BreakPoint

As I record this commentary, the death toll in the horrific terrorist attack in New Zealand has risen to 50 souls.

Everything we do at the Colson Center, including BreakPoint, the Point, BreakPoint This Week, the BreakPoint podcast, and the Wilberforce Weekend, is designed to provide clarity on the culture from a Christian Worldview.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced the indictment of fifty people, including a pair of well-known actresses, for their participation in a series of schemes to get their kids admitted to elite colleges and universities.

The following is not a hypothetical scenario. Your four-year old daughter comes home from school and says, “I can wear my brother’s clothes and he can wear mine. I can change my name to a boy’s name.” Again, this scenario is not hypothetical. This is exactly what happened to British mum Mariam Ahmed recently.

A chilling quote is often attributed to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin: “One death is a tragedy. One million deaths are a statistic.” Stalin is alleged to have said this in the days leading up to one of the largest man-made disasters and mass-murders in history: the 1932 Ukrainian famine.

I still remember when Papa Johns came to my hometown. Man, I loved their pizza. Still do. And I loved that it became the pizza of choice for my church’s youth group… But counting on pizza for the success of any youth group is banking on the wrong papa. According to the best available data, the most reliable predictor of children’s ongoing church attendance is how consistently their own father attends.

We recently began the season of Lent. One of the practices most associated with this season is giving up something as an act of sacrificial discipline.

America is getting older. In 1950, near the beginning of the Baby Boom era, the average life expectancy of Americans was 68. Today, it is 79. By the year 2040, one in five Americans will be over the traditional retirement age of 65.

In Deuteronomy 25, Moses commanded that if a man dies childless, his brother should marry the widow and that “the first son whom she bears shall succeed to the name of his dead brother, that his name may not be blotted out of Israel.”

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the forty-day period in the church calendar known as Lent, a time of preparation leading up to Holy Week and Resurrection Sunday.