The World and Everything in It: October 31, 2025

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Good morning!

Has America’s ideological fever finally broken? We’ll talk about what may be a cultural tipping point—and what comes next.

NICK EICHER, HOST: John Stonestreet is standing by for Culture Friday.

Also a new Netflix film imagines a world one decision away from nuclear war.

CAPTAIN OLIVIA WALKER: Alright, anything from Pyongyang?

DUTY OFFICER: Not since the last test.

WALKER: Saber rattling or silence. I’m not sure which worries me more.

WORLD arts and culture editor Collin Garbarino reviews A House of Dynamite.

And your listener feedback for the month of October.

MAST: It’s Friday, October 31st. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Lindsay Mast.

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

MAST: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Trump-Xi meeting » President Trump says the United States is making big progress with China on trade, after his face to face meeting on Thursday with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One:

TRUMP:  I thought it was an amazing meeting. He's a great leader and uh, it was an outstanding group of decisions. I think that was made. A lot of decisions were made.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called the progress—his words— “an opportunity to reset the relationship … in terms of mutual respect.”

 BESSENT: The mood in the room was one of great respect, but also, uh, between two men who knew each other quite well and knew what they were getting into.

The White House says China has agreed to hold off for one year on new controls on the export of rare earth minerals. And Washington is halting plans to double tariffs on Chinese goods.

What’s more, Trump says he has decided to lower his combined tariff rates on imports of Chinese goods from 57% to 47% and Beijing agrees to buy large quantities of US soybeans and to take steps to fight fentanyl trafficking.

Bessent said final signatures on those agreements could come as soon as next week.

Trump nuke testing » President Trump on Thursday said the Pentagon will restart nuclear weapons testing for the first time in decades.

Trump claims that countries like Russia and China are testing their nuclear stockpiles, so the United States needs to keep up.

TRUMP: We have more than anybody. When I see them testing, I say, well, they're going to test, I guess we have to test. I'd like to see a denuclearization.

The United States stopped testing nukes in 1992, after the end of the Cold War as part of a global push to curb the arms race and move toward a test-ban treaty.

The U.S., Russia, and China all paused nuclear tests but never fully committed to a treaty

Both Russia and China insist they haven't been testing nuclear weapons. And the Kremlin says if any country begins such testing, Russia will follow suit.

Israel latest » In Jerusalem:

SOUND: [Israel protest]

Tens of thousands of men flooded the streets Thursday to protest plans to draft them into the military.

For decades, the Heredi or "ultra-Orthodox" Jews who are full-time seminary students were exempt from the mandatory military service required of other Israeli citizens. But Israel's high court in 2017 struck down those exemptions as unconstitutional.

Israel's parliament is set to discuss legislation on the topic next week.

Baruch Debchic was one of the demonstrators:

DEBCHIC: We very much appreciate all the soldiers who do everything and risk their lives, and do everything else, even those who don't risk their lives, to do everything we need to protect the state. But there is a complete lack of appreciation of the creative community and what the Torah learners do.

But counter-protester David Sherez said it's time for the ultra-Orthodox to do their part:

SHEREZ: I'm here today on behalf of all the reservists, all the soldiers, all of the people who were injured in this war, all the families who lost their beloveds. To tell my brothers, the Haredim, join us.

He said there is no contradiction between serving in the Army and studying Torah.

The demonstration shut down major roads leading into Jerusalem, and dozens were injured in confrontations with police. 

Hurricane Melissa aftermath » Communities across the northern Caribbean are now coping with the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa.

Officials report  catastrophic scenes all over Jamaica. The Montego Bay Airport is severely damaged. Many hillsides are bald after trees were ripped from the ground.

Dennis Zulu is the U.N.’s Resident Coordinator in Jamaica.

ZULU: It has been tremendous, unprecedented devastation of infrastructure, of property, roads, network connectivity, energy has been lost across its path.

Kingston Airport is beginning to reopen with emergency aid landing on the island.

The historic Category 5 storm killed at least 19 people and left many without homes, power or communication.

In Cuba, heavy equipment is clearing roads and the military is assisting isolated communities. However, no deaths have been reported there.

In Haiti, dozens were dead or missing after catastrophic flooding.

Teen wins religious liberty battle with Colorado school district » In Colorado, a high school student this week won her fight to include a Christian design in her painted parking spot. WORLD’s Benjamin Eicher reports.

BENJAMIN EICHER: Rampart High School in Colorado Springs lets seniors decorate their reserved parking spaces—but only with school approval.

And the school rejected Senior Sophia Shumaker’s artwork.

Inspired by Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep, it depicted a shepherd holding a staff, along with a Scripture reference to 1 Corinthians 13:4.

But the district has reversed its policy against religious symbolism after the nonprofit First Liberty Institute sent a legal demand letter arguing the ban violated Shumaker’s First Amendment rights.

Students are now allowed to include religious symbols or messages in their designs.

Shumaker calls the experience a lesson in standing up for what’s right.

For WORLD, I’m Benjamin Eicher.

Five more arrests in Louvre heist » In France, authorities have tightened the dragnet around the Louvre museum thieves, arresting five more people in connection with the recent crown-jewels heist.

Authorities have now arrested seven suspects in total, at least two of whom have reportedly admitted some involvement in the crime.

But the stolen loot, valued at more than $100 million dollars, remained missing as of last night.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: Culture Friday with John Stonestreet. Plus, your listener feedback for the month of October.

This is The World and Everything in It.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Friday, October 31st. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s Culture Friday! Joining us is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast, good morning John!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: This week another domino fell on one of the most controversial questions in culture and medicine.

Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, writing in The Wall Street Journal (gift article link) on Wednesday, says the numbers now back what many were once punished for suggesting—that the boom in transgender identification among teens wasn’t biological discovery, but social contagion.

He points to surveys showing trans identification among college students dropping by as much as half since 2022. If that’s true, the “trans moment,” as Wright calls it, may already have peaked.

Is this a full-on cultural corrective after an ideological fever, or the calm before a new storm?

STONESTREET: Well, as Yogi Berra once said, predictions are dangerous things to make, particularly predictions about the future.

EICHER: [Good St. Louisan]

STONESTREET: That’s right. I mean, it’s clear that the brakes have been put on, and you kind of think about what counts as cultural progress. And Peter Kreft years ago wrote that when you’re on the edge of the moral abyss, the best way forward is backwards. And we’ve certainly put on the brakes as we were once heading over the edge of the moral abyss.

But there are two things, I guess, that give me pause before I give too much celebration. Number one, that this should have been obvious from the very beginning. I think the second thing that gives me pause is that Romans 1 is so clear that a culture that denies God is a culture that will always, to some degree, deny reality. And that reality includes the obvious stuff—the stuff that should be clearly seen, as Paul writes in Romans chapter 1.

So I never want to underestimate the ability of a culture or an individual to suppress the truth in unrighteousness. And it’s not like we’ve gone right-way-up on all the parallel confusions—morally, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and other very clear, observable biological things. We still have a group, even those who fit into the co-belligerents with those of us who want to oppose transgender ideology, still wanting to promote something like same-sex marriage, which is every bit as much against biology, against observable reality, as the trans issue.

So I’m a little hesitant to say it’s a new day in America. It’s a better day, right? When you’ve got the gas to the floor and you’re headed straight off the moral cliff, it’s a good day when you hit the brakes—it’s better than the day before when you’re still heading that way. But that doesn’t mean we’ve turned around. So I guess that’s my hesitation.

EICHER: Let me follow up on that, John. If social contagion really is the best explanation, what does that say about the responsibility of schools, doctors, and the media that helped fuel it?

STONESTREET: Well, look, again—something we should have known from the beginning—when all the progressive politicians and education officials stood up and said, “We know better than parents. And maybe parents are domestic terrorists, and maybe they’re the enemies of this and that or the other.” That’s what they really thought, and we should have believed it.

And then we should have believed that everything then that came out of their mouths after that was a way of backing up this assertion, even if it was saying things that were obviously false, not true, and harmful—and then saying something like, “The science is settled.”

So, you know, we’ve talked here a lot about the loss of cultural trust, and what does that mean—particularly for Christians. I think also that it says something for the Christians who said, “Well, we should just go along with this because the science is settled,” or, “We should just go along with this because it’s too controversial and it’ll keep people away from the gospel.”

You know, again, since the release of the Truth Rising film, I’ve been thinking about all those people who told Jack Phillips, “You should just bake the cake,” and how absolutely wrong they were. But we’ve got a million examples like that of people, particularly Christians, saying you should just go along. The church doesn’t remedy the loss of cultural trust by then just trusting who’s untrustworthy, right? We become the truth-tellers. We become the ones who have—as Paul prayed for the church at Philippi—discernment. That’s the kind of people we need to be.

MAST: Here’s another falling cultural domino: There’s a sharp turn in the climate conversation. Former alarmist Bill Gates used to say things like this, from PBS:

GATES: The beaches disappear. You have you know trees dying off and lots of wildfires. You have the ability to grow food in the Southern part of the U.S. is dramatically reduced.

And so it makes the pandemic look small. The death rate by the end of the century would be over five times what we have had in this pandemic.

Well as of this week, he now says climate change won’t end humanity—that people will live and thrive for the foreseeable future.

Free Press commentator Lucy Biggers calls it too little, too late. She points out that years of “climate doom” messaging have taken a toll: half of young people report feeling anxious or helpless about climate change, and one in five say they’re afraid to have children because of it.

So now the billionaire who helped spread the fear says it’s time to focus on improving lives instead of obsessing over carbon counts.

Are we watching a larger cultural correction—where elites walk back the panic they once stoked?

STONESTREET: I think one thing we know from history is that panic doesn’t leave the culture just because the elites who preached it walk something back. I mean, think about The Population Bomb, which was, you know, an early form of this catastrophism, but that’s been one of the stickiest zombie ideas that you can think of.

And what I mean by sticky is it won’t go away. And what I mean by zombie is that baby should have died a long time ago, but for some reason a whole lot of people still think that the world’s overpopulated, even while we’ve hit a tipping point and are headed into a demographic winter that we see across Europe and much of the Western world—what a birth dearth will do to you.

Well, this is the same thing, and I’m so glad you brought up the panic that young people point to. The climate-change catastrophism has been put into the cultural water. We have so many of these sticky zombie ideas in history that continue to still wreak havoc in people’s peace of mind and very real habits—like the kind of money they spend, the kind of things that they spend it on, what they do with family and relationship and having babies and everything else. These ideas have consequences.

I’ll just give you one example, right? One example was this: climate-change catastrophism was actually leveraged by the Biden administration to downplay the persecution of Christians in Nigeria—chalking it up to a land dispute and saying that it was made worse over climate change. Okay, so none of that’s true. You know what’s still happening? You still have Muslims killing Christians there like they have been for years. This is by far the worst year on record, and under the Biden administration that kept the United States from labeling Nigeria a country of particular concern.

I hope it still doesn’t, right? Because climate change has proved bogus. So now we’ve got to figure out what’s the real cost. And, you know, here’s a sign: all the perpetrators in that crisis are Muslim, and all the victims are Christian.

EICHER: John, we’ve been watching signs of possible revival across the country, and this story caught our eye. Sunday night in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, players turned the North End Zone of Bryant-Denny Stadium into a worship service they called Audience of One

The sound that you hear is from one of the many online videos of that event. A wide receiver led, the quarterback and teammates shared testimonies, and more than a thousand students and fans joined in. Christian worship led by star athletes on a flagship SEC campus. What do you make of that, John: Does it point to a wider shift among Gen-Z men, or might it be just a one-off moment?

STONESTREET: Well, it’s not just a one-off. I mean, we saw similar videos at Ohio State certainly last year, but we’ve seen them again this year. We have reports on all kinds of college campuses. A friend of mine has sent me the similar reports from the University of Kansas.

And as a Duke basketball fan, it’s really hard for me to say anything good can come out of Kansas, but it’s way better what’s coming out of Kansas on this point than what’s coming out of Duke. That’s, by the way, not coming from the sports program but just the student-ministry group.

These student-ministry groups are absolutely huge, and they’re attracting people who weren’t believers before. You know, they’re also doing a better job at giving safe haven, so to speak, on these college campuses to these students.

So it’s not just a one-off. It’s been going on for now more than a couple years, and it is very, very widespread. I do think there’s some uniqueness coming out of the South, particularly the SEC—when you’re talking about, you know, truck beds lined with plastic swimming pools where they’re holding baptisms and all other kinds of things that, you know, maybe can only happen in the South. But at the same time, it’s a lot of fun to watch. It’s a lot of fun to see this in athletes.

Listen, I think there were some seeds ahead of time that at least need to be acknowledged. It was probably about maybe seven or eight years ago where I started to notice a change in coaching. Now, I grew up in sports. I played small-college basketball. My freshman year, I played for a coach who was insane. He had the Bobby Knight kind of, you know, scream at you, yell at you.

I remember one time we’d gotten beat really bad and played bad, and all of a sudden we were all sleeping on the bus on the way back from an away game, and all of us sat up at the same time because he had pulled off into our parking lot. We’re like, is he going to kill us? Is he going to make us run in the dark? Thankfully, he had just taken a wrong turn. But all of us had the same thought there—just how.

And that was a pretty normal way of coaching, right? You shame somebody into obeying. And I remember it was before the national-championship game in college football where the players were being interviewed, talking about how they love each other and how they love their coach. And I’d only seen that one other time before, which was Jim Valvano and NC State.

But this was different. This was like, “We tell each other before we go play, we love each other, that we’re in this together.” So you saw coaches not being drill sergeants; you saw coaches being dads. You saw coaches who had a sincere faith—not only a different coaching style, but a sincere faith.

But there is an ability within college football and college-basketball programs right now for coaches and players to be people of faith, to be good guys. There’s an expectation. The cultural norms have changed. And I don’t think there’s been enough history done on the change in coaching that took place probably about 10 or 15 years ago. That’s just my thought, though.

MAST: Well, John, it seems Christian-influencer turned deconstructionist-influencer Jen Hatmaker has a new god … and it’s her body. Hatmaker wrote as much for Oprah Daily. She’s upset about a number of things, including the patriarchy, capitalism, and Christians who oppose Hormone Replacement Therapy. Now that’s a bigger issue than we have time to deal with adequately, so I’d like to focus on her argument: that her body is the most knowing source of wisdom.

I found audio of the article, and thanks to capitalism, had to pay $25 to access it. And then found out it was AI-generated, so there’s the further oppression. Let’s have a listen, anyway:

HATMAKER: So as we consider interventions for perimenopause and menopause, it is no surprise that women raised in patriarchal Christian environments have an outsize resistance to HRT as unnatural. These same women oppose reproductive rights, as if their daughters couldn’t experience a rape or ectopic pregnancy and be forced to turn septic in the hospital parking lot before a doctor could legally save their lives. Forget supporting run-of-the-mill agency over our bodies simply as their rightful owners; these heavily controlled women ceded autonomy before fourth grade. Shouldn’t everyone else have to?

John, care to take a stab at unraveling that illogic?

STONESTREET: Absolutely impossible. No one could do that within the time constraints that we have. What a strange leap, but it actually makes sense—and it’s not because it’s someone who actually values the body too much. It’s actually someone who devalues the body.

I know it sounds strange, because of how she said what she said. What she’s actually claiming is that the body itself is a canvas, and the body itself is a way of projecting oneself to the world. It’s the medium you use to project your true self—but your true self is really who you are inside, and that’s your own feeling, your own, you know, here’s what I want out of life.

And it’s how she’s explaining a lot of her own moral framework right now in this new book—and has really for quite some time. It, by the way, is very similar to ancient paganisms that talked about femininity in a particular way. There’s this inner spirit—that’s what’s really real—and then the body becomes a projection.

It’s very easy to see how that’s a very similar idea to the transgender ideology: that this is my true self, and the body is a projection. It also believes that the body then can be changed, it can be altered, it can be violated. If it’s another body, it can be killed, because it’s not my body—that’s the abortion argument. You can just kind of go down the line.

It’s a very Gnostic view, and it sounds like someone who is elevating the body. She is elevating the sense experiences that come through the body, but she’s actually devaluing the body. It’s a Gnostic position—that the body is pliable, the body is basically how I portray my true self, and that’s the most important thing in life.

Carl Trueman identified that as the idea of expressive individualism. “I have to have the right to portray whatever I want to the world,” and giving up that autonomy—which is what she has just argued here in this piece that we just quoted—is the greatest crime that you can do against yourself, because this inner voice is who you really are.

MAST: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thank you, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Friday, October 31st.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

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

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: a chilling new film imagines what happens when the world’s most unthinkable weapon suddenly becomes thinkable.

MAST: Netflix’s new movie A House of Dynamite examines the hard choices the government would wrestle with in the face of a nuclear attack.

Here’s WORLD arts and culture editor Collin Garbarino.

COLLIN GARBARINO: An intercontinental ballistic missile is heading toward the United States. Presumably it’s bringing with it a nuclear warhead. That’s the situation in director Kathryn Bigelow’s new Netflix political thriller A House of Dynamite.

The film begins in the White House Situation Room. One of my favorite actresses, Rebecca Ferguson plays Olivia Walker. From the situation room, it’s her job to monitor world events.

CAPTAIN OLIVIA WALKER: Right, anything from Pyongyang?

DUTY OFFICER: Not since the last test.

WALKER: Sabre rattling or silence. I’m not sure which worries me more.

She starts her shift distracted because her young son’s fever has spiked. Within minutes of coming on duty, she finds out about the missile launch. Suddenly her concern shifts to whether her son’s country will exist by the end of the day.

WALKER: Add SECDEF and POTUS to the call. Now, Davis. Were you listening to that?

ADMIRAL MARK MILLER: Yeah, I was.

WALKER: Yeah?

MILLER: Yeah, get to it.

Walker rounds up the secretary of defense, Strategic Command, the NSA, and eventually the president who’s out making goodwill appearances.

GENERAL ANTHONY BRADY: We have dual phenomenology on the track. Nineteen minutes to impact.

The action in this 112-minute film takes place over a harrowing 20 minutes… the time that elapses between the missile’s detection and its arrival at its destination.

A House of Dynamite is rated R for strong language. But the language feels realistic—lots of muttered cursing under the breath by military and government officials under extreme stress.

Kathryn Bigelow knows what she’s doing when it comes to directing military and political thrillers. She won two Academy Awards for 2009’s The Hurt Locker, and she got another Oscar nomination for 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty.

The action in A House of Dynamite unfolds in three acts that repeat those tense minutes from different perspectives. Each time we relive these moments, we get a deeper understanding of the various characters and the impossible choices they face.

MAJOR DANIEL GONZALEZ: What is it, Sergeant?

SERGEANT MARY NOLAN: Uh, clear radar acquired our object, sir.

MAJOR DANIEL GONZALEZ: And?

SERGEANT MARY NOLAN: Uh, rate of ascent slowing. Inclination is flattening.

MAJOR DANIEL GONZALEZ: Velocity?

NOLAN: It’s steady, sir. Six kilometers per second.

Two urgent questions must be answered as we count down the minutes to impact. First, is the U.S. military capable of stopping the missile. Second, how should the government respond?

This second question is especially vexing because surveillance systems didn’t register who launched the missile. It came from somewhere in the Pacific. Is it the North Koreans? The Russians? The Chinese? How can the president order a counterstrike if he’s not positive who’s responsible?

MAJOR GENERAL STEVEN KYLE: A single unattributed strike sows chaos. Puts us on our heels. And gives them an opportunity to see if they can get away with worse.

BRADY: It gives everyone that opportunity.

Would a lack of response signal weakness to our enemies and invite more attacks? Maybe the best course of action would be to launch our entire arsenal to neutralize the nukes of all potential aggressors. But that course would escalate the crisis and invite the targets to immediately launch their entire arsenals.

POTUS: I let whoever did this get away with it. How is that any different from surrendering?

DEPUTY NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR JAKE BAERINGTON: Sir, if you wanna look at it that way, then I’m telling you your choices are surrender or suicide.

Over the last 40 years, we’ve lulled ourselves into thinking of nuclear war as unthinkable. A House of Dynamite is an unsettling movie because it shows just how thinkable the unthinkable really is. We might have plans and contingencies, but if someone really did launch a nuke, world leaders would have less than half an hour to respond.

BAERINGTON: So what now? What are we doing?

MILLER: Now I call Fort Belvoir and put the Army Corps of Engineers on standby in case the White House gets hit and they have to dig us out.

BAERINGTON: Serious?

MILLER: That’s what the plan says.

BAERINGTON: There’s a plan for this?

The film’s characters show a range of reactions. Some advocate immediately launching a global war. Some caution that the stakes are too high and that the U.S. shouldn’t respond at all. Some focus on making sure their loved ones are far from any urban center. The president is one of the last people to find out about the crisis, but he’s the only one who can determine the response. As the audience, we feel the agony of his responsibility.

A House of Dynamite isn’t a feel-good movie. It’s a reminder that no one wins in a nuclear war. We’ve used that fact to comfort ourselves. We tell ourselves that since this kind of war can have no winner, no one would want to start one. But Bigelow’s film offers an overlooked caveat: Someone who’s already losing the game might decide that they prefer a world without any winners. It’s a sobering and scary thought.

I’m Collin Garbarino.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Friday, October 31st. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast. Time now for Listener Feedback.

We start with this feedback from Lyle Hall. He’s a regular listener who benefits from our international coverage every week on World Tour, though he found the October 15th coverage of El Salvador not up to par.

LYLE HALL: The political and social challenges within El Salvador are complex, and there are many competing viewpoints that are important to understand. Unfortunately, the recent report by Carlos Paez provided a one -sided view of one issue facing the country. The initial basis for the story was a single fact from a university study that stated more than half of Salvadorans fear expressing political views. However, the story ignored additional facts in that same study that showed very strong public support for Bukele and his government's policies. The story also leveled multiple accusations against the government, but there was not even a mention of trying to get a response from a government spokesperson…I hope that future reporting on El Salvador will provide a more balanced perspective that will enable your listeners to more fully understand the issues from a broad range of opinions and facts. Thanks for all you do at WORLD News to bring biblically objective journalism to us all.

EICHER: In defense of Carlos, that’s on us as editors. Our view is that when we accept a story, the buck stops with us, and we didn’t insist on the balance that we ordinarily would. So I agree with Mr. Hall. We need to do better by our reporters and by our listeners—and we will.

MAST: Next, Jennifer from Richmond, Virginia, commenting on our October 16th story on restorative reproductive medicine. She wanted to share a different personal experience.:

JENNIFER: Both of my boys were conceived with the aid of a reproduction specialist down in Louisiana. And at no point was I told initially or anywhere in that three to four year process that IVF was the best or only option for me. The team that I worked with worked tirelessly along with my husband and myself to perform a multitude of tests to try to get to the root cause of why the infertility was occurring. And eventually, we were able to have both of our sons through a procedure called an IUI. I certainly have a lot of the same concerns about IVF that y'all talked about today. I just wanted to provide a counterbalance of experience that a lot of parents may not be only presented with that option. Thanks for all the hard work, guys, we love listening to you and we're going to continue listening to you. Have a great morning.

Jennifer, thank you. That’s a great reminder that couples’ experiences really do vary widely. And we’re so glad your story had a happy ending!

EICHER: Pastor Jeff Moser from Boise, Idaho, also got in touch. He was encouraged by David Bahnsen’s not shying away from making a tough call.

JEFF MOSER: …during a recent Monday Moneybeat segment, David Bahnsen commented on the use of presidential pardons, citing the inappropriate and inordinate use of them for self-benefiting reasons in recent administrations. I just want to say thank you for your commitment to truth-telling and gracious refusal to skirt over the sort of actions that run counter to the humble and righteous living that God intends for us. In fact, it's almost a direct quote from Isaiah 5, verse 23, a passage my wife and I read this week: “woe to those who acquit the guilty for a bribe and deprive the innocent of his right.” Keep up the good work.

MAST: Another regular listener, Mary Norton, also had a comment about our Monday lineup:

MARY NORTON: I love Mondays. What could be better than learning about two subjects I know so little about in the world? The Supreme Court and economics. So to have Mary, Jenny, and Steve telling us about nine cases before the Supreme Court this term was amazing. Thanks Nick for moderating the discussion. What a great way to start the week.

EICHER: As they say at Chick-fil-a, my pleasure! Seriously, we’ve got a great and smart legal team and all the team members are a genuine pleasure to work with.

A couple days later, Kim Henderson’s story out of Mississippi struck a chord with Beverly Jacobson.

BEVERLY: It is difficult to leave our kiddos who have these complex needs, and I appreciate how she shared that story, and it's close to my heart, and it's something that a lot of people need to know about. I think the church can really come alongside families like this and show them the love of Christ because it is it's hard. So thank you, Kim, for all you do. I appreciate your reporting.

MAST: And finally, one more listener—Amy Fields—called after our World Tour story on the growing church in Mongolia.

AMY FIELDS: I just wanted to callN in and say how much I appreciated the story this morning about the growth of the church in Mongolia. In around 1983 I saw in Operation World that there were just several known believers in Mongolia. And this was what really inspired me to consider going into missions and since then my husband and I have served in West Africa. And earlier this year we dedicated the New Testament in a new language. So it was a huge encouragement to me to hear that in that same time period the church has gone from a few known believers in that country to over 100,000. I am thanking God for that.

That’s this month’s Listener Feedback. Thanks to everyone who called in and sent us emails this month. We appreciate your constructive feedback even if we don’t have time to highlight it all each month.

EICHER: Just a quick reminder before we wrap up. Today is the application deadline for our upcoming WJI midcareer course. The scholarship-funded training will be held in Louisville, Kentucky, January 4th to January 10th. The course features instruction in boots-on-the-ground reporting, and the opportunity to learn from WORLD reporters and editors.

MAST: For more information or to submit the online application, visit wji.world. That’s wji.world.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s time to name the crew who put the week’s programs together:

David Bahnsen, Hunter Baker, Janie B Cheaney, Emma Eicher, Collin Garbarino, Kim Henderson, Amy Lewis, Liz Lykens, Carolina Lumetta, Mary Muncy, Mary Reichard, Jenny Rough, Leah Savas, Josh Schumacher, John Stonestreet, and Cal Thomas.

Thanks also to our breaking news crew: Kent Covington, Daniel Devine, Christina Grube, Travis Kircher and Steve Kloosterman.

And thanks to the Moonlight Maestros, working in the dark of night so the program’s ready bright and early: Benj Eicher and Carl Peetz …

Harrison Watters is Washington producer, Kristen Flavin is features editor, Paul Butler is executive producer, and Les Sillars is editor-in-chief. I’m Lindsay Mast.

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

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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: “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” —1st Corinthians 1:18

Myrna’s out this week, and she’s counting on me to remind you: Sunday’s coming! So make sure to worship with a Bible-believing church this weekend.

Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in every circumstance.

And Lord willing, we’ll be right back here Monday morning.

Go now in grace and peace.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.