanings of the offender. For instance, when former Harvard President Claudine Gay was found to have plagiarized her work, you saw The New York Times rush to her defense—at one point with this opinion piece saying, “We need a new word for plagiarism.” Apparently, plagiarism is just too harsh! It's such a negative word.

But, properly speaking, plagiarism is intellectual theft. It is stealing, the taking of somebody else’s work, and claiming it as your own. It’s serious enough to get a college student expelled, in some cases, from a university—certainly failing a class. It’s something that every professor has to take seriously. So, I don’t think we should brush it under the rug. But what we also shouldn’t brush under the rug is the way that the legacy media are responding to it. You can only imagine how, if this were an ideological or political conservative, some of these same media outlets would be responding to proof of plagiarism. That, I find, is the more-concerning thing.

And really, Nick, in our moment today, it only adds to this growing institutional distrust that so many Americans have, whether it’s of our government or of media.

BROWN: Katie, a former star on the show “The Bachelorette,” his name Josh Seiter, dropped a bombshell. Several months ago, he announced he was a transgender woman. But as it turns out, it was all just a big social experiment. He appeared on an online conservative TV show to reveal what he’d done—which is pretend to be transgender. Here’s Seiter explaining his purpose.

SEITER ON ALEX STEIN: I said, ‘Let’s look at the medical literature and what it says.’ It says that trans people don’t have to transition, don’t have to have gender dysphoria, don’t have to get surgery and don’t have to get hormones. If they feel they are a different gender than their bio sex, then they are trans and they are valid. And I said, understandably, ‘this is ridiculous, then I can present exactly how I am, and I can be trans and valid if I say that’s my gender identity.’ And so I said, ‘Let me prove how ridiculous this is, using Reductio ad absurdum by being trans for five, six months.’ And hopefully people will understand then how ridiculous this is.

So is he doing a service or is he just a mocker?

McCOY: Myrna, I don’t know how to answer that question because I think there are two aspects to it. On the one hand, we don’t want to ever discount the fact that there are countless adolescents, especially teenage girls, for whom gender dysphoria is a very real coping mechanism. It is often a signal of distress, typically in some other area of life. So, I don’t want to discount that gender dysphoria is itself a real thing.

Now, most of what we’re seeing, especially among teen girls today, is not properly gender dysphoria. It is social contagion and a coping mechanism. But when we get to talking about men self-identifying as women, more often than not, it is linked to a pornographic fetish. We have talked about this before. It is a very uncomfortable and unpopular thing, but it is something that is very real. You can trace the prevalence of transgender pornography, the uptick we are hearing of it on places like Pornhub—and how, all of a sudden, men are self-identifying as women, not only to gain access to women’s social spaces, but because they are aroused by the idea of themselves as female.

That is what Josh Seiter was pointing out. He’s absolutely correct in that the vast majority of these men who are self-identifying as women do not have gender dysphoria.

You don't have to take my word for it. Look at secular sociologists and psychologists like Ray Blanchard, who is no conservative. He has brought up that most men who are transgender or trans-identifying are what is called autogynephilic. That word, autogynephilia, comes from Greek words that essentially mean “love of oneself as a woman.”

On the one hand, I had a little bit of pain as I saw this through the lens of perhaps a very confused teenage girl who needs spiritual and emotional care. But on the other hand, Seiter did do a service to people who are just ready to wholesale believe someone's self-identification.

I actually went back to his Instagram page to see where he “came out” as trans. You would not believe all of the accolades: “You're so brave; you’re inspiring to me!” And now, all of a sudden, there’s all kinds of hate mail that he’s getting. I think he has death threats. Why? Because this does not align with the prescribed cultural narrative that we are all told to believe, despite common sense.

BROWN: Katie, I ran across a story of a couple in Philadelphia, very heartwarming story. They discovered their twins were conjoined and chose life for them, hoping for a successful separation surgery after they were born. And it was a wonderful success!

Now, this is about a week-old story, but I bring it up because the surgery was at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. And as it turns out, that very same hospital is alone at the top of a list of the 12 worst offending institutions that mutilate children with medical procedures aimed at sex-change. Heads the list!

That’s quite a dichotomy. How do you explain that?

McCOY: Very simply, Myrna, if you do not have a definition of good and evil that is anchored in some type of transcendent truth, you are destined for incoherence. In both of these cases, they both happened at the same children’s hospital, and in both cases, the action was done in pursuit of what was considered good. It was considered good and life-saving to separate these conjoined twins—praise God, what a miracle!

But then it is also considered good to sterilize or mutilate children. So, we have two conflicting definitions of what is good.

Whether we’re talking about medical advancement, I also think we can apply this to things like artificial intelligence and other scientific advancements. You can use something in the genius that God created humanity to be. All of human ingenuity can be used for good, or it can be used for evil. All of the things we are seeing with medical advancements—we cannot out-advance human nature. Human nature is still inwardly corrupt, and human nature is a horrible guide for what is good.

This story and the dichotomy of these two things being true in the same children’s hospital just demonstrate how incoherent it is to have a definition of morality that is not anchored in something objective, something transcendent, and something eternal.

EICHER: Katie, you’re a St. Louisan, if I remember right. So you may be surprised to learn that voters in Missouri, if polls are accurate, are likely to okay a constitutional amendment that among other things would legalize abortion. But it’s the “among other things” part that is a real concern. We’ve been talking about transgender issues, and I just wrote a column for WORLD Magazine that makes a case that the way the language is written, it’s going to undermine parental rights and create a new super right that will include the right to transgender procedures for children. We’ll talk more about this in days ahead. But for you, Katie, isn’t it surprising that what we thought of as a very pro-life state may not be?

McCOY: That's fascinating and deeply disturbing.

So, first of all, yes, I am a South County St. Louis girl. I went to high school in St. Louis and still love that city. I was very saddened to see that this legislation is coming up for a vote.

Since Roe was overturned, we’ve seen a common theme, and it is this: we cannot take for granted that laws equal change. Now, they do bring change in laws, but it shows that state by state, we have to win the hearts and minds of people towards protecting the unborn. Even a state like Missouri can be vulnerable to legislation that is this extreme.

One of the things I find over and over again is that pro-life people, like you and me, are kind of scratching their heads, going, “Well, why is it that Roe was overturned and we keep losing?”

It’s because at the core, we cannot take for granted that people know what abortion is, what it entails, and we have a new generation that we have to educate on these things. We have to do the arduous work of not only looking to laws and ballots and political cycles but actually engaging our neighbor to talk to them about what abortion is and why it’s wrong.

EICHER: But doesn’t it prove the point that the law is a moral teacher? A half century of Roe versus Wade was not only deadly, but it taught the culture that abortion, even if you think it’s evil, it’s a necessary evil.

McCOY: Precisely. And with that, all of the rhetoric, such as “the government doesn’t have a right over a woman’s body,” becomes entrenched in people’s minds—so much so that it’s like we stop thinking.

We see this in our presidential election today as well. You’ll hear pro-abortion advocates who don’t really say the word “abortion” very often. They talk about freedom. They talk about choice. In other words, freedom and choice are conflated with upholding Roe or reinstating Roe or making it a constitutional right.

So, you’re exactly right. We’ve had two generations living in this legalized abortion society, and in many ways, it has been baked into our social consciousness that this is a good, and it is something worth defending. It’s part of why we need laws that are just and righteous.

BROWN: Author and speaker Katie McCoy. Thanks, Katie. We’ll see you again soon!

McCOY: Thanks for having me!

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, October 18th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

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

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: a cultural icon turns 30. For generations, Disney Studios was king of animated films. But three decades ago, all that changed. Here’s Arts and Culture editor Collin Garbarino.

COLLIN GARBARINO: Thirty years ago this month three entertainment giants founded DreamWorks Animation as a division of their newly created DreamWorks SKG. The SKG standing for superstar director Steven Spielberg, former-Disney executive Jeffery Katzenberg, and music mogul David Geffen.

Katzenberg took the lead on the animation studio. Audio here from a 2022 interview with Summit co-founder Jeff Rosenthal:

KATZENBERG: My teacher turned out to be Walt Disney, even though he had been dead 20 years when I got there.

Katzenberg had overseen Disney’s animation renaissance that had created instant classics like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King.

KATZENBERG: And I learned these amazing, amazing lessons which became North Stars for me. He said I make movies for children and the child that exists in every one of us. And he said, my movies are only as good as their villains. And so I learned from the greatest.

But Katzenberg split from The Walt Disney Company after a dispute with then CEO Michael Eisner and Walt’s nephew Roy Disney. Katzenberg felt Eisner and Disney had overlooked his contributions. Bringing his talents to DreamWorks would give him both the creative control and renown he desired. It would also give him the chance to humiliate the mighty Disney Animation Studio.

And DreamWorks did beat Disney. After Katzenberg’s departure Disney animation entered a slump that lasted about 15 years. Meanwhile DreamWorks created some critically acclaimed hits and launched its wildly successful Shrek franchise

SHREK: This is the part where you run away.

TOWNSPEOPLE: [screaming]

But it turns out DreamWorks’ real competitor wasn’t Disney. Just as Katzenberg was building his new animation studio, another upstart company was hoping to revolutionize the industry.

WOODY: You’re my favorite deputy…

Pixar released Toy Story in 1995, and kids’ entertainment hasn’t been the same since.

DreamWorks’ first animated feature film was Antz which came out in October of 1998. A month later Pixar released its second film, A Bug’s Life. Doesn’t it seem a little coincidental that two computer-animated movies about ant colonies would come out at the same time? It wasn’t a coincidence. Katzenberg knew what Pixar was working on, and he rushed out a similar product. A Bug’s Life is a little more slapstick than Antz, and it beat Antz at the box office, probably because it appealed more to kids. Antz, with Woody Allen voicing the hero, took a more ironic tone.

Z: My mother never had time for me. When you’re the middle child in a family of five million, you don’t get any attention. I mean, how’s it possible?

Both films fall into the category of being pretty good, but not especially memorable.

Even so, they are good examples of the divergent paths Pixar and DreamWorks would take. Up until 2015, Pixar was creating hit after hit, focusing on heartfelt stories and innovative animation that held broad appeal for both parents and children. DreamWorks, on the other hand, designed its biggest films to please more adolescent tastes.

GINGERBREAD MAN: Do you know the muffin man?

KING: The muffin man?

GINGERBREAD MAN: The muffin man.

KING: Yes. I know the muffin man. Who lives on Drury lane?

DreamWorks’ films usually featured voice work from Hollywood A-listers to help sell the film. The humor was more irreverent, and it tended to rely heavily on jokes about pop culture. DreamWorks wanted to be timely, while those early Pixar movies proved timeless.

Over the last three decades, DreamWorks Animation has churned out 49 feature length films. Not all of them are great, but there are some gems that you might want to revisit.

A couple of months after Antz, DreamWorks released The Prince of Egypt, a retelling of the story of Moses.

MOSES: Rameses! Let my people go!

The movie stars Val Kilmer as Moses and Ralph Fiennes as his adoptive brother the Pharaoh. It isn’t 100 percent faithful to the story as told in the book of Exodus, but it’s respectful. The movie uses traditional hand-drawn animation and show-stopping songs reminiscent of the classic Disney style. DreamWorks would abandon hand-drawn animation five years later after its movie inspired by the story of Sinbad flopped in cinemas.

But DreamWorks would have plenty of monster hits. The fairytale mashup Shrek launched one of the studio’s most profitable franchises.

PUSS: Fear me!

In 2004, Shrek 2 became the highest-grossing animated film worldwide, a record it would hold on to until it was surpassed by Toy Story 3 in 2010. The Shrek franchise didn’t create the cracked fairytale genre, but it definitely helped make it ubiquitous. These days it seems kids encounter the cracked versions of fairy tales before they even know the traditional versions.

DreamWorks also created family-favorite franchises like Madagascar, How to Train Your Dragon, Trolls, and Kung Fu Panda. When my youngest daughter was a toddler, the only thing she wanted to watch was the original Kung Fu Panda.

PO: Legend tells of a legendary warrior whose kung fu skills were the stuff of legend.

And in recent years, DreamWorks has been experimenting with animation techniques that are in my opinion much more interesting than what Disney and Pixar have been offering lately. Check out The Bad Guys, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and The Wild Robot, which is still in theaters.

I’ll end today by recommending what I consider to be DreamWorks’ most underrated film: Rise of the Guardians, which came out in 2012. In the movie, Santa Claus, Sandman, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and Jack Frost ensure the safety of the world's children.

TOOTH FAIRY: Each of those lights is a child.

NORTH: A child who believes. And good or bad… Naughty or nice… We protect them.

Rise of the Guardians remixes the traditional stories from America’s holiday traditions. It’s amusing, and clever. But the thing that struck me was how much Christian imagery was in the film. Jesus’ name is never mentioned, but as Flannery O’Connor might say, He’s haunting every scene if you have eyes to see.

I’m Collin Garbarino.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming next on The World and Everything in It: the hymns we share.

Regardless of your church background or tradition, there are many Christian songs from the past that we’re all familiar with. Favorites we often return to.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: This summer, four musicians took ten of those timeless classics, and reimagined them in traditional folk and bluegrass stylings. The project is titled: Hymns That Made Us. I listened to the new renditions and have a review for you

MUSIC: Nothing but the blood, nothing but the blood, nothing but the blood….

On vocals…Adam Wright and Connie Skellie…they also play the mandolin and violin.

MUSIC: What can wash away my sins, nothing but the blood of Jesus…

Picking the bass and guitar are Tim Carroll and Chris Griffin. Together, the foursome make up the quartet, Act of Congress. It’s an unusual name Griffin says he and Wright picked up in college.

CHRIS GRIFFIN: We were looking for a time to practice in college and someone said it would take an act of congress to get you guys together and it kind of stuck. But it’s always a good conversation starter.

And once you get used to the name, you can focus on other things. Like the near perfect way Wright’s and Skellie’s voices blend in the hymn, “Nothing But The Blood.” Or how the two musically emphasize the hymn’s most important phrase.

MUSIC: Nothing but the blood, nothing but the blood, nothing but the blood…

Tim Carroll and Chris Griffin don’t sing but the two musicians do get high marks for the way they fill in the instrumental gaps.

GRIFFIN: We don’t have a drummer. So, if you’re thinking through things musically, the bass player, he acts like the drummer’s kick pedal. And the mandolin player acts like the snare on a drum set. So we’re constantly trying to pass around the rhythmic nature of the song so it feels like you still have a drummer, even when you don’t.

MUSIC: [Nothing but the blood]

Based in Birmingham, Alabama, all four band members are in their early forties, married with children and have day jobs both in and outside of the home.

GRIFFIN: Adam and I both work in local churches. Connie, the violin player, her husband is a worship leader at another local church. Tim, his wife, is a pharmacist, but Tim is raising their three children. They have three boys. Tim is a stay at home dad.

Together for nearly two decades, the band is known for its genre-bending sound. They’ve brought pop, folk, gospel and bluegrass to venues around the world. Over the years, the group has moved through different phases.

GRIFFIN: There was the band that traveled all the time and we were gone for six and eight weeks at a time. There’s been the band that’s played a lot of symphonies around the southeast. There’s been the band that’s played a lot of weddings.

Between twenty and thirty weddings a year! So producing another album seemed unlikely.

GRIFFIN: We always wanted to do ministry together in a worship space but could not find cohesion.

Griffin says that’s because all four have different backgrounds and worship styles. Two are presbyterian, one is baptist and the other non-denominational. Hymns brought them together.

CHRIS GRIFFIN: Classic, timeless text. And it seemed like a natural fit for us to do.

MUSIC: Come thou fount of every blessing…

Each band member got to include their favorite hymn on the project and the story behind it. For Griffin, “Come Thou Fount” is a tribute to the early years of both his marriage and his faith.

GRIFFIN: In my first house with my wife, I would sit on the back porch, and I would practice playing that song right out of college when I became a Christian.

Other group favorites will likely be some of your own…

MUSIC MONTAGE: What wondrous love is this oh my soul, my soul, what wondrous love is this, oh my soul….when peace like a river attendeth my way…

But this project also introduced me to hymns I’d never heard of before.

MUSIC: Dear refuge of my weary soul. On Thee when sorrows rise…

“Dear Refuge,” originally titled, “The Soul’s Only Refuge,” was written by Anne Steele, a prolific English hymn writer and essayist who lived in the 18th century. Lyrically, their arrangements mirror the original songs. Most selections are word for word from the hymnbook. But there are other instances where the group takes what I would call theologically sound creative liberty. John Newton’s “Amazing Grace”:

MUSIC: And when this flesh and heart shall fail. And mortal life shall cease…

It’s worth noting some arrangements aren’t as strong as others. I found it hard to keep up with the meter changes in their rendition of “How Great Thou Art.”

MUSIC: What joy shall fill my heart. Then I shall bow in humble…

After 17 years of performing as independent artists, Act of Congress is entering a new phase of ministry.

GRIFFIN: A year ago we’ve become the Nashville band. So, we’re traveling to Nashville every four weeks and taking a new step in some career moves.

With those new opportunities and plans, Griffin says their prayer is that they’ll continue to stand on Christ the solid rock.

MUSIC: On Christ the solid rock I stand……on Christ I stand. 

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, Caleb Welde, Mary Muncy, Jenny Rough, Candice Watters, Leo Briceno, Onize Oduah, Emma Freire, Janie B Cheaney, Travis Kircher, Amy Lewis, Grace Snell, Cal Thomas, Katie McCoy, and Collin Garbarino.

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

And thanks to the guys who stay up late to get the program to you early: Johnny Franklin and Carl Peetz.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Our producers are Paul Butler, Kristen Flavin, and Harrison Watters, with assistance from Lauren Dunn and Benj 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 Psalmist encourages us to worship our maker and King with these words: “Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth! Serve the LORD with gladness! Come into his presence with singing! Know that the LORD, he is God! It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.” —Psalm 100:1 - 3

So be sure to worship the LORD with your brothers and sisters in Christ this weekend. And Lord willing, we’ll meet you right back here on Monday.

Go now in grace and peace.

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