The World and Everything in It — September 10, 2020

MEGAN BASHAM, HOST: Good morning!

Christian schools braced for a drop in enrollment as parents weighed the risk of sending their students back to class. But many schools have actually had their rosters grow.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Also persecutors around the world are using food aid as a weapon against minority faiths. Christians in some countries are being told to renounce their faith if they want help feeding their families.

Plus our fifth and final Hope Awards winner.

And Cal Thomas on Washington’s runaway spending train.

BASHAM: It’s Thursday, September 10th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Megan Basham.

BROWN: And I’m Myrna Brown. Good morning!

BASHAM: Up next, Kent Covington has the news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: NIH: Halted vaccine study shows ‘no compromises’ on safety » Top government doctors told lawmakers on Capitol Hill Wednesday that when a coronavirus vaccine is delivered to the public, it will be safe and effective. 

Surgeon General Jerome Adams said he has not seen any political influence in the testing process. 

ADAMS: We have a process in place that I trust as a doctor, as a dad. 

Their testimony came as drugmaker AstraZeneca suspended its final phase of testing of a COVID-19 vaccine after a volunteer recipient became ill. 

The Director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins said the very fact that one illness in the 30,000-person study halted testing “ought to be reassuring.”

COLLINS: When we say we are going to focus first on safety and make no compromises, here is Exhibit A of how that is happening in practice.

AstraZeneca gave no details on the illness, but Collins said it involved a “spinal problem.” Tests are on hold while scientists determine whether the test subject’s illness was a side effect of the shot or just a coincidence. 

There are six vaccine candidates now conducting large scale trails. Three of them are in the third and final phase of testing, including AstraZeneca’s vaccine. 

The doctors said they remain cautiously optimistic that a vaccine will be ready by the end of the year. 

U.S. to draw down troops in Iraq and Afghanistan by November » The U.S. military will pull thousands of troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan by November. 

Commander of the U.S. Central Command, Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, made that announcement Wednesday during a visit to Iraq. 

The Pentagon will remove just over 2,000 of the roughly 5,200 troops in the country. Officials say they’re confident that U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces can handle the remnants of ISIS. 

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the move reflects the fulfillment of the president’s promise.

MCENANY: And look, this is a president, when he says he’s going to end endless wars, it’s not a slogan like it’s been for Democrats and past presidents. It is an actual truth. 

General McKenzie also said troop levels in Afghanistan would drop to 4,500 by November. 

Trump nominated for Nobel Prize » A Norwegian lawmaker said Wednesday that he has nominated President Trump for a 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.

Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a member of the Norwegian parliament, said Trump should be considered for several reasons. 

GJEDDE: His reduction of standing arms. He has reduced the number of troops in the Middle East. And the third criteria is promotional peace congresses. And his latest effort resulted in the peace between the U.A.E and Israel. 

Israel and the United Arab Emirates agreed last month to a historic deal, brokered by the Trump administration, normalizing relations. Leaders from both countries are scheduled to sign it at the White House on Tuesday. 

President Trump said he is “honored” by the nomination. 

Tybring-Gjedde was one of two Norwegian lawmakers who nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for efforts to bring reconciliation between North and South Korea. 

Trump releases list of 20 new possible Supreme Court picks » Also on Wednesday, President Trump announced he’s adding 20 names to the list of possible Supreme Court candidates. He has vowed to choose from that list if he has future vacancies to fill.

The new additions include judges, current and former government attorneys, and three sitting Republican senators. 

TRUMP: Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri.

Also on the list, the current ambassador to Mexico, Christopher Landau, and Noel Francisco, who argued 17 cases as the Trump administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer.

Wildfires burn across Western states » AUDIO: [Sound of wind]

Winds gusting to 50 mph fanned dozens of catastrophic wildfires Wednesday across parts of Washington state and Oregon. 

Officials in some places were giving residents just minutes to evacuate their homes. And Oregon Governor Kate Brown said the flames consumed hundreds of houses. 

And the weather still isn’t cooperating in California, where an unprecedented number of fires are raging across the state. 

Cal Fire spokesman Edwin Zuniga told reporters…

ZUNIGA: Erratic winds basically push that fire in all directions. That’s something that we’ve been having to deal with over the past couple of days. Obviously, the record-setting heat we had over the weekend and continue to have. 

A massive cloud of smoke blanketed much of California on Wednesday, dimming the sun to an eerie orange glow over San Francisco.

NFL season starts tonight » The 2020 NFL season kicks off just hours from now with two of the league’s brightest young quarterbacks on display. 

Super Bowl LIV (54) MVP Patrick Mahomes will lead the defending champion Kansas City Chiefs as they host Deshaun Watson’s Houston Texans. 

As with other leagues, the NFL has installed a range of new safety measures amid the pandemic, and there will be no fans in attendance. 

Action begins at 8:20 Eastern Time on NBC.

I’m Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: Christian schools hold steady amid pandemic upheaval.

Plus, Cal Thomas on our ever-increasing public debt.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MEGAN BASHAM: It’s Thursday the 10th of September, 2020. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Megan Basham.

MYRNA BROWN: And I’m Myrna Brown. First up: Christian schools and COVID-19.

Millions of students finished the last school year online. Now as a new school year begins, many public schools are still having classes either completely online or splitting between online and in-person instruction.

BASHAM: Online education fatigue is leading to a surge of parents choosing to homeschool this year, but it’s also prompted a boost in attendance at some Christian schools. WORLD’s Sarah Schweinsberg reports.

SARAH SCHWEINSBERG, REPORTER: Heading into the 2020 school year, Wilmington Christian School expected to take an enrollment hit. Roger Erdvig heads the school in Hockessin, Delaware. 

ERDVIG: So from 330, we downgraded to 307 coming into the school year. That was our expectation. With a private school tuition, we assumed that a lot of people would have serious challenges being able to continue to pay. 

Losing 7 percent of the student body may not sound like a lot, but for Christian schools that operate on tight margins those losses add up. Erdvig says the school prepared for a lean year. 

ERDVIG: We cut everything we possibly could in preparation for that kind of a downturn in enrollment. 

But then a surprise. Instead of families leaving, they stayed, and more came. This year, the school enrolled 341 students.  

ERDVIG: So we actually have surpassed our enrollment projections from pre COVID-19 and significantly surpassed by 30 students our COVID-19 projections. 

Lynn Swaner is the chief strategy and innovation officer at the Association of Christian Schools International. Swaner says a surprising number of the group’s 2,300 Christian schools are seeing enrollment grow this year.

SWANER: We had a full quarter of schools actually reporting an increase in enrollment.

Swaner says half the group’s member schools are experiencing a decline, but it’s less than expected. 

SWANER: The highest range of that drop is about 6 to 10 percent.

The other quarter of the member pie have student numbers holding steady. 

Jeff Walton directs the American Association of Christian Schools.. He says its more than 700 members have had similar experiences. Many schools reported that a portion of last year’s study body left to homeschool. But… 

WALTON: The really interesting piece is that most of those schools have not experienced an overall decline in enrollment. And many of our state leaders are this week saying, actually, we’re probably going to stay even and might even go up. 

Jeff Walton and Lynn Swaner say that steady enrollment and even enrollment growth is due to several factors. The first: public school families are looking for in-person education for their children. 

Most Christian schools are offering that. 

Michael Phillips leads Bay City Christian School in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He says the school felt the only way it could fulfill its mission was by meeting in person.  

PHILLIPS: We’re supposed to be doing the spiritual, the academic, the the social and the physical needs of our students. And we decided we can do that best if we’re going to be in school five days a week. 

To do that, the school did the second important factor. It worked with families and staff to implement health precautions and guidelines that most were comfortable with.

PHILLIPS: We have plastic shields around their desks. When they come into school, we take their temperature, you know, they wash their hands and just kind of preliminary things like that. But then they have to be in their mask. 

Dan Peterson is the head of school at Regents School of Austin in Austin, Texas. It typically enrolls about a thousand students. This year, the school kept most of those students and added more. 

PETERSON: We actually are at the largest enrollment we’ve ever had in the history of the school. 

Peterson credits that boost to families looking for in-school learning, the school’s new coronavirus precautions … and a third factor: its online-only option. 

PETERSON: We provided an at-home option really for medically challenged families that had a concern, maybe a grandparent that might be living in their home that was more compromised to COVID-19. Around 50 students are actually choosing the at-home experience. 

Finally, many Christian schools are providing coronavirus financial relief funds for struggling families.

Last spring, Wilmington Christian School raised an additional $50,000 for families needing tuition assistance. 

Headmaster Roger Erdvig says that helped some families hang on. 

ERDVIG: We were able to, through an application process, help families who may not have qualified for standard tuition assistance. They qualified for COVID relief, and we were able to give them one time grants to help them. 

While the enrollment numbers are encouraging for many Christian schools, budgets are still tight. Many have had to hire additional janitors and pay for new air filters, plexiglass, and other health equipment. 

But, Regent’s Dan Peterson says school’s in session. And right now that’s what matters. 

PETERSON: We’re on this huge whitewater rafting trip. And we don’t know the rapids that are ahead for us. But we’ve left shore. We’re paddling, and it’s going to be really exhilarating.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Sarah Schweinsberg.

MYRNA BROWN: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: food aid and persecution.

On Tuesday we told you about the looming food crisis in developing nations. The world has enough food, just not in the right places. And pandemic-related restrictions have made it much harder to move food to where it’s needed most.

MEGAN BASHAM: That makes food an even more valuable commodity—one that can be used as a weapon instead of a blessing. According to a recent report from religious liberty watchdog Open Doors USA, officials in some parts of the world are withholding aid from Christians unless they are willing to renounce their faith.

Joining us now to talk about this new method of persecution is Open Doors CEO David Curry. Good morning, David!

DAVID CURRY, GUEST: Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

BASHAM: So, you note that this problem is especially bad in sub-Saharan Africa due to the presence of militant Islamic groups. Can you tell us what Christians are facing in parts of Nigeria and Sudan?

CURRY: Well, Nigeria is the real epicenter here, particularly northern Nigeria where you have two very radical groups: Boko Haram, which is associated with al Qaeda and ISIS. It has the same ideology, which is really the critical part, because what they’re doing is they’re attacking Christian villages, trying to push Christians out of the north, many of them over the last six to seven years have already gone down into the southern part of Nigeria. 

But with COVID relief, you’ve added an extra filter of difficulty, particularly because some of the food resources, hygiene resources that would typically go to these sorts of impoverished villages in the midst of COVID, these goods are being distributed by Islamic governors of these Sharia law states and they’re basically saying to Christians this aid is paid for by Islamic taxes, you are a Christian, you are an infidel, we’re not giving you food, we’re not giving you hygiene kits.

So, we’re drawing attention to this for a couple of reasons: it’s an intense situation, it also highlights the difficulty of Christians in general in that larger region. And we just really want people to be aware of it, to be able to step up and pray, first of all, if they’re people of faith. And to support them. … 

BASHAM: What about other countries, like Vietnam, where it’s the government, not militant groups, opposing Christianity?

CURRY: Well, what we really see as regards to issues around COVID relief being withheld from Christians is in what I would call the Islamic parts of Asia. It’s not to suggest that all of Islam would approve of this, but where there are radicals, where those groups exist or governors can withhold that, it’s happening in Islamic Asia. 

So you’ve got areas of India as well where there might be extremist Hindu groups that will do that. We really first began to notice it in places like India and the Islamic parts of Asia. So, but Vietnam, we haven’t seen the COVID relief to the same degree because the metropolitan areas have a lot more freedom.

BASHAM: Are international aid groups aware of what’s happening? Are they taking steps to prevent this kind of discrimination and persecution?

CURRY: I think everybody has largely been focused on, first, how can we get our hands on food supplies, on aid. I don’t think everybody’s been focused on this, which is why we’re drawing attention to it. The reality is that there’s about 100,000 people who we’ve been able to help in Asia, in some of these Islamic areas. 

We’ve identified, I think, somewhere around 12,000 families in northern Nigeria that need this aid and the hygiene kits and the things that they need to stay safe and to eat in the midst of the COVID thing. So, these are pockets—significant pockets—but I think that it hasn’t risen to the wider awareness because people are just scrambling, as you know. 

And we’d love to see people be aware of this to the degree that governments can step in and make sure that this aid gets distributed to Christian minorities and other minority groups who would be withheld. That would be helpful. Of course in Nigeria, that’s not an expectation we have because the government has been so ineffectual in protecting Christian communities from Boko Haram and the extremist groups. It’s hard to believe they’d step forward now, but we certainly hope they do.

BASHAM: David Curry is CEO of Open Doors USA. Thanks so much for joining us today.

CURRY: Thank you.

MYRNA BROWN: Law enforcement has released bodycam footage of an incident involving a sheriff’s deputy in Douglas County, Georgia. 

The unnamed deputy was serving papers at a rural residence and soon found herself in a struggle after a suspect jumped into her car and began eating her paperwork. 

Yup. We’re not kidding. 

The suspect had four legs and horns. And if you haven’t guessed by now, it was a goat.

AUDIO: He’s eating the paper. Get out! Go home! Get out! Go! Come on! Come on! Get out!

The sheriff’s office explained in a Facebook post on Friday that the deputy often leaves the door open on such calls in case she has to make a quick escape from aggressive dogs. 

But she didn’t account for a hungry goat. 

The animal clambered around, munched on some paperwork and knocked over a drink before managing to bump the deputy to the ground.

Neither the officer nor the goat was hurt. And from what we understand, the goat will not face charges for assaulting the officer.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

MYRNA BROWN: Today is Thursday, September 10th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day. Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

MEGAN BASHAM: And I’m Megan Basham. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: The last installment in our Hope Awards for Effective Compassion.

Anna Johansen takes us to a ministry that reaches out to some of South Carolina’s most broken residents.

DEANNA: We were actually living in a tent in a person’s backyard. We had been there for four months. 

ANNA JOHANSEN: Deanna Smith and her husband Jason used to have it all together. He was a chef; she was a manager at Walmart. But then things fell apart.

DEANNA: We were on drugs. We were on meth, we’ve been on meth for four years. Eventually all our money was going to drugs.

They sold everything so they could keep using. They quit paying bills, quit paying rent. They were both deep in addiction.

DEANNA: I just didn’t care if I laid in there and died. That is a horrible feeling coming off of that. And all I could think about was wanting to go get more of it to feel better. 

Then a family member reached out and told them about a ministry called the Dream Center.

Chris Wilson is its executive director. Back in 2010, she felt a call to help people in the community. So that’s what she and her husband did. 

WILSON: And we didn’t understand at the time that we’re kind of helping them in the wrong way…

If someone was jobless, they would help them get a job. If someone was homeless, they would help get them into housing. But Wilson would inevitably be disappointed.

WILSON: And I would say, Okay, now, here’s your new place to live. So, you know, you can do A, B, and C, but please don’t do D or you’ll get evicted. You know, within two days, they will jump right over A, B and C straight to D. And they would get evicted. Or we would get them a job, pull some strings, get them a job and three days later, we’d get a call that said we had to fire them. 

Wilson began to realize that you couldn’t just fix the symptoms. You had to go for the holistic cure. And that became the model for the Dream Center.

AUDIO: Oh the class? Yeah it’s in classroom one today. [SOUND OF CLASSROOM]

The Dream Center is a hub for dozens of different classes: Budgeting, parenting, Bible study, health, job readiness, anger management. Through those classes, Wilson hopes to change the community from the ground up. 

AUDIO: I know you finished the second half of chapter five with Christy last week…

This is a Bible class, run by volunteer Jeannie Truman. They’re studying John chapter six and the feeding of the 5,000. It’s not a big group—they’re just starting to get back up and running after COVID-19 shutdowns. One woman sits hunched over, her grizzled hair covered with a backwards pink baseball cap. Another carries a backpack and a grocery bag and wears a pair of slippers. Some are quiet the whole class. Others speak up often.

AUDIO: Even as Christians. Yes you have to pray and God does provide, but He provides on His time, not ours.

Anyone in the community can take classes here. If they do, they earn Dream Dollars…currency they can spend at one of the three Dream Center thrift stores in the area. We’ll visit one of those thrift stores in a minute. But first, let’s stop by the tiny house village. This is where homeless families can stay for one year while they rebuild their lives.

Chris Wilson leads the tour.

AUDIO: [Door creaking open] This is, Amanda just moved out of this house…

The village includes 23 tiny houses. Over the course of a year, the people who live here move through a structured program. They have to take classes and earn Dream Dollars. Those Dream Dollars go towards paying rent on the tiny house. 

WILSON: Nobody lives in this one right now, but this gives you an idea…Very small. Kind of like a dorm.

This tiny house village is where Deanna and Jason Smith came. The Dream Center isn’t meant for drug rehab, so the couple had to detox before they could come. Even then, they still had a long way to go. 

DEANNA: Eventually we started coming up here taking the classes and got moved in.

The first eight weeks of the program are a blackout period: No phones, no contact with the outside world. It’s an intense period of Bible study and character development. For Deanna Smith, that was intimidating.

DEANNA: And I feel so out at like a fish out of water because I’d never read the Bible. I didn’t know anything about it.

She would sit silently during class, feeling like the black sheep of the group. But as she read more of the Bible, she started to notice a change.

DEANNA: It’s just like when you start reading it, you just get pulled in, you get drawn in. And it didn’t take long before I was just in there asking questions, raising my hand.

The Smiths still had to work through withdrawal, but Deanna says dealing with the guilt was almost worse. 

DEANNA: Because we felt so ashamed even though they weren’t judging us or anything. Realizing we had hurt our families, we had hurt our children.

The only thing that helped with that was turning their lives over to God.

DEANNA: I’m telling y’all when we surrendered everything to the Lord, it just got easier and easier. And Jesus transformed everything about us. Nothing about us is the same. 

After the first eight weeks of the program, Deanna started working at one of the Dream Center thrift stores. 

AUDIO: [SOUND OF STORE]

All of the stores’ profit goes to funding the Dream Center. And the stores provide a place for people to get work experience and start providing for themselves.

AUDIO: Okay I had to do a return and re-ring her stuff up…

All the residents volunteer at the ministry in some capacity. That’s key to the Dream Center’s “hand up instead of a hand out” mentality. 

Chris Wilson says they do their best to provide a place for people to rebuild their lives. But it doesn’t always work.

WILSON: So we just had a lady relapse with drugs. And we even gave her a second chance because we dearly loved her kids. But she still was not, we actually had to call DSS and have them get involved because she was not willing to make the changes. She just wasn’t ready, I guess.

The ministry has a lot of moving pieces. But Chris Wilson says the gospel is at the center of it all.

WILSON: We don’t pound them over the head with a Bible. We try very hard not to do that. But Christ is undeniable, here. So we really are just trying to leave it out in front of them. And when they accept him and it’s real and then we see real transformation.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Anna Johansen in Easley, South Carolina.

BROWN: That’s the last in our series of features on the 2020 Hope Awards for Effective Compassion recipients. Now it’s your job to vote for the ministry you’d like to see receive the $10,000 grand prize. Voting begins next week at wng.org/compassion. That’s wng.org/compassion.

MEGAN BASHAM: A new season of Listening In begins this week. Coming up next, an excerpt from tomorrow’s episode.  

This time Warren Smith talks with musician and songwriter Buddy Greene. He’s best known for his musical mastery on the harmonica. One of his most memorable performances on the “pocket piano” happened at Carnegie Hall.

WARREN SMITH: Tell me how that came to pass. It’s just absolutely first rate and I just, you know, really appreciate that, and I want to thank you for that. But you and Bill kind of had a little schtick go in that set that up as well.

BUDDY GREENE: Well, you know it was really a fluke. It wasn’t even supposed to happen. I was not scheduled to have a spot on the video program, but Bill and I were standing there during a break. Looking at the empty Carnegie Hall and I just was telling Bill, you know, “Thank you so much for having me at this thing is, this is just the coolest thing to be at Carnegie Hall” and he said, “yeah, this is great.” And he looked at me and said, “Hey, you want to do something on the show?” And I said, “Are you kidding? Of course!” 

And so that was basically it. We didn’t rehearse it. We didn’t do anything. In fact, I think, actually, by the time he called me up there, I thought he had maybe forgotten about it. I just thought it wasn’t going to happen. So when he turned around and you know, waved his finger, be like “come on” and it was just one of those moments where I didn’t feel nervous and I can’t explain that except maybe just the grace of God, because there I was standing on one of the most, you know, hallowed stages in the world. And I was perfectly at ease, having a great time with Bill. So, the whole thing’s just worked out great. 

And then it’s something that got posted on YouTube a couple of years later not by me. Somebody just sent it to me one time and it already had about 100,000 views or something at that point. And you’re right, now I think over the years, I don’t how many million hits there are on it now. I have so many harmonica players who say, if somebody sends me that video one more time, I’m gonna shoot you…[LAUGHTER OUT]

BASHAM: That’s Buddy Greene talking to Warren Smith. To hear the complete conversation, look for Listening In tomorrow wherever you get your podcasts.

MYRNA BROWN: Today is Thursday, September 10th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

MEGAN BASHAM: And I’m Megan Basham. Commentator Cal Thomas now on fresh evidence of Washington’s spending problem.

CAL THOMAS, COMMENTATOR: Amid all the presidential campaign coverage, you may have missed the latest report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). It isn’t a good one. For the fiscal year ending this month, the CBO projects the federal deficit—that’s how much the government spends beyond its means—will hit $3.3 trillion. That’s more than triple what it was last year. 

Overall, U.S. government debt is on pace to surpass 100 percent of GDP next year—meaning more debt than the country’s entire economic output in a single year. By comparison, the debt was “only” 35 percent of GDP in 2007. 

The pandemic is partially responsible, but it is too easy an excuse to blame a virus for politicians of both parties to stop spending and reduce debt. The federal government continues to take in record amounts of revenue, but it goes out the Treasury’s door as fast as it comes in.

Very few in Washington ever speak of the harm debt causes, and this report provides the latest example. Where are the campaign promises and plans to stop this runaway train? Most candidates don’t even pretend to care anymore. 

Maybe that’s because we the people haven’t demanded it of them. Maybe it’s also because the media and the opposing politicians demonize officials who make even small attempts to rein in spending—calling them uncaring toward the poor, children, the elderly, etc. 

It isn’t that we don’t have sufficient warnings about the dangers of debt. It is that the politicians and those who benefit from their largesse refuse to heed those warnings, instead putting their careers ahead of the welfare of the nation. 

Take President Trump, for example. In 2016 he promised to eliminate the national debt in eight years. Instead it’s ballooned from just under $20 trillion to $26.7 trillion as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has repeatedly struck spending deals with former Democrat and current Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin—and the president has signed them into law. 

Meanwhile, Joe Biden says we haven’t spent enough. He wants to raise taxes, including those on capital gains, to pay for his $7 trillion spending plan.

Fiscal restraint used to enjoy bipartisan agreement. 

Republican President Ronald Reagan said, “We don’t have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven’t taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much.”

Democratic President John F. Kennedy believed economic growth occurred when lawmakers cut taxes and reduce spending. He believed high taxes slowed capital formation and reduced risk-taking—while lower taxes produced more revenue for the Treasury. We’ve seen that proven time and time again, including after the 2017 tax overhaul. 

Kennedy couldn’t get nominated by today’s Democratic Party. 

Recently I quoted several of our wise Founders who warned against debt. I won’t quote them all again, but we’ll link to those in today’s transcript. 

But I’ll remind you of what James Madison said: “I go on the principle that a public debt is a public curse, and in a Republican Government a greater curse than any other.”

I’m Cal Thomas.

MYRNA BROWN: Tomorrow: Leaders in police departments across the country are announcing their resignations. Who’s to blame for the exodus?

Plus, the new Disney movie, Mulan, is sparking controversy for thanking organizations in the Chinese government linked to genocide.

We’ll talk with John Stonestreet about that on Culture Friday.

We’ll also have a review of the film.

That and more tomorrow. 

I’m Myrna Brown.

MEGAN BASHAM: And I’m Megan Basham.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio.

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First Corinthians asks us, what do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not?

I hope you’ll have a great rest of the day. We’ll talk to you tomorrow!

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