The World and Everything in It - September 27, 2021

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

A new report shows college students less engaged in rigorous debate or thinking through their positions.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s ahead on Legal Docket.

Also, the Monday Moneybeat. Today: the ups and downs of the markets, the Federal Reserve behaving as predicted, and the drama over the debt.

Plus the WORLD History Book, today the 80th anniversary of a baseball record that still stands.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, September 27th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

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

REICHARD: Up next, Kent Covington has the news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Mayorkas: border camp cleared, more than 10k migrants released in U.S. » A camp along the Texas border once crowded with tens of thousands of mostly Haitian migrants is now empty.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas revealed on Sunday that the Biden administration released many of the migrants inside the United States.

MAYORKAS: Approximately, I think it’s about 10,000 or so, 12,000.

He said thousands more are in custody and the administration may release many of them inside the country as well. Those released north of the border are given orders to appear in an immigration court at a future date.

Republicans note that, historically, many migrants who are released and given such orders never show up in court.

And Texas Governor Greg Abbott said the Biden administration did nothing to prevent the migrants from crossing the Rio Grande into his state.

ABBOTT: I will give you the words of Border Patrol agents themselves in Del Rio when they said that the surge of migrants across the border was stopped only when the Texas Dept. of Public Safety and the National Guard showed up to provide a steel barrier.

But Mayorkas said the administration does not agree with putting up barriers on the border.

MAYORKAS: It is the policy of this administration - we do not agree with the building of the wall. The law provides that individuals can make a claim for humanitarian relief. That is actually one of our proudest traditions.

Republicans say President Biden’s policies are a magnet, encouraging hundreds of thousands of migrants to make the dangerous trek to the border.

More large groups of Haitian migrants, numbering more than 20,000, have reportedly gathered in Central America and are preparing to make their way north to the United States.

Democrats push $3.5T spending bill through committee » Democrats over the weekend pushed a $3.5 trillion spending plan through the House Budget Committee. The Democratic-dominated panel, meeting virtually Saturday, approved the measure on a near party-line vote, 20-to-17.

But one Democrat voted “no.” And that highlights the challenges party leaders face to get the deal done. They’ll need near unanimous support from Democrats because Republicans uniformly believe it’s a bad idea. Texas Congressman Tony Gonzales.

GONZALES: You know, the price of gas is going up, the price of eggs, the price of basic necessities is through the roof. At the end of the day the spending is completely out of control, and we have to stop somewhere because eventually the bill becomes due.

Saturday’s vote checked a procedural box. But more important work has been happening in a series of private phone calls and closed-door meetings.

President Biden and other party leaders are negotiating with more moderate Democrats behind the scenes, hoping to overcome their objections.

The Senate has already passed a roughly $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. But the House has held off acting on it, hoping to vote on that bill and the $3.5 trillion spending package, which Democrats call the Build Back Better plan, at the same time. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

PELOSI: This is the vision of the president. And he has said that while he wants to pass the infrastructure bill, and we will, that he will not confine his vision of the future to that bill.

Pelosi told fellow Democrats Saturday that they “must” pass both bills this week and a third measure preventing a government shutdown on Friday.

Walensky works to clear up booster shot confusion » CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky says she knows many people are confused about who should get COVID-19 vaccine booster shots.

The CDC last week gave the green light for a third dose of the Pfizer vaccine for people 65 and older, high risk Americans with certain health conditions, and “people who live or work in high risk settings.”

WALENSKY: That includes people in homeless shelters, people in group homes, people in prisons, but also, importantly, people who work with vulnerable communities. So, our healthcare workers, our teachers, our grocery workers, our public transportation employees.

No word yet on when or if the FDA might approve booster shots of the Pfizer vaccine for all adults.

WALENSKY: We are evaluating this science in real time. We are meeting every several weeks now to evaluate the science. The science may very well show that the rest of the population needs to be boosted.

She said the FDA will provide guidance on expanded booster shots just as soon as it has the data it needs to make a decision.

NTSB investigation deadly train derailment in Montana » A team of investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board is now on the ground in northern Montana combing the scene of a deadly train derailment.

They’re trying to determine what caused an Amtrak train to jump its tracks on Saturday.

The crash killed at least three people and hospitalized seven others.

Everyone else on the train was treated for minor injuries and released. The train was carrying about 140 passengers and 16 crew members.

The westbound train was en route to Seattle from Chicago, with two locomotives and 10 cars, when eight of those cars left the tracks about 4 p.m. near the town of Joplin.

I’m Kent Covington. Straight ahead: bullying in college classrooms.

Plus, baseball’s best batter.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Monday the 27th of September, 2021.

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

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

Before we get rolling today, maybe you remember we’d offered a thousand free 30-day trial subscriptions to WORLD Watch, our daily video news for students. Maybe you noticed we mentioned it only a few times and then stopped. Well, that’s because the offer was more popular than we’d expected and the thousand got snapped up fast. Now, we’ve been honoring these beyond the thousand and I was talking with our marketing director Jonathan Woods this weekend and he told me to tell you: If you’re interested in a WORLD Watch trial, we’ll just keep the offer open-ended for the rest of this month.

So you have today, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday to claim a 30-day trial to WORLD Watch. It’s on the house. We have no supply-chain problems—it’s just a little added bandwidth—and we can handle that.

REICHARD: That’s good to hear! So take us up on the offer. Thirty days free for WORLD Watch at WORLDWatch.news—look for the orange button around the middle of the page. It says, in all capital letters, CLAIM YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL. Just click and follow the directions. The offer’s good through the end of the month, which is Thursday. WORLDWatch.news.

EICHER: All right, so next up, Legal Docket.

Today, campus speech rights. Or rather, the lack of them.

A new report finds that nearly a quarter of college students say it’s acceptable to use violence to shut down a speaker they don’t like the speaker.

REICHARD: The latest report on College Free Speech Rankings is the largest survey ever to assess free expression on college campuses. Over 37,000 students surveyed by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, College Pulse, and RealClearEducation. They used several components to assess free speech: openness to discuss controversial topics; tolerance for liberal or conservative speakers; administrative support, among others.

EICHER: Here are three of the findings: (1) more than 80% of students self-censor. Meaning, they know the social cost of speaking their minds, so they just don’t do it.

(2) In general, students showed greater intolerance for conservative speakers.

(3) Only a third of students say their college administrators make it clear enough that they will protect free speech on campus.

REICHARD: The ever increasing number of complaints from students against professors got personal for a law professor at the University of Illinois- Chicago School of Law.

Jason Kilborn posed a question on a Civil Procedure exam, the same question he’d used for a decade without incident. Kilborn emphasizes discovery methods in this course. Discovery: meaning, finding information to support your side of the story.

He used a scenario common in employment discrimination cases. A woman claimed to have been discriminated against on the basis of race and sex.

KILBORN: And so I set up a scenario where some, the lawyer had found this former manager who had this explosive evidence and what I was testing was to see if the students knew that the employer was not going to be able to conceal this evidence from this woman, and it was going to come out of the open and the legal system would vindicate her rights. The evidence was that this manager had heard some other person referring to the plaintiff as and I wrote this quote, N-space, B-space, and I put in parentheses to avoid, you know, clever law students wiggling out of the question, profane expressions for African Americans and women.

Someone felt offended and complained to the administration, the media, and the Board of Trustees. To this day, Kilborn doesn’t know who it was.

KILBORN: And it just went all downhill from there.

The Black Law Students Association at the law school pursued further action by filing a complaint with the Office of Access and Equity.

Kilborn let everyone know he regretted causing anyone upset, he meant no offense and offered to talk to students and school officials about it. He said the manner in which his question used the words is the same way they are communicated elsewhere. Didn’t matter.

KILBORN: That, of course, did not produce the desired result, it actually, frankly, produced the expected result, which is now you know, these people know that there's a live fish on the line. And so it just ramps up pressure, there's this petition circulated against me, my administration reacted very poorly to an interaction that I had had talking to these students about, you know, trying to figure out what the deal was, and what the right way forward was.

An investigation ensued. Kilborn didn’t get the merit raise he expected based on his work. He said the Interim Dean cited this incident as a reason why not.

I contacted the vice chancellor for diversity and equity for comment, but she referred me to the public relations director, who didn’t get back to me.

The free-speech group that was part of the survey we talked about a few minutes ago has come to Kilborn’s defense. It’s the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education—FIRE as it’s known. FIRE sent a letter to the school asking for answers. That is ongoing.

The immediate emotion of the situation may have petered out somewhat.

KILBORN: But the entire experience has had such an incredible chilling effect on me and on many, many other professors around the country who have heard about this story.

And that’s the big picture worry here.

Kilborn was willing to chalk up the students’ complaints to pent up frustrations combined with COVID restrictions and other pressures.

KILBORN: My concern really is with the reactions of the administration. You know, we all as educators have a duty not only to teach people what we're teaching them, but to teach them how to be educated members of civil society. Unfortunately, more often than not from the far left, that's how the far left thinks that it can achieve what it wants to achieve these days. Blowing every minor, whatever they regard as a transgression into this complete nuclear explosion, rather than going, "Hey, you know, that kind of made me feel uncomfortable, can we think about ways that we can come up compromise and achieve your goals and my goals and move together forward?"

I spoke to a lawyer with FIRE, the group that defends civil liberties rights in higher education and helped to put together that college speech rankings report.

Adam Steinbaugh says too many institutions are afraid of conflict. Afraid of potential threats to their reputations. Steinbaugh pointed out the report shows most threats against free speech come from undergraduates. Of those, mostly from the left.

But when the complaints come from off campus, the threats are more likely to come from the right.

I asked for an example of that.

STEINBAUGH: Well, we have a situation down in Texas where a faculty member named Laura Burnett had, while she was watching the vice presidential debates, she had tweeted that Mike Pence should "shut his demon mouth up." And that caught the attention of some conservative websites that were compiling lists of quotes of, you know, look at the outrageous thing that a faculty member said about the vice presidential debates. And because of that, it caught some public anger from the right eye. And one of the members of that audience was a member of the state legislature, who texted the president of the college and said, "Hey, I just want to find out whether or not our tax dollars are going to this faculty member." And the president of the college responded, "Don't worry. If you are, it's already on my radar." And the college wound up terminating her and this was a public institution, so the First Amendment protects the right of faculty members when they speak as citizens. This was something that was not said in class and the institutions’ interest was very low.

I’d wondered about the distinctions between a public university and a private one as far as freedom of speech goes.

STEINBAUGH: Sure, so at a public university, because it is an arm of the government, the First Amendment attaches to protect the rights of both students and faculty. At a private institution, the First Amendment doesn't apply because it only limits actions of government and a private institution is not the government. But a lot of private institutions promise free speech or academic freedom to their faculty members. And that's what you would expect from a college. It's supposed to be a place where you can, you know, become involved in the exchange of ideas.

So what rights and protections do professors have? It depends upon what hat they’re wearing when they speak.

STEINBAUGH: So if you're speaking outside the classroom as a citizen or a member of the community, you have the right to extramural speech; meaning that the institution's interests are very low, because you're not speaking as an employee of the institution. You're not, you know, they're not paying you to say these things. And you have the strong first amendment right to speak out about matters of public concern.

On the other hand, if you are a faculty member and you were speaking in class, there's a First Amendment question about when the government can control the speech of its own employees.

Case law is still in flux in this area. You can see the tension that creates: the government can control employee speech in some areas, but inherent in that is the power to compel ideological conformity.

What about other protections? Well, that depends upon what state you’re in. Some states have laws that extend freedom of speech rights in certain contexts, although those tend to focus on the rights of students over the rights of faculty.

STEINBAUGH: So faculty members really have a couple of different tools at their disposal. One of them is the procedural protections that are afforded by tenure if they're tenured. But our educational systems or higher education generally is relying more and more on adjunct faculty members who don't have the protection of tenure. And that means that they have to depend in, to a greater extent on their first amendment rights and on other types of support from members of the community or unions or other people to come to their defense, to persuade institutions not to censor them.

One solution may be The Chicago Statement, released by the University of Chicago in 2015. Not to be confused with the school where Professor Kilborn teaches, University of Illinois-Chicago.

The Chicago Statement articulates the school’s “commitment to free, robust, and uninhibited debate and deliberation among all members of the University’s community.” As of last week, 83 institutions have adopted it.

STEINBAUGH: We have seen that we have a greater ability to protect free speech and to defend free speech, when an institution has adopted the Chicago statement.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Well if we’re honest, many of us, by the time we’re well into our 50’s, we’re trying not to throw our backs out lifting heavy things.

And that’s why Kevin Fast is such an inspiration.

He is a pastor at a Lutheran church near Toronto, and at 58 years old, he’s still going strong. REALLY strong.

Fast is a decorated strongman with well over a dozen world records to his name. And he just added another Guinness plaque to his impressive collection.

AUDIO: 3-2-1, go!

Fast pulled a 40-foot New York Metro Transportation Authority bus and he did it while sitting down!

That pull shattered the record for the heaviest vehicle pulled using only the upper body. He did it live on ABC’s Live with Kelly and Ryan.

EMPRIC: I can announce the distance of 15 feet, 28,850 lbs. Kevin, come on over!

The previous record was a 24,000-pound truck.

And by the way, that record belonged to Fast as well. He set in 2017, then just a youngster—at 54 years of age.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: the Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Time now to talk with financial analyst and adviser David Bahnsen—it’s going to be a sprint—three things to hit quickly, David, and I’d like to begin, as markets open this morning, with a review of what drove the odd volatility in the markets last week. Big drops, big recoveries: What was up with that?

DAVID BAHNSEN, GUEST: Yeah, I mean, for quite some time, there's been two things that have been happening in the market pretty consistently, which is that it's been going up, and that there hasn't been much volatility. And I think that's more or less still the case.

But this week did something that was almost identical from start to finish through the week to what happened in I believe, is the third week of July. You had a Monday where the market was down a lot. And both of the July Monday and this one day, I'm talking about this last week, I mean, down over 900 points in the middle of the day. And in both cases, it came back 300 by the end of the day. And then the Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, the market was up huge. And all of a sudden you're up on the week. And that's what took place this last week as well.

We were down 970 points Monday on all of these ideas that this Chinese real estate company that is facing its financial challenges could be a “Lehman moment” and a contagion effect in the financial markets. And so you go from Monday, 1,200 news reports to the next “Lehman Brothers moment” to Friday, we were up on the week.

So what do I think that matters to WORLD listeners? Well, here's the thing that I am very, kind of animated about here. We can believe the market is a little expensive right now. And I do believe that, especially certain parts, we ought to still maintain the position that we don't know what the next day or week or month will bring. We know for some time markets have shrugged off COVID all the way since the point at which we found out it wasn't going to make our society go extinct.

So you look at the overall set of circumstances. And companies are growing profits at record levels, profits are higher than they've been, profit margins are higher than they’ve been. The concern is the ability to sustain it with economic growth into the future. But constantly wringing our hands about the next “Lehman Brothers moment,” besides the melodrama of it, and I think, irresponsible sensationalism, from an investor's standpoint, it's really quite dangerous. And that's the nature of being in the market. It's a nature describing an economy. And so I believe it's just really important for people to have kind of a more prudent and sober perspective.

EICHER: David, the Federal Reserve held its long-anticipated, two-day rate-setting committee meeting. How did you read the chairman’s message on quantitative easing?

BAHNSEN: The Fed this week, there had been all this hubbub earlier in the summer: Are they gonna start tapering quantitative easing in September, meaning starting to tighten monetary policy? It's been my position all along that it was laughable that they would do that. They most certainly didn't. And then what Chairman Powell said is, “oh, we're looking at either November or December to kind of start getting going and will probably continue doing quantitative easing, but slowing it down until at least the middle of next year.”

Now between now and then, I can see plenty of scenarios in which they actually decide to delay further, but I wouldn't predict that. I think that, again, short of a really disappointing unemployment number, or some other headline event that gives them an excuse—a winter surge in COVID cases—that they use as an excuse. I think they intend to actually go forward with the tapering. And by tapering I mean, slight slowing down, but not raising interest rates.

And so the Fed did this week exactly to the “T,” what we've been writing for four or five months what we expected them to do.

EICHER: And as we go out—big week coming up in Washington with budget votes and we’re just going to have to wait to next time, certainly, to have anything to say about that—after we see what the Democrats do—because this is all about them. But there is this debt ceiling drama added into the mix—little extra, intriguing storyline there that we can talk about now.

BAHNSEN: Well, the debt ceiling thing has been building up for a few months, but it wasn't a story a few months ago. It's gonna be a story if you mean, everyone's gonna be talking about it. But also there's no ambiguity about how it's going to end.

My problem with this story, Nick, is that this is at least the eighth time since 2011. We have an obscure statute that legislatively limits the amount of debt the country can take, and then they move that number higher every time they need to. So I of course on record. And this is something I'm pretty committed to, as a cause in my life, to resisting the growth of government, which implicitly means the growth of the debt the government takes on. And my reasons for that are entirely theological and anthropological: that I believe it necessarily means less self-government, and less individual responsibility, the larger the size of government.

So mine is not so much about “Oh, we can't pay back the debt.” The difference, quite candidly, between 29 trillion of debt and 28 and a half trillion a debt is it's reasonable to say those are basically the same thing economically. But my point is, the trajectory of which we continue to accept a larger percentage of our society being represented by government, I think is very problematic.

So I think the statute is silly, and therefore I'd like to see it go away. But that's not because I want the debt to go higher. It's because there's absolutely no point in tokenism in our legal code. And both parties—this is not a Democrat thing—both parties waive the debt ceiling whenever they want.

And so then you get to a point where, well, are we actually going to say that we're going to default on the debt, that we're that we're not going to raise it, and we really will won't pay a bill, we won't pay off remaining debt? Remember, most a lot of our Treasury debt just gets paid off with new Treasury debt? I mean, of course, we're not going to do that. So why are we pretending? Well, we're pretending for the sake of setting up dramatic moments in the Beltway, where either a Democrat with leverage or a Republican with leverage gets to stare each other down.

So this particular debt ceiling thing is especially perverse, because the Democrats have 50 senate votes, so they can just do it tomorrow. They don't need one republican vote. But because they were trying to explore if they can get a political moment out of making the Republicans not vote for it. They don't want to put it in a reconciliation bill. And they're trying to catch the Republicans in a gotcha moment.

The whole thing's a charade. It's unbecoming of adults. It's unbecoming of the leadership of our country. And so my somewhat contrarian view is I obviously just wish they would quit growing the debt? But to the extent that we know, know, know, they're going to grow it anyways, I would rather get rid of the token measure altogether. That is only used as a political instrument.

EICHER: David Bahnsen—financial analyst and adviser. He writes at dividendcafe.com. David, eager to talk to you next week after we see how the spending votes shake out—a lot more then.

BAHNSEN: Yes, we'll definitely know a lot more by this time next week. Nick.

EICHER: All right, thank you.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: The WORLD History Book. Today, milestones for Disney devotees, sports savants, and opera aficionados. Here’s senior correspondent Katie Gaultney.

MUSIC: “THE MAGIC FLUTE: OVERTURE," WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

KATIE GAULTNEY, SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Opera buffs consider it one of the greatest of all time: The Magic Flute premiered in Vienna on September 30th, 1791—just two months before its composer’s death.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote the two-act opera to a German libretto by Emanuel Shikaneder. The story takes place in a mythical land between the sun and the moon. The queen of the night charges a prince and a birdcatcher to save her daughter from a magician. On their quest, the magician reveals the queen’s evil nature, turning their mission on its head.

Listen to Diana Damrau in the role of the queen—a part known for its difficulty—at The Royal Opera in London:

MUSIC: “QUEEN OF THE NIGHT ARIA”

After that first performance 230 years ago, the opera drew enormous crowds. It reached hundreds of performances during the 1790s. Biographers say Mozart was thrilled with the success—well, for nine weeks, anyway. On December 5, 1790, the musical phenom died under mysterious circumstances at his home. He was just 35.

MUSIC: “PAMINA”

Turning from an opera overture to an at-bat overachiever.

SONG: “TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLGAME,” DORIS DAY AND FRANK SINATRA

Eighty years have passed since baseball great Ted Williams, playing for the Boston Red Sox, achieved a .406 batting average. That achievement in the 1941 season made him the last major league baseball player to bat .400 or better.

ANNOUNCER: Remember this day, fans, September 28, 1941, it may be a history-making day. Red Sox and As in a double-header here at Shibe Park in Philadelphia, but all eyes are on this man: Ted Williams, gunning for a .400 season…

And he did nab the record that day. Going into those last two games of the season, Williams was batting .39955. Since that rounded up to .400, Red Sox manager Joe Cronin suggested Williams sit the game out, rather than risk his average going south. Williams answered, “If I'm going to be a .400 hitter, I want more than my toenails on the line.”

ANNOUNCER: Ted finishes the double-header six for eight, batting .406. Not too bad a day.

Williams is still known as the greatest hitter of all time. The slugger studied hitting obsessively, improving the speed of his swing by using lighter bats than others. He only swung at pitches that entered what he called his “happy zone,” a small area where he believed he could hit .400 or better.

Williams served in the military in World War II and the Korean War, missing five seasons in the prime of his career. But he still nabbed a boatload of honors: 19-times an All Star, two-time American League MVP, two-time Triple Crown winner, and the list goes on.

Well, we opened today’s edition of History Book with a magic flute, and we’ll close with the so-called “most magical place on earth.” Walt Disney World opened near Orlando, Florida, half a century ago, on October 1st, 1971.

MUSIC: DISNEY’S PINOCCHIO

Disney execs had seen great success with the 1955 opening of Disneyland in California. But market research showed fewer than 5 percent of the park’s visitors came from east of the Mississippi—even though 75 percent of the U.S. population lived there.

Walt Disney, ever the visionary, took a liking to some swampy land in Bay Lake, Florida, for his next big venture. His company used some real estate sleight of hand, buying up over 30,000 acres—that’s 48 square miles—under dummy corporations. They didn’t want speculators catching wind of the plans and driving up land prices.

Construction began, municipalities formed, and on that first day of October in 1971, eager Mickey fans filed into the Magic Kingdom for the first time. Disney’s Contemporary and Polynesian Village Resorts also opened that day. Doing stand-up in the lobby of the Contemporary as part of the grand opening festivities, Bob Hope joked that resort planners had really thought of everything.

HOPE: A lot of hotels put a Bible in your room. Here, Billy Graham comes up and reads it to you. (laughter)

Walt Disney died in 1966, five years before his dream was realized. In dedicating the park, his brother and business partner Roy said that just like we know Henry Ford’s name because of his cars, Walt Disney will remain in memory “as long as Walt Disney World is here.”

MUSIC: MICKEY MOUSE CLUB

One thing far from memory, though: affordable park tickets. Admission prices in 1971 were $3.50 for adults, $2.50 for ages 12 to 18, and one dollar for children under 12. Today, a one-day ticket to a single Disney World park starts at $109.

That’s this week’s History Book. I’m Katie Gaultney.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: Countering China’s military threat. We’ll find out how the recent security pact among the United States, Australia, and Great Britain will help to do that.

And, we’ll find out why that new pact is straining some of our oldest alliances.

That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD: And I’m Mary Reichard.

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

WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

Reminder for those living in the Twin Cities area—Minneapolis St. Paul—The World and Everything in It Live, we’ll be recording the program live on September 30th and we’d love for you to be there. We’ll place a link in today’s program transcript so you can sign up or from our podcast page, click on live events and you’ll find it.

The Bible says: We have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. As it is said, today, if you hear his voice, don’t harden your hearts as in the rebellion.

Go now in grace and peace.

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