Weekend Previews: Concurrently and WORLD Opinions roundtable

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: weekend listening.

A couple months ago we introduced you to one of our newest sister products from God’s World News: Concurrently, the News Coach Podcast.

EICHER: Just a minute ago we heard from Collin Garbarino. He’s a regular contributor to this program reviewing books, movies, and streaming series. Well, this week he put on a different hat and was a guest on the latest episode of Concurrently along with WORLD reporter Juliana Chan Erikson.

BROWN: A few weeks ago news coach Kelsey Reed received a question from a mom wondering how to help her kids discern fact from fiction on the internet.

EICHER: To tackle this question, cohosts Jonathan and Kelsey talked with Collin and Juliana—all of them parents who’ve tackled this subject in their own homes. In case you missed it, here’s a short excerpt of their conversation:

COLLIN GARBARINO: We need to be continually asking ourselves—as we're researching hard questions—we need to continually be asking ourselves about our own bias in, in these things.

Even a simple Google search is designed for confirmation bias because Google wants to give you the thing you ask for, right? It doesn't want to give you the thing you didn't ask for. And so if I'm worried about my health and I type “dangers of caffeine.” Google is going to give me what I wanted, right? And that's going to…I'm afraid maybe caffeine is not good for me. All of a sudden, Google is going to inundate me with information about the dangers of caffeine.

JULIANA CHAN ERIKSON: And so you will believe that you have cancer.

GARBARINO: And so you believe in and, and so maybe this is just a helpful tactic for some of our listeners. Maybe you should Google…every time you Google one thing, Google the opposite of that thing too, to get the other side because we, because we sometimes naively assume that if I type “dangers of caffeine,” Google will give me a balanced list of results. It's not, it's going to give me what I ask for. The library search tool was designed to help you find books, right? Google search tool is not designed to help you find information, it's designed to sell ads.

BROWN: That’s Collin Garbarino from this week’s Concurrently episode. It’s live now. You can listen by subscribing to Concurrently wherever you listen to podcasts or listen online at wng.org.

EICHER: And one other program available this weekend. On Wednesday night WORLD Opinions hosted a discussion on critical theory: Albert Mohler, editor of WORLD Opinions, along with managing editor Andrew Walker, and WORLD Opinions contributor Carl Trueman held a serious discussion on the roots of critical theory and how it diverges from biblical truth.

MOHLER: In the middle of the 19th century, along came Karl Marx. He was absolutely convinced that this ruthless critique of all that exists, that it would lead to an uprising of workers and eventually a communist revolution and the arrival of the new communist man and the energies of Marxism were increasingly directed towards what we would now call critical theory.

TRUMAN: In recent years of course, critical theory has pretty much hit the headlines, particularly in terms of critical race theory, but also in terms of things like gender theory and, and post colonialism. So many of the impulses within humanities departments in higher education at the moment, fall under the broad rubric of critical theory.

EICHER: Great conversation and we’ll release an audio version of that right here in this podcast feed on Saturday. If you want to see it, and see it right now, head to our website and we’ll have a link in today’s transcript.

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.