WORLD Magazine, April 13, 2019 Vol. 34 No. 7

APR I L 13, 2019

ISIS fighters have lost their last acres—and the human toll on enslaved girls like Martine is coming to light

NOW SHE IS FREE— OR IS SHE? AUSTIN: HIP TOWN NOW HIGH-TECH BASEBALL: HOW TO BUILD A TEAM CHABAD: NOT NEAR MY FRONT YARD? GOFUNDME: SCAM PROBLEMS

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CONTENTS |

April 13, 2019 • Volume 34 • Number 7

34

19

40

44

48

F E AT U R E S

D I S PA T C H E S

34 How they stand

7 News Analysis • Human Race Quotables • Quick Takes

ISIS may be beaten in Iraq and Syria, but for Yazidi women who have escaped its atrocities, the battle to survive such brutality and find justice for war crimes is only beginning

40 Let the giver beware

From fake cancer pleas to fake funerals, fraud is a purportedly rare but persistent problem on the crowdfunding website GoFundMe. What’s the responsibility of the Christian donor?

44 Ambition, money, and mercy: faces of Austin

People are flocking to Austin for the jobs, education, and hip culture, but the city’s rapid growth is hurting some longtime and low-income residents

48 A house is not only a home After a Chabad rabbi expanded his home to host Jewish college students for the Sabbath, neighbors sued

C U LT U R E

19 Movies & TV • Books Children’s Books • Q&A • Music NOTEBOOK

53 Sports • Technology Politics • Money VOICE S

4 Joel Belz 16 Janie B. Cheaney 32 Mindy Belz 61 Mailbag 63 Andrée Seu Peterson 64 Marvin Olasky

ON THE COVER: Photo by Mindy Belz

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Notes from the CEO Please pray for us.

We do tend to ask a lot of you, from renewing your membership to making a charitable gift to support our work.

But no request we make is as important as the reminder to pray for us.

As we decide which stories to pursue, then how to cover them, we rely on your prayers. It seems that our profession has more pitfalls than ever before.

We don’t want to fall into them. Pray that we won’t.

Pray for our clarity of thought and our clarity of communication. Pray for our humility. Pray for our courage.

Pray that our love for Christ may abound, as well as our love for one another and our love for you. Pray that we will love the truth, and the Truth.

Pray that we will reject lies. Pray that we will resist the temptation to tilt our reporting to fit our narrative, knowing that God’s narrative does not need our help.

We will make mistakes in our work. Pray that we will recognize them and learn from them. We will sin in our work. Pray that our sins will cause us to turn to Christ.

Pray that God’s strength will be demonstrated through our weakness. Pray that God will multiply the effectiveness of our work in the world. Pray that God uses our work to renew your own mind.

Pray for our physical safety. Pray for our financial ­stability. Pray for our wisdom. Pray for our encouragement.

Please, when you pray, remember to pray for us.

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Kevin Martin kevin@wng.org

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Joel Belz

Maker and shaker DON’T FORGET THAT THE CREATOR OF THE EARTH ALSO CONTROLS IT

4 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

We ‘religious’ people have too often ­forfeited the whole idea that God is intimately involved in His creation.

The Sand Creek in Jordan, Minn., floods its banks in March due to a large ice dam.

 jbelz@wng.org

BRIAN PETERSON/STAR TRIBUNE VIA AP

Media reporting on the recent devastating flooding—in places as distant as Mozambique and as close as the Missouri River Valley—brought a new reminder: The doctrine of creation matters.

The problem is that so few Christians really believe that anymore. They just can’t express that idea with any gumption. For a couple of generations now, evangelicals have increasingly swallowed the line that what we believe about origins is really just about the same as what everyone else believes—except that we think God controlled the process. Leading evangelical colleges quietly but efficiently persuade ­thousands of students that theistic evolution is a more sophisticated and less embarrassing explanation of origins than that which we learned as beginners in Sunday school. Those who still hold to the quaint idea that God made everything in six 24-hour days are regularly made to feel as if they should also be speaking Elizabethan English.

I still remember the exchange I had standing in line at my bank some 25 years ago. The woman in front of me and I were both glued to another exchange just outside the window, where a cat was crouched beneath a bush watching a bird above him as only a feline can.

“I have two cats,” the woman told me. “But I don’t let them play with birds. Mice, voles, shrews—OK. They can gobble them up to their hearts’ content. But no birds. Can you believe some people actually get a thrill out of watching a cat catch and eat a bird?”

Well, no, I can’t—unless maybe it’s a lion in Kenya on the prowl for a buzzard. But I was puzzled, and still am, at the source of our ­double standard. “Do you suppose,” I asked the woman at the bank, “that God might have built that into His creation—that He planned that we would put a higher value on canaries than we do on mice? Or is that something that we came up with on our own?” The woman’s silent,

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blank stare suggested I was speaking a dialect I had picked up in Tibet.

I had, of course, broken a profound social taboo. Analysts at CNN and Fox News, along with most other public news sources, may be a zillion miles apart in their political views. But they’re joined at the hip when it comes to ­talking about “nature.”

Writers of our nation’s earliest documents got a lot closer to the truth when they talked discreetly about “Nature” and “Nature’s God.” But even that, of course, is way too invasive in this ­secular era. Which is why it’s not unusual now to hear ­commentators, like one on NPR radio recently, tell us that “Mother Nature may just be getting angry at all the abuse and pollution human beings have piled on her in recent years.”

But nary a word about God’s role in all this—which may not be so bad in any case, given the theological illiteracy of our age.

The problem is not, however, some superficial difference between “religious” people like us and “nonreligious” people like most TV analysts. The problem is that we “religious” people have too often forfeited the whole idea that God is ­intimately involved in His ­creation. We may claim to believe it theoretically, but those theoretical convictions only rarely find their way into our everyday conversation.

Yes, it bothers people to think—and especially to talk—about God’s involvement in the cyclone in Mozambique or the floods in the Midwest.

But we’ve been blackmailed. By conceding the story of creation the way most of us learned it as little children, we’ve forfeited the stage where we might talk about the very God who set it all in motion. If we’re squeamish and embarrassed to talk about God the Creator, we’ll naturally shrink from a discussion about a God who orders the details of that creation.

The big reason we’re disturbing to such folks is that most of them have never joined with Job as he sat and marveled at the Creator of all that is. Maybe if we were a bit bolder on that front, we’d challenge a newscaster here and there to take God seriously. Or maybe even a woman in your line at the bank. A

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DISPATCHES News Analysis / Human Race / Quotables / Quick Takes

Surrounded by water

Floodwaters encircle a grain elevator in Hamburg, Iowa. March flooding in the Midwest killed at least three people, forced thousands of evacuations, and caused at least $3 billion in damage.

DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

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April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 7

D I S PA T C H E S

News Analysis

Madness of March

A HARRIED FORTNIGHT FEATURED MALPRACTICE IN COLLEGE ADMISSIONS, LIBRARY READINGS, AND WASHINGTON POLITICS by Marvin Olasky

8 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

she allegedly paid $500,000 to have her two daughters admitted to the University of Southern California as rowing team recruits. Loughlin, facing mail fraud charges, paid $1 million to be released from jail on bail.

Press accounts emphasized that ­neither of the daughters row, but stories overlooked the way federal government

Lil Miss Hot Mess reads to children during a Drag Queen Story Hour at the Park Slope Branch of the Brooklyn (N.Y.) Public Library.

action enabled madness. Courts have said Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 requires equal recruiting treatment of young men and women. Since 130 Division I NCAA schools offer 85 scholarships each for their cash cow, football, and 312 Division II schools typically give the equivalent of 36 full football scholarships each, these institutions all have to find ways to give women numerous scholarships as well.

That need results in notices like this at Scholarships.com: “The number of female-only rowing, or crew, teams has exploded over the last decade, and now women have a better shot at landing scholarship money from a college than

MARY ALTAFFER/AP

An English poem originating around 1500, “Blowbol’s Test,” refers to “a March hare” acting erratically. Fast fact: During March, their major breeding month, hares attack other hares and leap vertically for no apparent reason. The “March Hare” is a major character in the tea party scene of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865). Kaiser Wilhelm in 1908 called the English “mad as March hares.”

On both sides of the Atlantic during March, madness was in the air, and not just in the hare. Britain was scheduled to exit the European Union at the end of the month, but Parliament kept turning down Prime Minister Theresa May’s withdrawal plans. In the United States, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament known as “March Madness” cranked up.

The biggest American madness, though, was the sadness of the left-wing media at learning that the president of the United States is not a traitor.

WORLD writers have criticized Donald Trump’s character while praising many of his judicial appointments and other administration achievements, but we’re certainly glad that 19 lawyers, 40 investigators, 230 orders for communication records, 500 search warrants, 2,800 subpoenas, and interviews with 500 witnesses yielded no evidence of ­presidential collusion.

The March 12-26 fortnight did bring more Midwest flooding and a stream of disappointments: College admissions cheating, drag queens reading books to children in public libraries, and the House of Representatives slouching toward passage of a bill requiring one-size-fits-all treatment of LGBTQ persons (including drag queens).

The alleged cheater best known to some WORLD readers is actress Lori Loughlin, a regular on the Hallmark Channel. That network fired her after

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men do. Schools … have generous funding available for female rowers, including some full rides … to satisfy Title IX requirements.”

Athleticscholarships.net reported this: “Unlike other college sports, you don’t need any experience to join a rowing team in college. … Due to Title IX, there are ample scholarships available.”

So Lori Loughlin’s claim that her nonrowing daughters could become ­champion rowers was not over the top.

(Should students and parents reading Athleticscholarships.net think this prospect is too good to be true, the website informs us that “the sport of rowing has been in existence as long as humans have traveled the water by boat.”)

March madness #2: A WORLD member from upstate rural New York wrote me, “There is a drag queen—stage name Annie Christ— doing readings for children at our public library!!” Yes, and that’s not unusual.

Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that receives funding from donors and local libraries.

Philadelphia’s public libraries have hosted more than 50 DQSH events.

DQSH’s spring schedule includes events not only in Brooklyn and Los Angeles but in Zion, Ill.; Brookfield, Wis.; Lincoln, Neb.; and dozens of other heartland sites. One of its goals: “gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.” But one of those role models on March 15 gave DQSH publicity it didn’t want: The social conservative group MassResistance, followed by local, national, and international press and television, reported that drag queen “Tatiana Mala Niña” (aka Alberto Garza) was charged with sexual assault on an 8-year-old in 2008.

The Houston Public Library admitted it had not done a background check on Garza, or looked at his listing in the Texas Department of Public Safety’s

Sex Offender Registry. In the subsequent furor, DQSH hosts Trent Lira and Devin Will said they are “stepping aside” from the program. Houston Public Library officials, though, are not stepping aside: They announced on March 22 that the Drag Queen storytime program will continue this summer. The American Library Association is also doubling down: Instead of ­criticizing DQSH indoctrination, it posted more “GLBT News … GLBT Resources for Children … GLBT Religion & Spirituality.”

March madness #3: Jean-Louis de Lolme (1740-1806) grew up in Geneva but moved to England, took a close look at politics, and thought Britain’s Parliament had too much power: The clever line he is best known for was “Parliament can do everything but make a woman a man and a man a woman.” Now, though, the “Equality Act,” likely to pass the House of Representatives, will attempt to go where even Parliament feared to tread.

Equality Act consequences would be legion: I’ll name just two here. First, more biological males competing as women: Two of them easily finished first and second in the recent Connecticut state track championships, and female runner Selina Soule said, “We all know the outcome of the race before it even starts. It’s demoralizing.”

Second, the Equality Act would give aid and comfort to activists who say parents opposed to their children ­taking puberty-blocking drugs at age 9, followed by surgery, should lose ­custody of them.

Other elements make this proposed law as mad as a March hare, but I’m almost out of room. One quick note: If you’re wondering about the difference between hares and rabbits, hares are larger, and their fur changes color from brown or gray in the summer to white in the winter. The color of rabbits’ fur does not change.

Most politicians are hares. They should watch an epic war film from 1957, The Bridge on the River Kwai, that ends with an army doctor gazing at destruction and saying, “Madness … madness.” We’re on our way. A

 molasky@wng.org  @MarvinOlasky

50

B Y

T H E

N U M B E R S

The number of people killed during a shooting rampage at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15. The accused gunman, a white supremacist, live-streamed the attack online.

$13.3 billion The cost of U.S. productivity losses owing to employees following March Madness instead of working, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

76% The share of U.S. businesses without any paid employees, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

$270 million The amount Purdue Pharma and its owners agreed to pay to settle Oklahoma’s claims that the drugmaker aggressively and illegally marketed its addictive OxyContin painkiller. The lawsuit is one of 1,600 cases charging Purdue with complicity in the opioid addiction crisis.

92

The number of President Trump’s judicial nominees that the Senate had confirmed as of March 26. The Senate had confirmed 76 of President Obama’s judicial nominees at the same point in his presidency.

April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 9

D I S PA T C H E S

Human Race

Madrid

Protested

from Spain—a vote the Spanish government declared unconstitutional.

If the vote’s leaders are convicted, some face up to 25 years in prison.

Devastated

Cyclone Idai hit Mozambique on March 14 with winds of up to 105 mph before moving on to Zimbabwe and Malawi, triggering one of the worst disasters in the South African region in recent times. The storm affected at least 2 million people, according to the United Nations. The official death toll stood at 761 people as of March 26, but President Filipe Nyusi of Mozambique said the number could

Mozambique

10 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

affected were primarily those of Facebook Lite users, a version of Facebook popular in ­countries with poor Wi-Fi connections. Additionally, tens of millions of regular Facebook users and tens of thousands of Instagram users were also affected.

Facebook has promised to alert affected users.

Smuggled

Chicago prosecutors on March 26 dropped charges against actor Jussie Smollett for lying to police about an alleged attack based on his race and ­sexual orientation. The African-American and openly homosexual actor claimed he was attacked in late January in Chicago by two men who shouted racial and anti-gay slurs, poured bleach on him, and

A Malaysian national was caught allegedly smuggling a live human embryo through Mumbai’s airport.

Any importation of the kind into India is illegal without a permit. The BBC reported that the man told Indian officials he had smuggled embryos before, and he implicated a respected IVF clinic in the city. However, the clinic denied the claim, and its lawyer alleged a conspiracy among competitors to shut down the clinic.

According to The Times of India, investigators found a number of text messages to back up the Malaysian man’s claims, and the clinic has been called into court.

Stored

Facebook has admitted the company stored hundreds of millions of users’ ­passwords in plain text accessible to any of its employees. The company’s public announcement did not disclose how long this practice has been going on but did say the problem has been under investigation since January. According to CNN, the passwords

Dropped

looped a rope around his neck. In early March, a grand jury indicted him on 16 felony counts of disorderly conduct after police said Smollett hired the two men to attack him and lied to authorities about the incident. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel blasted the prosecutors’ decision: “From top to bottom, this is not on the level.”

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MADRID: OSCAR GONZALEZ/SIPA/AP • SMOLLETT: PAUL BEATY/AP • MOZAMBIQUE: TSVANGIRAYI MUKWAZHI/AP

Tens of thousands of marchers gathered in Spain’s capital on March 16 to protest the trial of Catalan separatist leaders.

According to the BBC, the organizers brought more than 120,000 people from more than 60 civilian ­activist groups from all over the country, including Catalonia. The protesters came to the city in ­hundreds of buses and marched on the Plaza de Cibeles, waving yellow and red Catalan flags and ­carrying banners declaring the region’s vote for independence to be no crime.

The leaders on trial helped orchestrate the 2017 Catalan vote for separation

reach 1,000 in his country alone as responders gain more access to closed-off areas. The storm destroyed about 90 percent of the Mozambican city of Beira.

Satellite images released by the European Space Agency showed inland floodwaters measuring 80 miles by 15 miles, drowning homes and villages that once dotted the region.

D I S PA T C H E S

Quotables

‘It’s welldeserved.’

A coalition of restaurant ­servers in New York, led by Outback Steakhouse bartender MAGGIE RACZYNSKI, in a ­letter responding to celebrities like Amy Poehler and Sarah Jessica Parker pushing New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to raise the minimum wage for servers to $15. Servers say they make more money under the tipping system.

Baseball star ALBERT PUJOLS on his Los Angeles Angels teammate Mike Trout’s record-setting contract.

The 12-year contract is worth $426.5 million.

‘Until justice rolls down like dollars.’

BOB MOSER, former writer for the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center, on the joking reference SPLC staffers regularly made to a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.—“Until justice rolls down like waters”—that is featured on a memorial outside the center’s offices. In a story for The New Yorker, Moser depicted the SPLC as a haven for racial discrimination, sexual harassment, and financial corruption. In March, the SPLC dismissed founder Morris Dees, and President Richard Cohen resigned.

‘The fight against the enemy you cannot see is much harder.’

ADNAN AFRIN, a commander with the Syrian Democratic Forces, after the group drove Islamic State fighters from their final piece of territory in Baghuz, Syria, on March 23. Many ISIS fighters have scattered and remain hidden within the population of Syria and elsewhere.

12 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

‘This is shaping up to be a potentially unprecedented flood season.’

Kingsland, Texas, 2018

ED CLARK, director of NOAA’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Ala., on forecasts that snowmelt and heavy rains could put more than two-thirds of the lower 48 states at an elevated risk of flooding this spring. The forecast comes on the heels of devastating March floods in the Midwest.

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PUJOLS: CHRISTIAN PETERSEN/GETTY IMAGES • DEES: FREDERICK M. BROWN/GETTY IMAGES • AFRIN: DELIL SOULEIMAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES • POEHLER: JORDAN STRAUSS/INVISION/AP • FLOOD: JAY JANNER/AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN/AP

‘Thank you for your concern.

But we don’t need your help, and we’re not asking to be saved.’

D I S PA T C H E S

Quick Takes

Do it yourself

Perceiving the Taco Bell cooks to be stingy, one fast-food customer in South Carolina took matters into his own hands. Frustrated with a lack of meat on his Mexican Pizza order, the unidentified customer pulled out of the ­drive-thru, entered the restaurant, and found no manager present to authorize a refund. The man promptly slipped behind the counter and began demonstrating what he believed was the proper way to make a Mexican Pizza. After making the order, the man left before police could arrive and apprehend him.

Sheep stealing

Attention getters?

Concerned about pedestrians who won’t take their eyes off their cell phones, Tel Aviv, Israel, has installed “zombie traffic lights”—or ground-level LED lights at crosswalks that turn red when pedestrians should stop. The goal, said traffic manager Tomer Dror, is to “find ways to put the road into their eyes.”

Pedestrian Haley Danino told The Associated Press that the idea would save lives: “But it’s a bit sad, no? We all look down all the time.”

Creative muscle car

A March snowstorm provided one Chadron, Neb., family with a chance to get creative: The family built a replica car out of snow on the street in front of their house. Jason Blundell and his ­teenage children spent five hours to sculpt a ­replica of a 1967 Ford Mustang GTA—exactly like the one Blundell keeps in his garage. “We actually had somebody come by while we were building it, and they thought we were burying somebody’s car,” Blundell told the Omaha World-Herald. The family briefly became worried when a Nebraska State Patrol officer stopped by the sculpture and wrote it a ticket. But Sgt. Mick Downing said the ticket and tow notice were just a joke for the State Patrol’s Facebook page.

14 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

SHEEP: MATT CARDY/GETTY IMAGES • MEXICAN PIZZA: HANDOUT • LED LIGHTS: SEBASTIAN SCHEINER • SNOW SCULPTURE: NEBRASKA STATE PATROL

Nearly 10,000 sheep across the United Kingdom are on the lam, but a BBC report revealed local police forces are struggling to solve the cases. According to the report, thieves stole 9,635 sheep in England and Wales in 2018. However, the thousands of thefts led to just one criminal charge by police. A spokesman for NFU Mutual, a company that provides insurance to most UK farms, said rural sheep thieves have become both brazen and organized because of a lack of rural policing.

“It’s organized gangs,” Tim Price told the BBC. “They’ve got big vehicles, they’ve got the skills to round up sheep and take them away.”

SPAGHETTI: ISTOCK • MEROLA: ROBERTO SERRA/IGUANA PRESS/GETTY IMAGES • ANDREWS: SQUAREMOUTH • KING ABDULAZIZ INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT • USPS: AMY SANCETTA/AP • PROPOSAL: HANDOUT

Not from around here

The mayor of Bologna, Italy, has one request for tourists ­traveling to his town: Stop asking for spaghetti bolognese.

According to Bologna Mayor Virginio Merola, the ­popular Italian dish isn’t actually Italian at all, but rather a foreign invention. Merola says bolognese sauce was first created in Bologna, but locals there serve it with flat egg noodles. Spaghetti, he told Italian radio RAI, comes from further south in Italy: “Spaghetti bolognese doesn’t ­actually exist, yet it’s famous the world over.”

Reading reward

Attention to detail paid off for one Georgia teacher.

After buying travel insurance for a trip to London next September, Donelan Andrews sat down to read the fine print on the Squaremouth contract.

Hidden in a jungle of legal phrases Andrews discovered the travel ­insurance company had inserted a contest. “If you’ve read this far, then you are one of the very few Tin Leg customers to review all their policy documentation,” the contract read.

Next, it instructed readers to respond with an email to a special address. Because Andrews was the first to reply, she won Squaremouth’s $10,000 prize.

Andrews says she’ll use the money to fund a trip to Scotland for her 35th wedding anniversary.

Can’t take the heat

The United States Postal Service might need to update its motto. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued a fine to the USPS in January for making its letter carriers deliver the mail during the heat of August in 2018. The official OSHA complaint alleges that mail carriers in Arlington, Fla., “were exposed to the ­hazards of high ambient temperatures while delivering mail.” The fine totaled $129,336. According to the postal motto, “neither snow nor rain nor heat” will prevent postal workers from delivering the mail.

An immodest proposal?

Lost and found

One Saudi Arabian mom won’t be winning any ­mother-of-the-year awards anytime soon. A flight departing from King Abdulaziz International Airport outside of Jeddah was forced to turn around and land when a young mother informed the flight crew she had accidentally left her newborn child in the departure lounge. The news forced the pilot of the Saudi Arabian Airlines flight to turn his Kuala Lumpur–bound airplane around and return to pick up the missing child. Mother and child were safely reunited at the airport.

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A marriage proposal in Iran has run afoul of local religious authorities. A video published March 8 revealed a man asking a woman to marry him as the couple stood in the middle of a popular shopping mall in Arak, Iran. For the proposal, the man had arranged ­balloons and flower petals in the shape of a heart. Police arrested the couple for committing a lewd public display based upon Western cultural norms, not Islamic custom. Mostafa Norouzi, a deputy police chief in Arak, explained the arrest to a local paper: “[It’s unacceptable] to do whatever is common in other places of the world and disregard mores, ­culture and religion.” The anonymous couple was quickly released on bail.

April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 15

VOICE S

Janie B. Cheaney

than a battleground for equality). She had barely got the words “foundation of Western civilization” out when an audience member tried to take her mike away. Shortly after that, a spat with Padilla went sideways when she said she hoped he had achieved his position at Princeton through his merit, not his color. That unfortunate remark not only got her kicked out of the room, but slammed in the SCS newsletter and fired from her assistant-editor job with the CALLS FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SOMETIMES Association of Ancient Historians. Justice?

JUST RUINOUS CALLS FOR PAYBACK The dissolution of the academy into intersectional turf wars is already an old What could be more genteel than a story. But Williams’ sad tale points to something beyond that. She notes ­meeting of academic classicists? Imagine that “diversity” was scarcely menscholars in tweed jackets subtly correcting each tioned on the panel, much less other’s Greek as they compare translations of ­teaching, or students, or improving Thucydides and debate the political implications academic standards. “The panel of Sappho. The expectations of Mary Frances wasn’t really about any of that, or Williams, an independent (i.e., not attached to a even ultimately about race, but university) classics scholar, were not so clichéd. rather about how to destroy classics.”

Still, she had no idea when she registered for the “Social justice” isn’t always about 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Padilla Peralta justice, either. It’s about payback.

Studies (SCS) what a wild ride it would be.

Dan-el Padilla’s proposal to bar Shortly after a workshop called “The Future white males from publication is just a smallof Classics” began, she was surprised that no Dan-el niche example of a culturewide trend. When a panel members offered scholarly papers. ­Padilla’s social-justice warrior reads the classics, writes Instead they launched into an academic gripe ­proposal to professor Mark Bauerleine, “it’s with a generalsession. The first speaker, after complaining ized resentment toward the past, which he sees about “manels” (all-male panels) at academic bar white as fraught with social injustice.” Outside the conferences, called out a highly respected males from university, actress Anne Hathaway summed up ­19th-century American philologist for his racist publication the sentiment last fall when she received an editorials published in the Richmond Dispatch award from the Human Rights Campaign. Her 150 years ago. Another panelist proposed a new is just a acceptance speech excoriated “white superiorvision for classical studies that downplayed small-niche ity” with a battle cry: “Let’s tear this world apart mastery in Latin and Greek. Still another made example of a and build a better one.” the case for “citational justice” in journals and If historical periods could be open for tours, tomes: discarding footnote references to dead culturewide it would be instructive to visit the French white (or even live white) scholars in favor of trend.

Revolution, the modern world’s first social women and minorities. ­justice movement. It began with cries for The panel discussion wrapped up with “equality” and ended up slaughtering not just Dan-el Padilla Peralta of Princeton, whose aristocrats but hundreds of thousands of major theme was racial and gender disparity in ­peasants, especially in the provinces where the field and how it called for “reparative ­citizens still respected their church. “Tearing ­epistemic justice.” White men must surrender the world apart” was the aim and revenge was “the privilege they have of seeing their words the fuel. What remained was not a better world printed and disseminated,” i.e., stop submitting but a ruin. articles for publication in academic journals.

Better worlds are built on the best traditions Since the standard practice is to submit papers —not just classics, but also law and gospel. anonymously for consideration by anonymous Much of what calls itself social justice would peers, Padilla was suggesting that an author’s stamp “white privilege” on the heritage of the race, sex, and gender preference should be stated West and burn it to the ground. Psalm 11:3 asks, up front as the most important criteria of value.

“If the foundations are destroyed, what can the When open discussion began, Williams righteous do?” What they’ve always done: Look stepped up to make four prewritten points up, because their foundation is indestructible. A about classics as an academic discipline (rather

Robespierre’s road R

 jcheaney@wng.org  @jbcheaney

RICHARD DREW/AP

16 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

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CULTURE Movies & TV / Books / Children’s Books / Q&A / Music

Television

The Savior on Earth DOCUMENTARY PRESENTS A MOSTLY BIBLICAL ACCOUNT OF JESUS’ LIFE—BUT WITH SOME LIBERAL CHAFF OFFERED AS FACT by Megan Basham In 2013, the History Channel scored cable’s most-watched entertainment show with Mark Burnett and Roma Downey’s miniseries The Bible. The series proved so popular the filmmakers were able to cobble together a successful 2014 film, Son of God, just from select scenes and unaired footage. So it’s no surprise, as Easter approaches, that the network is returning to the subject of Scripture with an eight-part documentary series, Jesus: His Life.

Through dramatic re-enactments and interviews with scholars, each episode examines Christ’s earthly ministry through the eyes of a Biblical

JOSÉ SARMENTO MATOS/A+E NETWORKS

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 mbasham@wng.org  @megbasham

figure who knew him: Joseph, John the Baptist, Mary, Caiaphas, Judas, Pilate, Mary Magdalene, and Peter.

While it’s certainly one of the more worthwhile, engaging new shows you could be watching, it does contain a few moments likely to make Christian brows wrinkle.

To start with the good, the unique approach of focusing on the perspective of one person from Jesus’ life at a time allows for intriguing historical context rarely covered for laypeople. For example, after a lifetime of church and Sunday school attendance, I was still surprised to learn about Herod the Great’s racial background and how his

A scene from insecurity over it may Jesus: His Life have impacted his response to the Magi.

At other times, however, the show takes speculation too far, giving ­priority to Scripture-skeptics who present their views as fact with little counter-response from serious ­conservative scholars.

Robert Cargill, a self-described agnostic, progressive Bible scholar from the University of Iowa, features especially heavily. In both episodes screened for critics—“Joseph” and “John the Baptist”—he describes the Gospel writers making independent literary choices to lend credibility to their accounts, rather than acting as divinely inspired faithful reporters. For example, Cargill says, “Most scholars think that Luke used the census as a device to get Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem because the prophecies say the Messiah will be born in the City of David.”

Later, Cargill drops a fairly ­eyebrow-raising statement he never

April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 19

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Movies & TV

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as far as the History Channel is concerned.

Based on my experience with producers, they likely have no idea that some of the ideas presented in their series might pose a problem for Christians.

As I’ve mentioned in other reviews, the shortcomings that crop up when secular studios take on the Bible have an easy solution: Consult teachers and theologians like Tim Keller, John MacArthur, John Piper, or countless others who fall on the conservative side of the ideological spectrum.

Downey and Burnett did just that with The Bible series, soliciting input from, among others, Luis Palau, Focus on the Family’s Jim Daly, and Young Life’s Denny Rydberg. So History Channel, if you’re listening, including diverse Biblical scholarship will make your Easter-season productions more accurate and more entertaining. It’ll probably also bring back those sweet, sweet ratings. A

Television

Whiskey Cavalier R

BOX OFFICE TOP 10 FOR THE WEEKEND OF MARCH 22-24

according to Box Office Mojo

CAUTIONS: Quantity of sexual (S), ­violent (V), and foul-language (L) ­content on a 0-10 scale, with 10 high, from kids-in-mind.com

S V L

1̀ Us R. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 8 8 2̀ Captain Marvel* PG-13. . . . . . . . . 1 5 5

3̀ Wonder Park PG. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 1

4̀ Five Feet Apart PG-13. . . . . . . . . 3 4 5 5̀ How to Train Your Dragon:

The Hidden World PG. . . . . . . . . 1 3 2

6̀ Tyler Perry’s A Madea

Family Funeral PG-13. . . . . . . . . . 5 3 5

7̀ No Manches Frida 2 R . . . . . not rated 8̀ Gloria Bell R. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . not rated

9̀ The Lego Movie 2* PG. . . . . . . . . 1 3 2 10 Alita: Battle Angel* PG-13. . . . 1 7 5 ` *Reviewed by WORLD

ABC’s new actioncomedy Whiskey Cavalier stars Scott Foley as Will Chase, an FBI super-agent whose defining characteristic is his sensitivity. His girlfriend has just dumped him, but he needs to get back into the field, even if he still tears up every time he sees a couple in love. International crime doesn’t stop for a broken heart.

Chase unwillingly pairs up with Francesca “Frankie” Trowbridge (Lauren Cohan), a beautiful, hard-nosed CIA operative with trust issues. The two clash at first but slowly learn to respect each other. This series revisits the idea that opposites attract by building in some romantic tension.

Whiskey Cavalier contains elements

from many popular shows, but scenic European settings end up being the only attractive thing about the series.

Chase and Trowbridge occasionally exhibit some chemistry, but the comedy’s timing falls flat, and the script often relies on cringeworthy sexual ­references and inappropriate language.

Is it a coincidence that Whiskey Cavalier debuted at the moment when many in America announced a war against toxic masculinity? The writers emphasize Will Chase’s “sensitivity” to the point of absurdity: It could be an interesting character trait, but they make it a plot device in every episode. Maybe ABC will realize that a series-long narrative arc in the action genre needs more than a character’s ability to empathize.

—by COLLIN GARBARINO

AMERICAN BROADCASTING COMPANIES, INC.

explains: that John the Baptist came preaching a message of social justice.

Other experts, meanwhile, make claims like, “In the Gospel of Mark, when John the Baptist sees Jesus, he doesn’t recognize Him at all,” that a quick passage skim proves false. Not only does Mark’s account assert no such thing, but Matthew’s suggests the direct opposite.

Such unsubstantiated claims to facthood are most concerning, however, when they read into Jesus’ mind thoughts that aren’t ­consistent with a holistic understanding of the Bible.

Without citing Scriptural support, a well-known ­liberal Catholic, Father James Martin, frames the Holy Spirit’s descent and God’s announcement, “This is my beloved son,” at Christ’s baptism as an ­eye-opening experience for Him, saying, “Jesus understands His identity which is revealed to Him very clearly for the first time.”

At the very least, this flies in the face of Luke’s account of 12-year-old Jesus being quite aware He was in His Father’s house.

While the series claims to offer views from across the ideological spectrum, with the exception of Ben Witherington, evangelicals who adhere to a literal reading of Scripture won’t find their views much ­represented. This doesn’t mean the show presents rampant heresy—the two episodes screened for critics featured mostly wheat with a bit of troubling chaff sprinkled in. And I doubt there was any malicious intent even in that, at least

Movie

UNPLANNED: MICHAEL KUBEISY/SOLI DEO GLORIA RELEASING • DUMBO: DISNEY

Unplanned R The new movie Unplanned, based on the 2010 book by the same name, tells the gripping tale of former Planned Parenthood (PPFA) director Abby Johnson’s pro-life conversion. Although some of its elements don’t sit right, the film exposes anew the foul practices of the nation’s leading abortion business.

Johnson’s story: A belief she’s helping women, she says, and ambition lead her from PPFA volunteer to director of the abortion center in Bryan, Texas. In a voiceover, Johnson (Ashley Bratcher), a churchgoer, claims she was “naïve.” For example, she receives PPFA’s 2008 “Employee of the Year” award but questions a directive to increase the number of abortions.

“Abortion has never been my priority,” she informs her peers. The film underscores her good-heartedness.

Local pro-lifers befriend and pray for Johnson. After eight years with PPFA (and two abortions and a divorce), she assists in an abortion for the first time, she says. She watches as a “13-weeker” disappears from the ultrasound monitor, while bloody tissue gushes through tubes into a ­collection bottle. (The R-rated film has disturbing images and four expletives.) The horrible sight causes Johnson to run out of the building.

(In a 2018 tweet, though,

Johnson said she had “pieced together ­thousands of fetal parts after abortions.”) She subsequently resigns, and later weeps for the 22,000 children who died under her watch.

It took courage to tell this story, and Bratcher gives a superbly moving performance. Still, some details—factual and ­dramatic—puzzled me.

Johnson’s staff is chipper, her workplace a lively atmosphere; I’ve been inside enough abortion centers to find this depiction peculiar. Johnson’s parents and second ­husband denounce her day job yet praise her promotions—again, odd.

The Christian pop soundtrack fits until Mandisa sings “Overcomer” during an extra-busy schedule of abortions hours before a hurricane hits. Perhaps the irony was intended.

In all, though, Planned Parenthood comes off as money-grubbing and heartless, so the film gets that right. Even better, Johnson learns that God forgives and redeems.

See all our movie reviews at wng.org/movies

—by BOB BROWN

Movie

Dumbo R

Dumbo was always likely to be the most difficult of Disney’s classic animated films to adapt for live action. The original ugly duckling tale of a ­little elephant who discovers that his big ears are his biggest asset was a perfectly contained, ­one-hour delight that even the youngest viewers could follow. Try to expand that to nearly two hours, however, and the story (not to mention little attention spans) starts to stretch thin.

Unlike Disney’s princess stories, Dumbo has no romance to orchestrate. It also boasts no villain obsessed by grand, murderous schemes. Sure, a few circus bullies crack wise about the ears, but that’s a far cry from one very specific monster plotting to, say, eat you, à la Shere Khan, and thus doesn’t call for much of a final showdown.

The one trump card Dumbo had over the others was its larger-than-life animal characters like Timothy Q. Mouse, a pack of gossipy pachyderms, and a flock of singing crows. While it certainly made sense to excise the bird band, which traded

on some uncomfortable racial stereotypes (one was literally named Jim Crow), the studio inexplicably decided to forgo any of the talking animals long beloved by kids of all ages.

It also dropped the most recognizable, ­toe-tapping tune from the 1941 version—“When I See an Elephant Fly.” It’s a bit like trying to do The Jungle Book without Baloo and “The Bare Necessities.” Bring in all the dazzling Tim Burton visuals you want—and there are plenty—audiences are still going to be a little disappointed.

That’s not to say this Dumbo isn’t entertaining, but it flies far afield of its source material. To start with, the PG rating comes with some minor language and a PETA-style moral about not caging animals.

And instead of a hilariously imaginative rodent manager with a Brooklyn accent to kill, we get the same old undistinguished child allies facing down corrupt corporate greed.

It’s fine but far too ­familiar and doesn’t hold a candle (or a feather) to the original little elephant that could.

—by MEGAN BASHAM

April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 21

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Books

Understanding Judaism 36 BOOKS FOR INSIGHT AND COMPREHENSION by Marvin Olasky I’m suggesting every couple of months reading lists for thoughtful WORLD readers. In our Dec. 29 issue I offered up books about American ­history, and in the Feb. 2 issue books for Black History Month.

Now, with Passover and Easter coming soon, here are books on Judaism that will deepen your knowledge and provide a ­background for evangelistic efforts.

I begin with Edith Schaeffer’s wonderful Christianity Is Jewish, originally ­published in 1975 and still in print. Christians wrote several others I’ll list, but most are by Jews so you can read Jewish understanding firsthand.

You should know some history: Martin Goodman’s A History of Judaism and Michael Brenner’s A Short History of the Jews are good overviews. Burton Visotzky’s Aphrodite and the Rabbis shows how Jews adapted parts of Roman culture, and David Klinghoffer’s Why the Jews Rejected Jesus is a thoughtful Orthodox Jew’s explanation of that tragedy.

Reuven Hammer’s Akiva: Life, Legend, Legacy tells us of the influential rabbi born shortly after Christ’s

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resurrection. Itzhak Shapira’s The Return of the Kosher Pig examines Messianic thought within Judaism.

Barry Wimpfheimer’s The Talmud is a history of the books that became almost second Scripture to Orthodox Jews. Chaim Saiman’s Halakhah shows what emerged from centuries of Talmudic discussion. JeanClaude Schmitt’s The Conversion of Herman the Jew shows us 12th-­ century pressures, Yair Mintzker’s The Many Deaths of Jew Süss 18th-century torment, and Adam Kirsch’s Benjamin Disraeli an amazing move from novelist to prime minister. Disraeli benefited from what the great historian Gertrude Himmelfarb describes in The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England, From Cromwell to Churchill.

Meanwhile, anti-Semitism surged in Eastern Europe. The Journeys of David Toback by Carole Malkin details one man’s life in Eastern Europe and his escape to America in 1898. Nathaniel Deutsch’s The Jewish Dark

Continent is an ethnographic look at Eastern European culture just before World War I. Many who stayed in Eastern Europe died during the Holocaust, at first by bullets, as described in Omer Bartov’s Anatomy of a Genocide, then by gas chamber in concentration camps like what Primo Levi ­vividly describes in Survival in Auschwitz.

The deaths of 6 million Jews led to the creation of Israel, where 6.5 million Jews now live: Return to Zion by Eric Gartman and Israel by Daniel Gordis are solid histories. Steven Pressfield’s The Lion’s Gate narrates the Six-Day War in 1967 that was key to Israel’s survival. AntiJudaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing Israel, edited by Robert Wistrich, has insights into what’s happened now that tiny Israel punches above its weight. The title of Joshua Muravchik’s Making David Into Goliath summarizes today’s media tendencies.

The only other major center of Judaism today is the United States: Jack Wertheimer’s The New American Judaism spotlights the slide to secularism of most American Jews.

Scott Shay’s In Good Faith thoughtfully shows why those (and other skeptics) should not abandon God. Most Jews rarely read

Scripture, but Shai Held’s two-volume The Heart of Torah, along with The Israel Bible (in Hebrew and English, edited by Tuly Weisz), is useful for learning the thinking of those who do. Readers with philosophical bents will be interested in Kenneth Seeskin’s Thinking About the Torah.

Gerald McDermott’s Israel Matters and George Gilder’s The Israel Test show why Christians and others should not abandon Israel.

That seems unlikely, given the strength of Zionism among evangelicals, as Paul Wilkinson’s Understanding Christian Zionism, Robert Smith’s More Desired Than Our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism, and Ray Gannon’s The Shifting Romance With Israel show.

For those who want to go deeper into Israel’s ­history, Ran Abramitzky’s The Mystery of the Kibbutz explains what worked in Israel’s communal experiment and what did not, and Daniel Heller’s Jabotinsky’s Children examines the rise of Israeli militancy in the 20th century. Two provocative books from Messianic Jews are Jim Melnick’s Jewish Giftedness and World Redemption and David Reagan’s The Jewish People: Rejected or Beloved? A

Four novels from Christian publishers reviewed by Sandy Barwick

BRUNCH AT BITTERSWEET CAFÉ Carla Laureano This romantic drama portrays realistically flawed characters in messy situations. Despite her lousy track record with men, pastry chef Melody Johansson feels immediate attraction to the handsome man stranded at her job one snowy night. Justin—a pilot— feels the spark too, but shuns a relationship because the timing couldn’t be worse. He’s planning to move to Florida for a career change while Melody, firmly planted in Denver, opens her own café. Faced with impossible choices, Melody trusts God while Justin accuses God of indifference. How can they be together without sacrificing their individual goals?

HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN Jolina Petersheim A subtle parallel to Ruth’s story found in Scripture, How the Light Gets In tells the modern story of Ruth Neufeld. After a bomb blast in Afghanistan kills Ruth’s husband and father-in-law, she decides to remain on a Wisconsin cranberry farm with her Mennonite mother-in-law. Here she reluctantly falls in love with her late husband’s first cousin. But what would happen if her ­husband came back from the dead? Beautifully written, this novel explores the covenant relationship of marriage and the importance of perseverance amid day-to-day living. However, the shocking ending will disappoint some readers.

CONVERGENCE Ginny L. Yttrup Psychology professor Denilyn Rossi survived a stalker’s attack.

Seven years later, he’s back—or so it seems. How can he be ­following her when he’s supposed to be in prison? Feelings of helplessness return as Deni’s life spirals out of control again.

Deni begins to fight back against the menace threatening her only when she remembers she has the power of the Holy Spirit living inside her. To avoid confusion, readers should pay close attention to the alternating timelines. When past and present converge, the stalker’s identity becomes clear. An evenly paced thriller to the end.

AS THE TIDE COMES IN

HANDOUT

Cindy Woodsmall & Erin Woodsmall Tara Abbott spent her childhood in one foster home after another. But at age 30, just as she settles into a happy routine, tragedy upends Tara’s life once again. Still addled from a head injury, she travels to Georgia’s St. Simons Island, seeking answers to her past. There she encounters a quirky group of older women called the Glynn Girls—who annoyingly act older and sillier than 50-somethings should—and a handsome firefighter. This novel includes a sweet love story and a fun plot twist and highlights God’s patience and kindness toward His children.

To see more book news and reviews, go to wng.org/books

AFTERWORD Of Fire and Lions (WaterBrook, 2019) by Mesu Andrews tells the ­fictionalized story of the Biblical prophet Daniel through the eyes of Abigail, his childhood friend and eventual wife. Daniel and his friends meet fellow ­captive Abigail after the Babylonians invade Jerusalem. The book’s title alludes to the accounts of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego surviving fiery deaths in a furnace after refusing to bow to a false god and of Daniel being thrown into the lions’ den for his refusal to worship King Darius.

Andrews expertly details their lives in exile, but the most compelling character is Abigail: The young Hebrew girl abandons faith in Yahweh as she struggles to survive among idol worshippers. When her faith is later restored, she grapples with guilt from her past and fears losing everything she holds dear.

—S.B.

April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 23

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Children’s Books

Celebrating the season CLASSIC EASTER STORIES FOR CHILDREN

AFTERWORD

reviewed by Mary Jackson

PETOOK: AN EASTER STORY Caryll Houselander Petook, a rooster, swells with pride when he becomes the father of 12 chicks. He struts and crows as the boy Jesus gently admires his brood, protected under mother hen’s wings. Years later, an older Petook observes with sadness three crosses on Calvary. Jesus, now dying, cries out to Jerusalem, “How often would I have gathered you under my wings.” But three days later nature stirs, darkness turns to life, and Petook cheers as a new chick bursts out of mother hen’s single egg. Houselander’s ­delicate writing, complemented by Tomie dePaola’s endearing illustrations, make this a treasured Easter classic. (Ages 4-6)

THE TALE OF THREE TREES retold by Angela Elwell Hunt

Three trees on a mountaintop dream of what they might become.

One envisions a treasure box, another a sailing ship, and the last, the tallest tree in the land. Soon, woodcutters chop them down, fashioning one into a feed box, another into a fishing boat, and leaving the last in a lumber yard. Years later the trees’ destinies are fulfilled, but are greater than they could have imagined. The feed box holds baby Jesus, the greatest treasure. The sailboat carries Jesus as He calms a violent storm. The lumber becomes a cross, bearing a crucified King. A beautiful retelling of a traditional folktale that will come to life for generations to come. (Ages 5-8)

THE LEGEND OF THE EASTER EGG Lori Walburg

When Thomas’ sister suggests they pretend to go on an Easter egg hunt, he doesn’t know what she means. Then his sister contracts scarlet fever, and he must go stay with a family that runs a candy shop. Thomas helps in the store, but he worries his sister might die. A small chocolate egg gives him hope by reminding him of chicks that burst out with life and of Jesus’ tombstone rolled away at the ­resurrection. Walburg interweaves Easter traditions like coloring and hiding eggs with the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection and shows readers how a boy finds faith amid trial. (Ages 4-6)

SIMON AND THE EASTER MIRACLE Mary Joslin & Anna Luraschi

24 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

James

HANDOUT

Simon enters the city market eager to sell his bread, eggs, and wine. Instead, an officer orders him to carry the cross of a prisoner whose crime is “preaching a message of peace.” Simon completes the task while people jeer and weep around him. When he returns to his goods, they are ruined except for a dozen eggs. Three days later, Simon finds those same eggs, not meant for hatching, cracked and open. Then he discovers 12 doves, symbolizing peace, and spring warms his new crops, blessing their growth. Joslin and Luraschi offer a unique depiction of Simon of Cyrene and new life in Christ. (Ages 5-8)

For families seeking a meaningful Easter readaloud, here are two books worth consideration: In Arnold Ytreeide’s Amon’s Adventure (Kregel, 2010) a 13-year-old Jewish boy finds his newfound ­status as a man put to the test when his father faces accusations of theft. As he sets out to save his father, his story intertwines with Jesus’ unfolding ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection. Short, exciting chapters end with reflections to help older children engage with the Easter story in a memorable way.

Scott James’ Mission Accomplished (New Growth Press, 2015) is a two-week family devotional intended for the weeks before and after Easter. Each day includes a Scripture passage, a short reflection, questions, and discussion prompts. Hymns and simple craft ideas appear intermittently.

James helps families reflect on Jesus’ last days, death, and resurrection, which are “not far off events that have no meaning for us, but … the basis of our daily life and faith.” —M.J.

To see more book news and reviews, go to wng.org/books

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Q&A

GEORGE FRIEDMAN

A fragile stability

GEOPOLITICAL UPDATE: SIFTING THROUGH THE HEADLINES TO ANALYZE INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS by Marvin Olasky

We’re sitting down on March 2, 2019, and hearing about India and

26 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

Pakistan fighting. It seems serious: Two nuclear-armed countries shooting down each other’s planes? They do this

regularly. Islamic groups occasionally carry out attacks on the Indians. India responds by blowing something up. In the end India feels better, the Pakistanis feel better, and life goes on.

The headlines are dire. Yes, something more for CNN to get hysterical about. This happens all the time. It was a slow news day.

OK: Let’s take a tour of Asia, starting with North Korea. Kim is not going to

give up his regional nuclear weapons.

He has no reason to. We’re not going to go to war because it’s very difficult to invade North Korea. It’s very difficult to know where his nuclear missiles are. So we have a standoff. The United States cannot eliminate the nuclear threat, and we’re pleased so long as Kim doesn’t build an ICBM that could reach the United States, which he has not done.

CHRISTOPHER GOODNEY/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGE

WORLD periodically interviews George Friedman, founder of Geopolitical Futures and a leading ­forecaster of international developments based on demography, geography, military capabilities, and ideologies. We have run previous magazine articles featuring Friedman in issues dated Jan. 30, 2009; Jan. 15, 2011; March 21, 2015; Nov. 12, 2016; and March 31 and April 28, 2018.

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Is Japan pleased? Japan is a historic enemy of Korea going way back. Japan is moving more and more aggressively toward being armed.

Why would North Korea fire nuclear missiles at Japan? I don’t

believe it will, but the Japanese after Pearl Harbor want to be prepared for the worst. Japan could rapidly have nuclear weapons. It’s the most advanced nuclear power country in the world, it’s very good at technology, and this technology is 70 years old.

Five years from now you expect Japan to have nuclear weapons? It’s

one turn of the screw away from having them. President Trump has said the Japanese should develop their own weapons because we don’t want to take responsibility for their national security.

Japan also faces two other major nuclear powers, Russia and China, and it has a very serious dispute with China over the status of the East China Sea. Was it odd that Trump and Kim met in Hanoi? The United States and

Vietnam have been building a friendship.

U.S. naval vessels are based in Cam Ranh Bay once again. Germany and Japan, once our enemies, became allies: We specialize in this kind of alliance switching. The Vietnamese are not hostile to the United States: They are hostile to China. The U.S. and the Vietnamese are cooperating in many different ways because both have a common interest in blocking the Chinese. And the closer we get to Vietnam, the more we can irritate the Chinese, which is our foreign policy.

Our war effort in Afghanistan has now gone on longer than our Vietnam War. The invasion of Afghanistan made

sense. The original intention was to disrupt the Taliban and their allies in al-Qaeda. We achieved that in the first six months. We then set as the goal creating a free and democratic Afghanistan. This was demented: Afghanistan is many things, but it is not democratic. It doesn’t want to be democratic. It has its own, very ancient method of governing itself.

And Afghans know that the Taliban is not going away, but we are. So we talk

to the Taliban and arrange a graceful exit. I have to say that this could have

been arranged 10 years ago or longer, and the tragedy is that it was not. We did not understand the limits of power. We could disrupt the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

You can blow something up and leave, without the pretext of rebuilding, but you always have the idea to stay a little more, put in a little more power. This happened in Vietnam and in Iraq, and it happened in Afghanistan. Afghanistan broke British hearts.

It broke Russian hearts. It just about broke Alexander the Great’s heart. Afghanistan has withstood ­invasion for millennia. If there’s one thing that history tells us, it’s don’t mess with Afghanistan. If you need to do something, go there, do it, and get out.

Does that apply to Iraq? We ­disrupted Iraq. We took out Saddam Hussein, who certainly deserved to be taken out, but we also took out the plug.

Iraq was blocking the Iranians from the Mediterranean. The Iranians have now expanded to occupy part of Syria, most of Lebanon and Iraq, part of Yemen.

Still, their economy is in shambles, partly because of our sanctions.

Was going into Iraq a mistake? Iraq was a critical country for projecting force in the Middle East. The Iranians had a serious problem with the Iraqis, against whom they fought a war, and they were delighted to see Saddam Hussein, their mortal enemy, go. We assumed we would be welcomed because Iranian intelligence told us we would be welcomed. Iranian intelligence manipulated us and persuaded us that the Shiites would support the Americans. Then the Sunnis attacked us, and for various reasons the Shiites also decided to attack us. We got caught in the civil war, and now the Iranians dominate the country.

And Russia is allied with Iran?

Russia was happy to use the Iranians in Syria, but Russia is worried about Iran becoming very powerful and using its substantial influence in Azerbaijan to put Iranian forces in the Caucasus, which the Russians could not tolerate.

The Caucasus is the second area, after the West, from which invasions come.

Here’s one of the confusing things: When Syrian government land-to-air

missiles mistakenly shot down a Russian plane last fall, Russia blamed Israel. What was going on? The Russian

response gave away the game: Russia told Israel, You didn’t give us enough warning. That means Israel is notifying the Russians about upcoming airstrikes and the Russians are not telling the Iranians, their supposed allies, that Israeli planes are coming. This is the Middle East and it’s complicated.

Fear of Iran has given Israel some Muslim allies. The Israelis and the

Saudis have worked together for years, covertly. They have common interests and common enemies. The Trump administration has chosen a prudent approach. We’re going to pull back a bit in the Middle East. It was a good thing to pull out of the Iran nuclear agreement.

Is the Trump administration doing better in the Middle East than its ­predecessors did? It’s not as bad as

people say, but nothing could be as bad as people say. It’s not as good as Trump supporters say, but nothing could be that good. Trump’s instincts are not bad.

His execution is bizarre. His decision to withdraw from Syria was not a bad one, but saying 2,000 troops would move out of a combat zone in a week?

That was a dangerous situation with Russia and the United States potentially coming to blows in Syria.

Russia is in deep trouble. It needs $70to $80-a-barrel oil to stabilize. When a country has deep economic problems, it tries to solve them by creating national security issues, so Putin threatened another Cuban Missile Crisis. He’s ­trying to convince the Russian people that even though he hasn’t given them a prosperous life, he’s made Russia great again. Russia does have 3,000 nuclear missiles, but Putin’s not a fool. He’s ­trying to point out that he’s a player, but since he’s extremely weak it’s a pretty weak move.

How’s Xi Jinping doing? China’s elite was afraid China was fragmenting.

Xi became the dictator. Countries don’t get dictators when everything is fine and they say, Hey, why don’t we have a dictator? He became dictator trying to hold together a country in the midst of April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 27

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Q&A

a terrific economic crisis quite independent of American sanctions. China has an economy too large for domestic consumption.

It needs exports? It’s entirely dependent on exports to stabilize its economy, and since 2008 the appetite of the world for Chinese exports has declined—first the recession, and then China no longer has the cheapest exports.

But it’s getting into high tech. In technology it’s up against the United States, Japan, South Korea, Israel, Germany … that’s tough competition.

You can’t just decide you’re going to become a technological power. So China is caught between its past and its future.

They’re worried about regional warlords? The Chinese are afraid they’ll

go back to the condition they were in prior to 1948: They had a century of regional conflict as each region tried to secure its own interests. Xi’s job is to make sure that doesn’t happen. He periodically arrests corrupt people.

Isn’t “corrupt person” another way of saying “government official”?

They’re almost all guilty of it. He’s ­getting rid of his enemies. Xi wants to make certain that no force arises within the Communist Party to challenge him.

The question is how loyal the People’s Liberation Army is. It appears that the PLA is united and faithful to the ­government, but Xi is nervous.

What about ideological and religious challenge, such as that posed by the very rapid growth of Christianity in China? This is about raw power. How

many army divisions do the Christians have? This is not one of Xi’s major concerns.

Why, then, is repression and ­ ersecution of Christians getting p worse? Why not? Xi has a general

­ olicy to suppress anything that even p remotely could threaten the regime.

The Chinese are terrified the United States will set up a blockade in the South China Sea and cripple the Chinese economy. Americans have a legitimate concern that the Chinese will push into the Pacific. It comes 28 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

Isn’t China’s naval power growing?

Two forces want to overestimate China’s power: the Chinese and the U.S. Navy.

China wants to appear stronger than it is. The U.S. Navy does it to increase its budget—and I have no trouble with the Navy getting more money.

And space power? China is trying to land on the moon. Well, we did that 50

years ago. So they’re way behind. I don’t see any chance of war anytime soon.

We can’t possibly land on the Chinese mainland: It would be a disaster. They can’t possibly challenge us. Basically, we will make faces at each other and stick out our tongues.

Will China open its markets for exports from the United States? The

Chinese have all sorts of informal ways to block American goods. One way: Tell their citizens, “Don’t buy this stuff.”

That works very well.

So, any real cause for alarm in South Asia or East Asia? At the

moment it is stable, not because it is inherently stable but because various powers don’t have the military force to do anything. The Chinese have two ­aircraft carriers, neither truly finished.

The Japanese are thinking about what to do. The North Koreans can’t hit the United States. But this is an area that could in 15 to 20 years become very dangerous.

One question about the Western Hemisphere: What do you expect will happen in Venezuela? Venezuela

should be one of the most prosperous countries of Latin America, given its oil.

It’s a wonderful place destroyed by a regime that bought support from the poor. Now there’s no more money and the party’s over. It should be a message to everyone about what happens when people are too generous with public funds. I don’t think the regime meant to destroy the country, but it has.

Neighboring countries are putting on the pressure? The Brazilians want

‘Venezuela should be one of the most prosperous countries of Latin America, given its oil. It’s a wonderful place destroyed by a regime that bought support from the poor. Now there’s no more money and the party’s over.’

to make speeches. The Colombians are allowing transports to come through, but Venezuela will have to solve its own problems internally at some point.

The military will have to act to remove Maduro, whereupon it will then be attacked as a stooge of the United States.

And books will be written about how Americans planned the coup? In

Venezuela you can’t plan anything, not even a bus trip. In due course the army will get rid of Maduro, but then the rebuilding starts. That will take a very long time, and the army has a problem: It has to deal with the Cubans that are guarding the regime. Remember,

KEVIN VANDIVIER/GENESIS

What’s the biggest tension now between the United States and China?

down to naval power. For 10 years the Chinese have been talking about doing something about the South China Sea. For 10 years they have failed. I have great confidence in the U.S. Navy, and I would be very surprised if it could not cope with anything China has.

York City. An ­incident like that is not a strategic threat to the United States. It is murderous, and tragic for those who are there, but it does not undermine the country unless we allow it to.

When we make terrorism a major military question, are we fighting the last war? It’s how

we fight a military action, but this is not a military ­problem. It’s an intelligence problem finding out who’s doing it. It’s a police problem arresting them.

Why haven’t we had another 9/11?

9/11 was a very sophisticated ­operation by people who knew how to evade surveillance by the FBI and the CIA while they gained training in learning how to fly.

So they all died.

Maduro is not guarding himself. Cuban intelligence security people are. At a certain point the Cubans will withdraw, and that will be the endgame—but after that comes rebuilding.

Final set of questions: Since 2001 we’ve made fighting terrorism our top national security issue. Is that ­changing? The United States in

Afghanistan disrupted al-Qaeda, but didn’t solve the problem. Going into Iraq or Libya didn’t solve the problem.

Some problems of violence are not solvable by military means. So terrorism remains a high priority, but it’s shifting away from a military solution.

 molasky@wng.org  @MarvinOlasky

If someone goes into a building and starts randomly shooting people … He

will be able to do so. But look at 9/11.

That was strategic terrorism, a massive attack on not just two important buildings in New York, but the Pentagon as well. It was a highly orchestrated ­operation. We had a massive military response to it. We were able to disrupt the command structure of al-Qaeda, but then ISIS emerged.

Are you saying we just have to live with apparently random terrorist acts? We’ve lived with them for a long

time. I remember when Croatian nationalists blew up a building in New

It was asset-wasting.

Few people can carry out those operations. But it’s almost impossible to stop a lone individual who drives a car into a crowd of people. It’s an act by a person who’s come to believe something, and he’s prepared to give his life for it.

We can build barriers. He’ll strike somewhere else. This is a form of ­terrorism that’s indistinguishable from a psychotic killer. Some people have motivations that don’t fit into the ­political or religious mode. Why in the world does a 16-year-old decide to kill children in a school? There is such a thing as madness. In a country the size of the United States there are many maniacs. A April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 29

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Music

Words with jazz KEN NORDINE SPOKE TO ‘THAT MUSCLE IN THE MIND’ by Arsenio Orteza Ken Nordine, the possessor of one of the greatest speaking voices ever committed to tape, died in February. He was 98.

Nordine first went public in the late 1950s and early 1960s with a series of spoken-word recordings for Dot Records. The titles of three of them— Word Jazz, Son of Word Jazz, and Word Jazz Vol. II—minted the catchphrase with which he would henceforth be identified.

The records ­capitalized on the beatnik-era fad of reciting or improvising poetry atop small-combo jazz while establishing Nordine as a master of trenchant drollery. One early track in particular, “The Vidiot,” is as relevant now in the age of smartphone addiction as it was in the early days of television.

Nordine later branched out into advertisements and became a voiceover star. But it was his Word Jazz Radio shows, with their memorable tagline “Stare with your ears,” that provided his sonorous voice, his skillfully calibrated delivery, and his surreally

R

inclined imagination with their most hospitable settings.

Initially recorded for Chicago’s National Public Radio affiliate WBEZ and later for NPR itself, the shows’ 30-minute formats gave Nordine the freedom to combine isolated bits into uninterrupted Nordine streams of consciousness and otherwise tweak his trademark ’50s formula.

His most notable innovation was the “underdubbing” of secondary voices.

These allowed him to engage in dialogues with himself that sounded like late-night phone conversations between friends whose shared ­obsessions included numbers, colors, Shakespeare, Blake, A.E. Housman, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and the humorously absurd.

Sometimes “they” even broke into song.

This approach ended up informing his albums as well. His final release, 2001’s A Transparent Mask, includes a meditation on the Fibonacci sequence and concludes with a quietly sung performance of an original Nordine love ballad called “What’s There to Do?”

And, his aversion to “vidiots” ­ otwithstanding, he eventually tried n his hand at video. For his hourlong film Agenbite of Inwit and the expanded version that he released on DVD as The Eye Is Never Filled, he supplied trippy, computer-generated visuals to what amounted to a kind of Word Jazz Radio’s greatest hits.

But it’s his voice that will live on.

“There should be,” he mused at the outset of his debut LP, “a set of setting-up exercises for the imagination, a way to strengthen that muscle in the mind that lets us dream while we’re awake.”

Thanks to his vast recorded legacy, there is.

EXPLORING, STRETCHING, BLURRING

30 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

the lengthy tracks. “Snow” (7:46) finds Oram tampering with Sandy Nelson’s “Teen Beat” until it sounds like a Residents prototype. “Birds of Parallax” (12:58) unites the urban and the bucolic in a synthetic skein. The harrowing “Dr. Faustus Suite” (9:36) evokes the terrors awaiting those who’ve made deals with the devil.

In her 1972 book An Individual Note, Oram wondered whether focusing on life’s “essential fundamentals” might enable one to perceive a “different richness.” To the extent that Oramics reflects her attempts at putting this idea to the test, the answer would seem to be yes. —A.O.

 aorteza@wng.org  @ArsenioOrteza

KEN NORDINE JR.

The Young Americans label has just reintroduced into ­circulation the works of another audio pioneer, the late British electronics wiz and BBC Radiophonic Workshop founder Daphne Oram.

Available both digitally and on four clearvinyl LPs, Oramics compiles 44 tracks Oram recorded in her home studio from 1958 to 1977, tracks that find her exploring, stretching, and blurring the boundaries between solemnity and fun, technology and art.

Many of the selections clock in at under two minutes and sound like incidental music in search of a science-fiction B movie. Not so

New releases reviewed by Arsenio Orteza

SONGS FROM ROBIN HOOD LANE Alex Chilton

Half of these songs come from Clichés, the only ­full-length testament to Chilton’s fondness for the jazzier chapters of the Great American Songbook released during his lifetime. And, truth be told, Clichés, with its typically Chiltonian curveballs, feels more alive. Still, it’s nice that his three cameos from Medium Cool’s Imagination have finally made it onto an album bearing his name and even nicer that his superb recording of Louis Jordan’s “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying” has finally made it onto anything at all.

GUY Steve Earle & the Dukes This album’s good because Guy Clark, whose songs these are, wrote good songs and because Earle sings and performs them pretty much as Clark would’ve if he’d fronted the Dukes. What makes it less than great is the something in Clark’s songs that makes singing and performing them pretty much as he would’ve ineluctable. An exception is “Out in the Parking Lot,” in which Earle locates an excuse to rock almost as valid as the excuse not to that Brad Paisley once located in the very same song.

TRAVELIN’ SHOES Marley’s Ghost The vocal harmonies and the material are pure Southern gospel, the arrangements and the folkleaning instrumentation only a smidgen more ­adventurous or roots-proud than the Oak Ridge Boys.

But that smidgen makes a difference, especially on the title track, which gets sped up and reconfigured along lines entirely consistent with its death-bed urgency.

Elsewhere, a happy-and-you-know-it spirit prevails, with “Shadrach” verging on the jocular. Not jocular at all: the “Sweet Hour of Prayer” that brings the program to a reverent close.

ENCORE Few artists can match the quality or the diversity of the recordings left behind by the pianist-composerconductor André Previn, who died in February at age 89. The title of a 2008 DVD celebrating his accomplishments and ­aesthetic philosophy ­proclaimed him “a bridge between two worlds”—jazz and classical—and that he was (as even a cursory listen to any of his recordings of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue will prove). But bridges are often prosaic, and Previn was anything but.

No sooner had he died than fans took to the internet to single out their favorite Previn recordings, many of which can be found in Sony’s recent 55-CD box The Classic André Previn.

One that can’t, however, is Doris Day and the André Previn Trio’s Duet (1962), on which Previn’s elegantly expressive playing functions less as accompaniment and more as an eloquent second voice—one that, were Day’s excellent vocals wiped, would still say everything that needs saying. —A.O.

HARALD HOFFMANN/DG

THE BEST OF THE ’68 COMEBACK SPECIAL Elvis Presley This single-disc edition of the seven-disc 50th anniversary box that Sony released last November avoids the repetition inevitable in the jumbo edition but at the expense of the ’tween-song chatter and jokes, without which these performances lose some of their intimacy and spontaneity. The energy, however, remains intact.

Now, if only someone (Giles Martin?) could think of a way to gussy up the audio—or to explain why anyone thought it was necessary to tack on “A Little Less Conversation,” “Suspicious Minds,” and “Burning Love.”

To see more music news and reviews, go to wng.org/music

Previn

April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 31

VOICE S

Mindy Belz

All politics is local NETANYAHU MAKES AN ELECTION GAMBIT ON THE GOLAN HEIGHTS

32 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

Playing ­politics with contested territory may help with voters, but drawing new attention to what’s been a largely unmolested border ­carries risk.

Lindsey Graham, Netanyahu, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman visit the Golan Heights.

 mbelz@wng.org  @mcbelz

RONEN ZVULUN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

When President Donald Trump at 12:50 on a Thursday afternoon tweeted it was “time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty over the Golan Heights,” the average world citizen said a collective “huh?”

Israel captured two-thirds of the strategic ­plateau from Syria in 1967 during the Six-Day War—and no one has seriously contested its control in more than 50 years.

The Golan was an afterthought until Day 5 of that war when Israeli Defense Forces, surmising their northern flank needed protection from Syria’s Soviet-backed forces, suddenly opened a front no one expected Israel to secure.

Syria’s minister of defense, the father of current President Bashar al-Assad, gave his troops an order no Israeli has likely forgotten: “Strike the enemy’s settlements, turn them into dust, pave the Arab roads with the skulls of the Jews.”

Unlike then-foes Egypt and Jordan, Syria has never made peace with Israel. The United Nations considers the Golan Heights “occupied” territory, but for Israel it’s a strategic buffer between sworn enemies. The barrier is made more necessary now eight years into a war inside Syria that Assad also has refused to end through a negotiated peace process.

The last time I visited the Golan Heights, in 2017, Israel by all appearances had beaten its swords into plowshares. Groves of mangoes and avocados compete with orchards of apples and pears. Hothouses vie for hillsides with vineyards making some of Israel’s best wines. All of it supplements agricultural exports—for Europeans and Middle East neighbors who make it ritual to condemn Israel’s occupation of the Golan.

For two years Israel also ran a humanitarian aid operation across the Golan border into Syria—sending tons of food aid and providing medical care (using two U.S.-based Christian aid groups, Frontier Alliance International and Friend Ships Unlimited) to thousands of Syrian civilians the Assad regime was ignoring.

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So why draw attention to something that’s not broken? Why put on the map again a place so lately off the radar? First, it’s an election year in Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, now in his 10th year in office, faces a historic reelection bid on April 9 amid corruption charges and a tough challenger.

Benjamin Gantz, a three-star general whose mother is a Holocaust survivor, was running ahead of Netanyahu in February polls (though the prime minister’s Likud Party remains favored to pick up enough seats to retain its majority in the parliamentary system). Securing Trump’s endorsement of stepped-up control over the Golan could secure votes. Netanyahu ­lobbied first National Security Adviser John Bolton, then Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on his Middle East trip in March.

During a March 18 phone briefing with Pompeo and about a half-dozen reporters I attended, Pompeo was vague in response to questions about the Golan Heights.

“I’m not going to foreshadow the remarks that I’ll make while I’m there,” he said. Asked about the State Department’s human rights report released a week before, which for the first time dropped the word “occupied” in reference to the Golan, Pompeo said the report “reflects the facts” but “is not a policy document.”

The Trump administration may be playing local politics, too. Israel more firmly in control of Syria’s southern border takes attention away from Turkey’s problematic control at Syria’s northern border. Both may pave a way to end U.S. troop involvement.

Playing politics with contested territory may help with voters, but drawing new attention to what’s been a largely unmolested border carries risk. Syria has deepening backing from Iran, with its militias nearby, and from Russia, which has installed in recent months a new anti-aircraft missile system there. These are the major threats, not a half-century-old border dispute.

The “radicalization of Syrian politics and the frailty of the Syrian state” played a major role in the crisis feeding the Six-Day War, argued former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Itamar Rabinovich. That same frailty, he said, has fed the current war in Syria. Trumpeting Israeli control of one border in that war may improve security, or hasten another scene of conflict. A

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ISIS may be beaten in Iraq and Syria, but for Yazidi women who have escaped its atrocities, the battle to survive such brutality and find justice for war crimes is only beginning BY MINDY BELZ IN SHARYA, IRAQ

A Yazidi woman who escaped Islamic State militant captivity stands inside the tent she shares with family members at the Sharya camp for civilians displaced by war in Iraq.

ALICE MARTINS/AP

April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 35

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ne thing you notice, interviewing the survivors, is they all sit the same way: knees pulled to their chests, arms encircling their knees, hugging themselves tightly as they talk, wanting to share but also recoil from violent memories of their captivity at the hands of Islamic State.

ISIS may be defeated on the battlefield, but one thing is clear: Families made Islamic State a state. The presence of women, children, schools, and commerce lent legitimacy to an illegitimate stake in the territory militants once controlled (one-third of both Syria and Iraq until 2017), a base from where they launched attacks on Paris, Brussels, London, and elsewhere.

Forced in March from its final stronghold in Syria, ISIS ­fighters with their thousands of burqa-clad women and ­children have fled the Syrian city of Baghuz into the desert. Public attention has focused on their plight without distinction between women who voluntarily joined ISIS and captives enduring its brutal slavery.

Yet inside Islamic State, the situation for non-Muslim captives and Muslim adherents could not be more different. ISIS treats the former as property, not people. Sexual violence and other war crimes, often momentary, these women have endured for years. Those interviewed for this story told me of being chained to walls, left in dark basements with dozens of women and Editor’s note: This story ­children, without toilet includes discussion of sexual ­facilities or even a bucket, for atrocities committed by ISIS. days. Some were starved, and nearly all were raped.

Even as Iraqi, Syrian, and U.S. coalition forces beat back ISIS occupation, the atrocities haven’t ended. Of more than 6,700 Yazidi women and girls captured, 3,000 are still in captivity.

Yet hundreds of Yazidi women have managed to escape over the last 4½ years. Most are young women, some are girls.

Martine is no different, except for this one thing I can’t get past when I first meet her: She is 12 years old.

Martine had just celebrated her eighth birthday when ISIS fighters in white trucks showed up in her village, Xanasour, on Aug. 3, 2014. They captured her mother, two sisters, and a brother on an exceptionally hot day. Militants caravanned them town to town before Martine was “sold” to an Iraqi fighter in his 40s, a married man with four children.

It’s a cold, damp, late January day in 2019 when we sit side by side on the floor of a safe house just outside Sharya, one of the camps for Yazidi survivors. I had traveled that morning from Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan region, passing ­military checkpoints and crossing a bridge under construction that ISIS had blown up in 2014. Inside the sparsely furnished concrete home, our breaths make puffs in the air until a ­kerosene heater warms the room.

While her cousin Maha brings hot tea, Martine, wearing high-waisted jeans and a striped shirt over her wispy frame, sits down on floor cushions, knees to chin. She pulls a parka up over her and begins to tell me what happened.

Martine briskly names the towns where ISIS trucked her and others for weeks that became months. “I stayed with my 36 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

mother and one sister. My older sister was taken to one place, my brother to another.”

Weeks later, she saw her brother again in Tel Afar, a city 50 miles west of Mosul. “Then ISIS took my mother away, and I stayed with my sister.” Trying to recall what happened next, she pauses, confused, then says, “I was 8 years old and I was afraid. I didn’t know what was happening.”

She and other Yazidis were living in an abandoned school when a militant came in one day to ask whether the girls wanted to see their mothers. Martine and others said yes and quickly left with him. It was a trap. “They were lying to us to get us to come without a fight.”

In a hallway, ISIS men had gathered to choose slaves from among the girls, says Martine. A man named Abbas Qahtan Khalil took Martine. She never saw her sister after that.

ISIS already controlled key territory in Syria starting in Raqqa, the capital of its self-declared caliphate, along the Euphrates River to Mosul in Iraq. A government organized into departments with documented rules and regulations guided the jihadists’ mission.

One pamphlet, issued by the Research and Fatwa Department, reads: It is permissible to buy, sell, or give as a gift female captives and slaves, for they are merely property, which can be disposed of. …

It is permissible to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn’t reached puberty if she is fit for intercourse; however if she is not fit for intercourse, then it is enough to enjoy her without intercourse. …

It is permissible to beat the female slave as a [form of ] darb ta’deeb [disciplinary beating].

Rearing families using slavery was compulsory work for the state. ISIS men received monthly stipends based on how many women they owned, $50 per woman and $35 per child. A ­special department maintained documents of who owned what

TOP: KHALID MOHAMMED/AP • BOTTOM: MINDY BELZ

Martine speaks through an interpreter, looking at the ceiling or in the distance as she talks. Her father, Khudeda Hajji, sits across the room. She has told portions of her story before, and I wonder what harm I’m inflicting to push her to tell them again. But then she leans forward in conversation, eyes on me, urgent, her small voice rising when the interpreter or her father interrupt before she’s finished. She wants the record to include important details, yet at one point she says, “Let’s stop this, it’s making me too angry.”

But then she laughs and continues.

When we return to the subject of physical abuse, she slows and speaks softly, almost a whisper. “It was from the beginning,” she says, pausing for several seconds. “Animals.”

“Martine was the first case we had of a girl that young used as a sex slave,” said Zeno Gamble, chief operating officer at Virginia-based White Mountain Research. His group works alongside the Nazarene Fund, launched by television and radio personality Glenn Beck in 2015 to support persecuted minorities in the Middle East. The two organizations have assisted in 121 rescues of Christian and Yazidi women captured by ISIS. Besides helping Martine return and receive medical care, they cover rent and other expenses for her family.

A Yazidi woman (above) who escaped The Nazarene Fund and White enslavement by the Islamic State shows the Mountain support a handful of special injuries to her hands that were carried out by an cases requiring medical and psychologiAlbanian who forced her to put her hands on hot cal support. One victim, a woman sold to asphalt, then stomped on them with his boots, at a relative’s tent in a camp for displaced more than a dozen men during captivity, people outside Duhok, Iraq; Martine (left). returned with multiple limb fractures and venereal disease. slaves. Martine says I met also Layla Taalo, a 29-year-old mother captured by Khalil’s family ISIS militants with her then 12-month-old daughter Sarah and ­traveled with him, 2-year-old son Salah. Repeatedly bought and sold to ISIS men, but she was the only trafficked from Iraq to Syria, Layla too was locked in a room and slave he owned. raped nightly, while her children listened, crying and screaming “I lived for one from the next room. By day her son was sent to ISIS training year in Mosul with sessions, learning to make bombs and behead “infidels” along his family,” Martine with other young boys. continues. “They “We were held two years, eight months, and six days,” Layla were good at the recites. beginning, then they became mean.” The espite her age, Martine is not considered a special family treated her case, and those who’ve worked with her say she’s harshly and had her remarkable because she remains sturdy and ready to clean the house, but prevented her from entering the kitchen, discuss her ordeal. But health officials say they’re saying she would contaminate the food. learning the damage—psychological and physical— Khalil began beating Martine with pieces of wood, she says. may be slow to emerge.

He beat her with a water hose. At night he locked her in a room “We have seen and treated girls 9 years, 11 years, 13 years,” away from the family and then began to rape her. said Nezar Ismet Taib, a psychiatrist and director general of

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April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 37

health for the Duhok governorate in Iraq, an area that includes most of Iraq’s Yazidi population. “Most of them when they arrived did not have any obvious damage, but you cannot, for example, see pelvic damage when they are so young.”

Taib said nearly all the returning girls need treatment for urinary tract and other infections, and a few have contracted hepatitis. A prevalent complication among those who have passed puberty is pregnancy: Numerous captives return with babies. Or, they’ve been forced to undergo abortions by fighters who did not want their children. For young girls like Martine, though, the biggest problems are psychological, said Taib. “Most of them are completely disassociated. When you talk to them they are not there.”

Taib began seeing young former captives within months of the 2014 ISIS invasion. By May 2015 his office had 500 cases;

by August, more than 2,000. Taib persuaded the regional government to treat the situation as a health crisis, setting aside hospital wards for specialized care, including suicide watch units as suicide skyrocketed among returnees. Officials set up survivor camps apart from the displacement camps many Yazidis still are living in. In 2019 the camps serve 720 women and girls with specialized care.

Four years into a crisis, Taib said resources for such ­prolonged care are scarce, and the United Nations recently pulled funding from a project just beginning to show success.

“We still have much to learn,” he said.

Many battered women come home after years away to ­ iscover that loved ones have disappeared or been killed, that d homes are destroyed and towns are empty. It’s another devastation.

For the youngest victims, attachment to captors, no matter how brutal, is an issue, said Taib. “You’ve had sex with someone and he is becoming like your husband. This bond happened and now this guy is killed or she escapes, but she still has to deal with the experience, the separation, and for some the loss. Even if the men were so bad to them, they still have some attachment.

A child in her emotional development phase, stopped by trauma like this that delays normal development, this is very bad.”

Boys, too, need psychiatric help upon return. Layla and her children made a harrowing escape during fighting in Raqqa after her family paid smugglers to secure her return. Upon arrival in Sharya and seeing thousands of displaced people at the camp, her son Salah asked, “Who are all these people?” Told they were Yazidis, he said, “They are infidels, and we should burn them all.”

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38 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

MINDY BELZ

artine also moved from Mosul to Raqqa with owner Khalil and his family. The family moved often according to each battle, three months in one town, four months in another, mostly paralleling the Euphrates to Deir Ezzor, an area that came under heavy fighting s­ tarting in 2017. Just south of Deir Ezzor, the final ISIS stronghold at Baghuz appeared by March near collapse. As fighting intensified last year, Khalil often was away. His 18-year-old son died during that time, detonated using a suicide vest.

Layla and her children Khalil sent Martine to live with a neighbor, also Muslim, in Dashisha—where the U.S.-backed, Kurdishled Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) battled ISIS with support from French warplanes. She stayed there for seven months, while the neighbor’s wife “watched after me as a daughter and treated me well,” Martine said.

With war closing in, relatives of the neighbor’s wife contacted a female soldier with Kurdish defense units fighting ISIS. She offered to contact Martine’s family.

Martine at first was suspicious of another trap, but ­eventually with the woman’s help reached her father by phone, traded photos and messages, and finally arranged to go home. A Kurdish unit escorted her across the border back to Iraq, where she met her father and cousin Maha, who cares for Martine in her mother’s absence.

Gamble told me no one paid ransom or a smuggler’s fee for Martine, which is unusual. Yazidi families over the years have constructed elaborate networks, using social media and word-of-mouth, to locate enslaved family members and hire go-betweens to negotiate and arrange their release, sometimes paying thousands of dollars.

Layla’s family paid $7,500 to rescue her and her children.

Martine has returned to school, and her father has applied for the family to emigrate to Australia. None of her childhood friends or other family members have returned. “I have only my cousin and a few new friends and studies,” she says.

When I ask her about her mother and sister, her father interjects, “We have information about her sister, but nothing about her mother yet.”

Do you think she is alive? I ask.

A Yazidi woman watches as forensic workers examine a mass grave of hundreds of Yazidis killed by Islamic State militants in northern Iraq (top); a Yazidi gynecologist talks with Yazidi women at a refugee camp near the Iraqi city of Duhok (bottom).

TOP: ZAID AL-OBEIDI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES • BOTTOM: SAFIN HAMED/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Hajji responds, “We hear different things. There are a lot of Yazidi women in Syria so we are hoping.”

Beside me Martine also answers, so softly I almost miss it: “She is not coming back.”

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arlier this year a UN investigative team arrived in northern Iraq to begin collecting evidence of war crimes and atrocities—two years after the UN Security Council passed a resolution forming it, and a year after Secretary-General António Guterres appointed Karim Asad Ahmad Khan to head it.

Khan is a Scottish-born lawyer of Pakistani descent, an expert in Islamic law who participated in international ­tribunals on war crimes in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and Liberia.

His mandate is long-delayed, and daunting: Besides examining atrocities against Yazidi survivors, his team must analyze the remains of more than 12,000 bodies buried in more than 200 mass graves across Iraq.

Khan’s team completed the first mass grave study on March 21, exhuming the remains of up to 30 individuals in Kojo. He told a local gathering, “You have already waited a long time.

And I’m sorry to say you will have to wait longer. Because the road to real justice is a long one.”

The Nazarene Fund and other organizations I contacted say the UN team has not approached them, but they are collecting

 mbelz@wng.org  @mcbelz

evidence just the same. Yazidi groups long have archived accounts like Martine’s to add to the data, even as more Yazidis are freed.

Layla Taalo was on hand in Sinjar Feb. 28 to receive 21 Yazidis—18 children and three women— rescued from Baghuz. As Yazidis continued to return through March, she said she wanted to make them feel welcome to begin re-entry to a much-changed homeland. The Nazarene Fund said it planned to support the returnees, including those wounded in the Baghuz battle.

When I ask Taib, the health official, what’s the most important thing he’s learned, he responds: “We learn from these Yazidis how to stand all this trauma.

This resilience among the survivors is something. As Kurds we have been through many wars, but to see these women, it’s amazing.”

What accounts for their resilience? I ask.

“I think they’ve kept their faith and hope in their community,” says Taib. “The community leadership has been good in dealing with it, and the Yazidi women are strong. They have more coping mechanisms than you can imagine, and that too is something really we need to study.”

Yazidis number perhaps 700,000 in the world, a community centered in Iraq and dating to the 12th century. Their religion draws on a mixture of Zoroastrian, Christian, Sufi, and Muslim rituals.

They worship an angel some consider Satanic, a teaching cited by Muslim extremists who want to wipe them out.

Long before 2014, Yazidis were the target of Islamic State groups. Four coordinated bombings in one day in August 2007 killed more than 500 Yazidis in villages west of Mosul—until 2014 the largest terror attack anywhere since 9/11.

A historically closed community of large families and intermarriage, Yazidis find their community pried open to the world, and pushed to change by what its women have endured.

Early on the Yazidi religious council in Sinjar issued a ­statement saying the returning women “are our daughters” and should be welcomed back without dishonor. The Kurdistan Regional Government did the same, pledging to help them. “These two statements have repaired a lot of damage,” said Taib.

More challenging is what Yazidis will do with children fathered by ISIS, who are not welcomed into the community.

Leaders opened an orphanage in Sinjar for them and ordered some sent to Baghdad, but many mothers understandably want to keep their children. In many cases, that’s not considered acceptable, by families or the community at large. “We are trying to find understanding, and hope it’s an area of controversy that will progress,” said Taib.

For women like Layla and Martine, being called “daughter” after “infidel” and “slave” is a needed first step on the way to a long recovery. A April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 39

F E AT U R E S

LET THE GIVER

BEWARE From fake cancer pleas to fake funerals, fraud is a purportedly rare but persistent problem on the crowdfunding website GoFundMe. What’s the responsibility of the Christian donor?

BY EMILY BELZ IN NEW YORK PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY RACHEL BEATTY

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: ISTOCK PHOTO POSED BY MODEL

40 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

HANDOUT

Popular crowdfunding platform GoFundMe finds its name in many heartwarming news stories and viral videos. This year, for example, it collected hundreds of thousands of dollars for the family of an 8-year-old Christian refugee who, two years after fleeing violence from Boko Haram in Nigeria, unexpectedly won the New York state chess tournament for his age group in March.

Tanitoluwa Adewumi had learned the game of chess only a year earlier while he and his family lived in a homeless shelter in New York City.

His chess coach at his public school started a GoFundMe campaign for the family’s housing, starting with a $20,000 goal. It quickly raised more than $200,000.

“We give God the glory,” said Kayode Adewumi, the boy’s father.

Since GoFundMe started in 2010, users have raised more than $5 billion for various causes.

Many of the crowdfunding campaigns cover funeral or medical expenses, or other legitimate needs like that of the Adewumi family.

Still, the giving often is not mediated by ­nonprofit institutions, regulators, or deep ­relationships—and because of that, fraud sometimes happens.

The company’s nine-year history is dotted with con artists pretending to have cancer and scalawags exploiting a disaster or tragedy. There was the parent who conjured a vague terminal illness for her daughter. There was the man who abused a puppy and then raised $14,000 for its veterinary care. Police discovered that fraud when they stopped him and noticed the abused puppy.

“People like these new mechanisms and they can be exciting and fun,” said Daniel Borochoff, founder and president of CharityWatch, a nonprofit watchdog. Borochoff recommends giving to organizations because of their checks and balances. “People shouldn’t be overly impressed because it is on the internet, or because it is on the GoFundMe platform. It’s just a convenient mechanism that could result in good, or it could result in throwing away your money. It’s like the plumbing.”

Unlike other crowdfunding sites such as Indiegogo, GoFundMe promises to refund donors of fraudulent campaigns and has several safeguards in place. But fraud remains a problem because it often doesn’t come to light until reallife checks intervene, such as when police ­investigate a related matter or when people who know the scammer file a report.

Real life intervened for Mississippi priest Lenin Vargas-Gutierrez, currently under investigation for allegedly faking a cancer diagnosis and raising $9,210 on GoFundMe for medical expenses, money he instead spent on personal expenses.

According to the federal affidavit, the Catholic priest was concealing that he had HIV. After hearing from suspicious parishion­ers about the priest’s fundraisers, a fellow priest in the diocese, John Bohn, reported his concerns, noting that the church had very good health insurance that would have covered his expenses.

“It appeared to me to be systemic, 1̀ ­premeditated fraud,” Bohn told the Mississippi Clarion-Ledger. “If you’re reasonably suspicious of criminal ­activity, go to law enforcement. That’s what we did.”

In Maine, Democratic and Republican legislators in March introduced a bill that criminalizes “organized electronic theft” from crowdfunding. The bill came after a wrenching incident involving a local couple: After Jennifer and Rodney Hembree lost their 16-year-old daughter Tabytha in a 2̀ car crash in 2017, someone else set up a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for the family, then stole $7,000 of the funds raised.

Maine Rep. Jeff Hanley was one of the sponsors of the legislation: “It’s one thing to lose your child,” he said at a hearing for the bill. “It’s another to have someone profit from it.”

Danny Gordon, GoFundMe’s vice president of trust and policy, said the 3̀ company supports these sorts of higher penalties for wrongdoers, but said fraud is already illegal, and that problems are overstated.

“The reality is a bit removed from what’s available in the media,” said Gordon. GoFundMe’s standard line in recent years is that only onetenth of 1 percent of campaigns are fraudulent.

Gordon described the platform’s fraud prevention tools as on par with those of financial institutions.

But watchdog website GoFraudMe argues GoFundMe “specifically allows for a significant amount of fraud to occur on its platform, and that it minimizes this fact in its statements to the media.” The founder of GoFraudMe, journalist Adrienne Gonzalez, said that when she first started the site in 2016 she was swamped with

(1) Victoria Morrison with her son; she spent months faking her son’s terminal illness and then his death in an effort to raise money online.

(2) A German shepherd puppy on GoFundMe whose owner was later charged with animal cruelty and theft by deception. (3) A photo used on Lenin Vargas-Gutierrez’s GoFundMe site.

April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 41

(1) McClure (center) and D’Amico on Megyn Kelly Today. (2) Bobbitt (left), McClure (right), and D’Amico pose at a Citgo station in Philadelphia.

(3) Photos provided by the Burlington County Prosecutor’s Office show Bobbitt, McClure, and D’Amico.

42 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

2̀

to New York to meet an agent about a possible book and movie deal for the three of them. But a friend, who lived near where McClure supposedly ran out of gas, texted her and asked why she hadn’t reached out.

“Okay so wait the gas part is completely made up,” McClure texted back, according to an affidavit in the case. What authorities later claimed is that McClure, D’Amico, and Bobbitt (who was indeed homeless) had come up with the scheme ahead of time. D’Amico allegedly called it a “little lie” in a text message. According to the affidavit, a friend texted, “This gas story is gonna backfire,” and McClure responded: “Nah it’s all good. …

How would it?”

GoFundMe disbursed the $400,000 minus some fees to McClure, and then the story became like a Coen brothers script. With a full bank account, McClure and D’Amico went to Walt Disney World and Disneyland, gambled $21,000 in casinos, and took a helicopter tour of the Grand

3̀

Canyon, according to prosecutors. The couple did send Bobbitt $31,000 and bought him a trailer home (which McClure titled in her name, put in her yard, and later sold). Meanwhile McClure bought a BMW and designer handbags.

In a few months, all the money was gone.

Bobbitt was panhandling again, prompting

1: NATHAN CONGLETON/NBC/NBCU PHOTO BANK VIA GETTY IMAGES

reports of scams like a mother raising money for a funeral of “her very much alive son.”

Gonzalez says she had no particular ax to grind with GoFundMe when she started her website, but she wanted the site to track instances of fraud and to be a hotline for tips that GoFundMe might ignore.

A growing number of school districts have banned teachers from raising money for supplies or field trips on crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe—most recently in Nashville, Tenn.— because of the potential for abuse and because districts couldn’t manage the process or the funds. Superintendents have instead encouraged teachers to apply for grants or raise funds through local organizations and businesses.

The superintendent for Dayton, Ohio, district schools announced a ban on teacher crowdfunding last year, saying the district had no way to track the funds. That came after the state auditor’s office recommended school policies on crowdfunding, citing as one of the risks “diversion of donations for private use,” according to the Dayton Daily News.

Fraud, according to CharityWatch’s Borochoff, is expensive for a regulator to go after, so it’s generally not worth it unless it’s a large campaign.

Borochoff argues that for that reason, GoFundMe doesn’t know the level of fraud on its site.

“They’re a business,” he said. “Unless the ­government mandates it, they’re not going to spend a lot of money to verify.”

If prosecutors were looking for a large campaign to investigate, nothing has topped the whopper in New Jersey that started in late 2017. The way 28-year-old Kate McClure told it, she was driving home alone one night when she ran out of gas and became stranded off a 1̀ ramp of 1-95 in Philadelphia. But lo, a homeless man named Johnny Bobbitt appeared and used his last $20 to get some gas from a nearby station, filling her tank and sending her on her way.

Afterward McClure started a GoFundMe campaign titled “Paying It Forward” to raise $10,000 to get Bobbitt off the streets. She posted pictures with Bobbitt, thanking him for his help in her time of need. The story went viral, and the outpouring was enormous. The campaign eventually raised $400,000 for Bobbitt.

The Ellen Show called for a booking, and McClure and her boyfriend, Mark D’Amico, went

2: ELIZABETH ROBERTSON/THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER VIA AP 3: BURLINGTON COUNTY PROSECUTORS OFFICE VIA AP

­ uestions from a reporter who had covered the q earlier fundraising campaign. The couple insisted in interviews that they could not disburse the full amount to Bobbitt because of his drug habit.

Bobbitt countered in interviews of his own that D’Amico was “hypocritical” because he had a gambling habit.

The scheme was unraveling. Bobbitt sought out a lawyer and sued to get his portion, which prompted New Jersey prosecutors to start sniffing around the case, leading to charges last fall. In March, Bobbitt and McClure pleaded guilty to federal charges connected to the scheme, and all three now face state charges as well. GoFundMe gave refunds to 14,000 people who had donated to help Bobbitt.

GoFundMe has some patched-together rules of the road to fend off trouble. It bans fundraising for things like criminal legal defense, drugs, and abortions. Website users can report a suspicious campaign or ask questions of the campaign organizer. When dispensing money, the company requires various forms of verification beforehand—in fact, the biggest complaint on consumer sites was that the verification process delayed receiving GoFundMe money.

A horrible bus crash in Canada last year killed 16 members of a junior ice hockey team, capturing national attention and sending GoFundMe’s enforcement process into action. A Canadian man set up a GoFundMe page for victims that police quickly said was fraudulent, and GoFundMe shut it down and alerted donors after it had raised $3,800.

Meanwhile, a hair stylist from the hockey team’s town of Humboldt started another  ebelz@wng.org  @emlybelz

GoFundMe campaign for victims of the same crash. That campaign raised a whopping $11.3 million, leading to an ongoing court case over how to divide the money—another wrinkle in the world of noninstitutional, person-to-person giving.

Gordon said the company’s “tech layer” immediately noticed both campaigns—the one from the concerned hair stylist and the one from the fraudster—and began vetting both. He wasn’t sure of the details for the campaign that was removed, but he said it could have been “too high of a risk” or the individual behind the campaign might have raised red flags. He said the company held the funds of the hair stylist’s campaign in order to do additional vetting.

“Some of our most successful campaigns … have been started by someone who is a stranger to the ultimate beneficiary but wanted to help,” said Gordon.

Crowdfunding may build on the power of strangers chipping in cash, but church giving tends to be based in long-term presence in the local community and has natural institutional safeguards.

At my church in New York City, internal deacon policies include a general recommendation

Viral GoFundMe campaigns tend to attract money far beyond the set goal for the particular need, while other worthy causes on the site languish. against giving cash assistance. Instead, deacons pay direct bills and provide checks only after receiving receipts. Each person in need has an assigned deacon and contact from a small group in his or her neighborhood for financial, relational, and spiritual support. Financial assistance is limited per family, so as to provide for everyone.

(CharityWatch’s Borochoff noted that viral GoFundMe campaigns tend to attract money far beyond the set goal for the particular need, while other worthy causes on the site languish.)

Jim Barber, head of the Generosity Trust, a philanthropic organization that trains churches in giving, said Christians should give mostly to their local church, and then secondly to outside ministries, and then to GoFundMe at a tertiary level.

“Many GoFundMe causes are legit,” Barber said. He encourages potential donors to do research, ask the organizers questions, and even ask for financials. “Keep your ‘bunk’ antenna high and on alert,” he said. “Proceed cautiously. And give in small amounts.”

He added: “And pray. … Trust in [God’s] leading and directing to point you to the things that He wants you to do. We serve a generous God.” A April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 43

F E AT U R E S

AMBITION, MONEY, FACES OF AUSTIN People are flocking to Austin for the jobs, education, and hip culture, but the city’s rapid growth is hurting some longtime and low-income residents

by Charissa Crotts in Austin, Texas THIRD IN A SERIES ON CHANGING CITIES

or the past two years, U.S. News & World Report has ranked Austin the No. 1 place to live in the United States. It says Austin beats the country’s largest metropolitan areas in affordability, job prospects, and quality of life.

Austin’s first-place rank catches some by surprise. The past few decades transformed the city from a sleepy college town and state capital into what some call “Silicon Hills”: a California-alternative tech hub with a beautiful natural environment and friendly business climate. Now it is one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States, with a population of more than 900,000.

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44 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

Austin’s small-town, hippie culture used to draw musicians and artists, but in recent years both established tech companies (like Google, Facebook, Apple) and numerous startups have settled in, sweeping swarms of young professionals to Texas. The city’s vibe is hip and eco-friendly, with a left-wing local government and a liberal population that defies the rest of the state. The Colorado River runs through the city, and bikers, hikers, and kayakers can choose from dozens of green trails and parks.

But massive growth can create massive challenges.

Housing prices are rising, highways are clogged, and ­developers are reaching into historic parts of the city,

AND MERCY:

i­ ndirectly pushing longtime residents out. Here are stories of six people who call this city of contradictions their home.

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ohn Mitchell, 22, works at Google. He wears cuffed jeans, black-and-white tennis shoes, and an elastic band on his wrist for his shoulder-length brown hair. He grew up in Massachusetts, but when he had to choose a college, he thought of the University of Texas at Austin: A family trip had taken the Mitchells through the city years before.

During his senior year, a UT professor told Mitchell about the job opportunity at Google. After eight weeks of intense interviews, he got a position. Mitchell calls Google “a PHOTO BY JAY JANNER/AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN/AP

s­ urreal place to work.” The 2-year-old Austin office gives Googlers all kinds of perks, including two meals a day and a rooftop dog park for their pets. Seven months in, Mitchell recently returned from a company trip to Las Vegas, where he stayed in the MGM Grand: “A year ago I was riding around on a bike with a brake that didn’t work. Every time I got Chipotle I would go deeper in debt. It’s a complete ­turnaround.” But he still doesn’t own a car and instead rides to work on an electric scooter.

On Mondays Mitchell goes to “free play night” at Elephant Room, a jazz club downtown. He loves the outdoor spots in Austin and a “long list of restaurants.” He hopes one day to April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 45

Mitchell

get a wristband and attend South by Southwest, a film festival, tech conference, and music showcase. He says, “The most important things that ­happened in Boston happened 250 years ago … whereas Austin, all those things are happening now. … For me, the young tech worker-graduate who appreciates what Austin was and also what it is now, it’s ideal.”

C

hris Morgan lives in a white stone house nestled in the hill country west of Austin. She and her late husband built the house in 2002, and all three of their grown children lived there for a time. They paid $30,000 for the lot: Now it’s worth $180,000. At 64, Morgan is short and grandmotherly, with chin-length gray hair. She frequently works in her husband’s old office, with a stretch of Texas sky visible through the ­window, and a short bookcase displays her cookbooks and Bible commentaries.

Morgan remembers old Austin: She moved here as a ­newlywed in the 1970s. Her husband, Jim, worked in real estate, and she studied English at the University of Texas. She remembers dragging her husband to dances at live music clubs like Austin’s famous Armadillo World Headquarters. They lived near Zilker Park, south of downtown.

In the 1980s the real estate market in Austin collapsed.

Morgan tapped into her love for computers to find a job and later gained an MBA. Jim died suddenly in 2010. Dealing with the loss and painful family circumstances made Morgan’s next year miserable. “Laura across the street got me a job with a consulting firm,” she said. “And after that, God always provided a job.” She found consulting contracts, six to 12 months long.

Now the large white house is mostly empty. Morgan spends her days cleaning it room by room, reading theology books, and taking calls from recruiters, looking for her next job. With her years of experience and her MBA, she is qualified for a high-tech position. But when people learn her age, their ­interest evaporates: That makes each new contract a challenge to secure.

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46 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

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on Dansby’s Austin is split between two worlds. He wakes up in his suburban home, half a mile from his kids’ school, then drives 20 minutes south to his office and the campus of the Austin Stone Community Church where he pastors. Both are located in the St. Johns neighborhood of East Austin.

Crime and neglect marked the area until recently. Now, as one of the cheapest parts of the saturated city, the neighborhood is rapidly gentrifying.

Dansby is a white Floridian with degrees from Texas Christian University and Dallas Theological Seminary. He was excited to move to Austin in 2010 because he knew it was a “cultural center” with “a lot happening spiritually.” The neighborhood surrounding his church is mostly Hispanic and African-American, but more than three-quarters of the congregation is white. Instead of a church building, the church purchased a run-down, vacant retirement home. Needles ­littered the parking lot, and locals called it “the field of dreams” because prostitutes put down mattresses to work there. The church renovated it and rents the building at a discount to nonprofits during the week. The church also runs a baseball program for local kids, mentors students, and responds to tragedies like apartment fires. Dansby said the goal is that if the church left, “Austin would weep for us leaving.”

HANDOUT PHOTOS

arl Walker has lived half his life in a converted duplex in northwest Austin. “I love this house!” he said, striking the cushion of the gray couch. Walker, 60, is a tall African-American, with glasses and a mustache. His wife Debbie is a Caucasian New Yorker with short hair and a motherly smile. They moved to the neighborhood in 1988 and purchased the house in 2000.

Eleven years later, they removed the inner wall so they could use both sides of the duplex.

Neither of the Walkers has a college degree, limiting their job options in the increasingly expensive city. Earl Walker grew up in East Austin, the historically African-American side of town. Interstate 35 split the city: Wealthier whites lived west, and low-income black and Hispanic people lived east.

Walker’s parents worked at the New Orleans Club, a nightclub just west of I-35. At night, his mother would call him on the club’s phone and leave the receiver on the counter. He remembers falling asleep listening to the live music, a mix of soul, rhythm, and blues. “That was my take on Austin,” he said. “Growing up

in the east side, your vision kind of stopped at 35, so it made my world bigger.”

In the early 1970s, the city changed its policy, sending freshman Walker and some of his friends to a predominantly white high school 20 minutes north of home: “The people at the new school didn’t want us there. We didn’t want to go,” he said. “So, a lot of tension, even some violence and policing. It was really tough initially.” After graduating, he attended trade school and got a job as a computer technician at Texas Instruments. At 19, he met Debbie, asking her to dance at a club. Together, they moved to the Northwest Hills area of Austin with their dog, Thor. Eventually Texas Instruments downsized, and Walker lost his job. He started a lawn care business in 1981 and later switched to housekeeping and laundry at Hawthorn Suites.

Debbie worked at Dell, then at a dental clinic.

The couple arranged their shifts so they could homeschool the kids together. “It was perceived as a huge risk, and God just made it happen.

Our children are the Debbie and Earl proof,” Walker said. He saw all three of their children graduate from college and marry. The Walkers attend High Pointe Baptist Church, about 5 miles from home, with two of their sons. After church, the whole family, including the grandkids, eats lunch at the Walkers’ home. Sometimes the grandkids spend the night, and a Pack ’n Play stands ready in the boys’ old room (with their sports and Awana trophies on a shelf ).

Earl Walker’s grandparents, ex-slaves, came to Austin from Bastrop, just southeast of the city, and settled in the east side.

His parents stayed in Austin, and now he is watching his grandchildren grow up in Austin, a fourth generation of native Austinites. “I wouldn’t live anywhere else,” Walker said.

“This used to be a Mexican meat market,” she said, pointing to an upscale restaurant called Hanks. Hanks shares a shopping center with a Family Dollar, a small nail salon, and a discoteca (a Mexican music store). Nearby is a Mexican fruit cup shop tucked in a corner between two stores. Sanchez knows the owners and remembers going there with her friends after school. Signs for shops and restaurants along the road alternate between Spanish and English. Every so often, a luxury condo complex appears, looking out of place.

Austin officials are succeeding in making the city attractive to people with money. But Sanchez said, “It’s coming at a cost for people who have roots here.”

G In helping the poor, Dansby did not want to communicate, “The white ­people are here, finally.” But some ­congregants moved into the St. Johns neighborhood expecting God to change things immediately. He said they were “chastened by reality that real transformation takes decades. It takes presence. It takes sacrifice. It takes all kinds of things. So we’re still there.” He said church members sometimes do neighborhood outreach. “That’s met with some very varied degrees of success. Mostly white folks walking through a neighborhood that’s not predominantly white is sometimes not super welcome.”

Instead of traditional efforts like soup kitchens, the church encourages members to serve through local nonprofits. Dansby said, “We always want to make sure we don’t divorce povertyfighting from proclaiming the gospel. You can help people for the short term, but if they go to hell, what has really been done?”

ene Burd has seen and done a lot. “When you live to be 87, you collect a little more than lint,” he said, sitting in his tiny retiree’s office in the University of Texas journalism department. Burd is small and mostly bald with blue eyes and an intense stare. He wears a light-blue long-sleeved button-up shirt and dress pants. Six stacks of paper, each 3 feet high, stand in a neat row along the wall. Stacks of papers and boxes of files fill the shelves and cover the desk, blocking the computer and the view out the window. He’s going through his writings— published and unpublished—and putting them online.

Burd moved to Austin in 1972: “At that time the UT Tower and the Capitol were the tallest buildings in the city.” Burd lives in the Threadgill’s apartments, named for the famous nightclub where Janis Joplin and other rock singers got their start, but he says high rents are forcing many of the nightclubs that gave Austin its culture to close.

Before retiring, Burd taught feature writing at UT for 40 years. He never married (though he said he “should’ve married Dola May”) and never owned a car. He walks to his UT office and takes a bus to dentists, doctors, and the H-E-B grocery store. Burd called Austin “puberty-ville” and said you can be arrested as an illegal alien for being Burd over 60 here.

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AUSTIN: JAY JANNER/AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN/AP • BURD: HANDOUT

A development project is under construction in the South First Street neighborhood.

hree miles from St. Johns, Marisol Sanchez, 36, sees the gentrification of East Austin up close and daily.

For 24 years, she’s lived in a pink, one-story house with ­potted plants along the front sidewalk and a string of lights decorating the eaves. She lives with her parents and youngest brother in East Austin, near the Mueller area, with its upscale offices and green park with a man-made lake. Luxury apartments, an Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, and the Thinkery children’s museum are also in Mueller, a development named after the old airport that used to occupy the land.

When 10-year-old Sanchez and her family moved to Austin from Mexico City, they settled on the east side where property taxes were lower. Her dad worked as a welder and construction worker, and her mom mostly stayed home with the four kids.

Most of their neighbors were Mexican or African-American.

The new airport opened south of downtown in 1999, and city officials contracted with developers to build Mueller. It opened in 2007, and property values of homes nearby soared. Many longtime residents could no longer afford a place in East Austin and moved further north and east.

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eople love Austin, with good reason. But many of its ­positive features come with negative sides. As the city grows, so does its homeless population. As developers beautify the city, property taxes rise. The demand drives developers to build high-end, luxury apartments or one-bedroom condos, and middle-class families struggle to find a place near the city center. Public transportation runs limited routes near downtown, so those who live in the suburbs must own cars and brave traffic to get to work.

Austin is a city caught between its past and its future: No longer a hippie small town, but not yet a San Francisco. Longtime residents and new residents are feeling the stretch, exciting and terrifying at the same time. Chris Morgan remembers old Austin, where you could buy breakfast tacos downtown for $1.25, with tech workers in Birkenstocks eating on picnic benches next to politicians in three-piece suits. But new Austin, with its spotlight and money and massive growth, is already here.

While career opportunity and spiritual opportunity abound, the hard question remains: What happens to the residents who can’t keep up? A April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 47

F E AT U R E S

A house is not only a home After a Chabad rabbi expanded his home to host Jewish college students for the Sabbath, neighbors sued

by HARVEST PRUDE in Towson, Md.

48 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

Towson University and Goucher College students pose with Rabbi Mendy Rivkin and his wife Sheiny at the Chabad House in Towson, Md.

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50 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

who hadn’t known about the covenant when they bought the property, decided it was too late to stop building.

The neighbors sued, arguing the Rivkins were in violation of the covenant and of zoning laws. A Baltimore County Circuit Court judge ruled in favor of the neighbors and ordered the Rivkins to tear down the addition. The Rivkins appealed, and asked if they could move the structure back to comply with the covenant. The court also rebuffed that request, ruling that the structure would still violate residential zonings.

The neighborhood is not entirely ­residential. On the same street are a nursing home, multifamily units, a church, and the grounds of Towson High School.

On Dec. 20, 2018, the Rivkins filed a federal lawsuit in defense of their Chabad house (aka “Chabad of Towson and Goucher”) against Baltimore County and the Circuit Court, arguing the government violated the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA). A U.S. Department of Justice website notes RLUIPA protects individuals, houses of worship, and other religious institutions “from

The Rivkins’ home (center)

RIVKINS & PREVIOUS SPREAD: HANDOUT PHOTOS

t’s Friday night as usual for a Messiah. Each Chabad house caters to group of Jewish college stuthe unique needs of the community: dents at 14 Aigburth Road.

Some act as synagogues, some as Outside, the sun has set on a schools, and many are inseparable from quiet residential street. Inside, the home itself. candles flicker in one corner “It’s not a 9-to-5 job,” Sheiny of a spacious dining room. A explained. “It’s a way of life—to make a dozen folding tables, graced safe home for all Jews.” with white tablecloths patterned with College students are the Rivkins’ swirling silver, signal a feast to come. ­special province because, as Mendy Around the tables, skirt-clad girls chat explains, they’re “at the age I feel is the while taking turns coddling two tiny, most vulnerable. Colleges do a great job 4-month-old twins in what they call in a lot of areas, but religious development “baby tag.” In an adjoining is not exactly one of them.” study separated by lattice In 2008, when the Rivkins The Rivkins wood dividers, Rabbi Mendy first moved into the house Rivkin leads a dozen young with just one kid in tow, it men in reciting a ritual prayer. took time to build relationMeanwhile, the rabbi’s ships with the students. But wife, Rebbetzin Sheiny Rivkin, soon students could expect is in the kitchen, flanked by a that when they were sick, handful of girls who warm Sheiny would bring soup, or up food, fill pitchers, and if they needed advice, Mendy chop lettuce. “We’re running would be in the library with a behind,” Sheiny said in her supply of bagels and cream rapid-fire Italian accent. But as she moves cheese. Soon, more and more students easily about the room, directing the tablebegan showing up for Shabbat dinners, setting or herding one of her seven chilHanukkah parties, and Judaism classes. dren, she peppers nearly every sentence The Rivkins’ 2,200-square-foot home, with an exhortation to “thank God.” particularly their kitchen and living It’s a necessary reminder because, room, began to be overrun. Goucher currently, the Rivkins are locked in a alum Chana Colin recalls having “elbows yearslong court battle over these very in my face while eating chicken.” rooms. In 2016, they built a 4,400By 2011, the Rivkins decided they square-foot addition to their house that needed more space, not only for hosting provoked a series of lawsuits from the students, but also for their growing family. neighborhood association, culminating Before granting them permission to build, last October in a Baltimore County county officials required the Rivkins to court order to tear down the $800,000 discuss the proposed addition with the addition. neighborhood. The Rivkins also had to Doing the demolition would be attend multiple public zoning hearings expensive and would jeopardize the where officials mulled over how to ­religious observance of the dozens of ­classify the addition, debating whether students from Goucher College (2 miles it was a synagogue, a community center, away) and Towson University (700 feet or a residence. The neighbors expressed away) who rely on the Rivkins’ hospitality to the county their opposition to the to practice their Jewish faith. In dorm extension: They cited the Friday night rooms students can’t keep some Jewish dinners and other activities as proof the practices—like baking challah bread, Rivkins were operating a community cooking up chicken matzo ball soup, and center. But in April 2016, the county lighting ceremonial candles. For Jews issued the Rivkins a building permit who don’t drive on the Sabbath, getting under a residential classification. to the nearest synagogue 7 miles away is Construction was underway when, in often impractical.

July 2016, a neighbor informed the The Rivkins are shluchim (emissaries) Rivkins’ their plans violated a setback of Chabad-Lubavitch, a Hasidic restriction someone had discovered in a Orthodox Jewish movement. The 1950 property covenant. The covenant Chabad movement encourages Jews in required that the house be at least 115 religious observance that they say will feet from the curb, but the addition ultimately bring about the return of the would be about half that. The Rivkins,

KENNETH K. LAM/GENESIS

­ iscrimination in ­zoning and landmarking d laws.” Under RLUIPA, the government cannot ­“burden” or hinder religious exercise through zoning laws unless it can prove that it does so out of compelling interest and in the least restrictive way to meet that interest.

The Chabad house’s lawsuit is the fifth RLUIPA suit brought against Baltimore County in the past two years.

A synagogue, a Baptist Church, a Presbyterian church, and a Mormon ministry have sued the county for what they deem discriminatory zoning decisions.

The neighborhood association declined to comment for this article, but next-door neighbor Robin Zoll testified in the complaint that the extension blocks the view in front of her home and that the property value of her home decreased 5 percent. The Rivkins say they’ve never had noise complaints from neighbors, and that street parking isn’t a problem because they have parking space at the side of their home. (Zoll told The Baltimore Sun, and Rivkin ­confirmed, that the Chabad house had offered her financial compensation, but

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she turned it down because she wants the addition removed.)

Garrett Power, professor emeritus of law at the University of Maryland, said RLUIPA gives religious institutions an unfair advantage. He gave the example of a megachurch wanting to move into the suburbs. “The stakes can be quite high. If a county imposes a regulation, and they say they’re trying to protect against traffic or too much sewage, they can be sued under RLUIPA and be ­subject to huge amounts of damages.”

Antero Pietila, author of Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City, allowed that ­“people are in the habit of trying to ­circumvent regulations.” But he also said zoning laws and covenants have been selectively enforced to discriminate racially or religiously: “Covenants have been used in the same way that zoning has been used. They’re seen as a way of screening out undesirables—people who cannot afford and do not belong.”

Students and alumni have rallied around the Rivkins by starting a Facebook group and writing letters of support.

Chabad rabbis have launched a social

media campaign, raising over $160,000 in donations. Even Maryland Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford wrote a letter to the county, arguing that the ordered demolition “sets an unfortunate precedent of local government tearing down a religious structure over a simple zoning dispute between neighbors.”

On Jan. 10, Circuit Court Judge Kathleen Cox granted Chabad a ­temporary reprieve on the tear-down order. Now the Rivkins have to wait until an appeal is heard in Maryland’s Court of Special Appeals.

But all of that seems far away on a quiet Friday night at 14 Aigburth Road.

With the tables set, students bow their heads over the blessing of the challah bread and line up to wash their hands in preparation for the meal. As the evening progresses, more and more students trickle in to eat chicken, drink the soup, and listen in mostly respectful silence to Mendy’s Torah teaching. As more arrive, others set up three more tables. The Rivkins expected unannounced arrivals because, as one student named Jessica Teich explained, “you don’t RSVP for dinner with your family.” A

April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 51

What Do Trees Reveal About God, Faith, and the Future of Everything?

More Than You Ever Imagined.

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“This book has deepened my love for God’s Word and his world.”

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NOTEBOOK Sports / Technology / Politics / Money

Sports

DAVID HAHN/ICON SPORTSWIRE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Trust, love, and baseball TEAMWORK LESSONS AT SPRING TRAINING WITH THE PITTSBURGH PIRATES by Laura G. Singleton in Bradenton, Fla. As the major league baseball season opens, fans in 30 cities will learn whether the teambuilding efforts in spring training camps have been successful.

Pittsburgh Pirates ­manager Clint Hurdle gave

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reporters the typical message: “‘Team-first’… We all have the same goal. There needs to be connection, there needs to be communication.”

Easier said than done: The 62 players at Pirates spring training camp came

from eight nations and 19 different states. Nearly a third were Spanish speakers, along with a Korean, Dave Jauss checks the lineup during a game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the New York Mets.

and MLB’s only Lithuanian.

Moreover, sharing one goal seemed particularly difficult when the essence of the camp was competition.

There are only 25 spots on a major league roster, so more than half of those assembled would either be with a Pirates minor league club or released.

The bulletin board outside the team’s locker room displayed inspirational statements and league ­policies in English and Spanish, along with a lessexpected notice advertising April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 53

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Sports with the last player invited to camp. During base-­ running drills, he barked encouragement and handed out low-fives and knuckle touches.

Jauss acknowledged, “Not too many people— definitely not males—talk about this, but when love

Pittsburgh Pirates at spring training in Bradenton, Fla.

permeates your family, … when you have the Lord in the middle of your home, … despite miscommunication, … despite differences of opinion, … you have a successful family, and a successful home.”

The same principle, he told me, applies to a team, so when “there is love in that clubhouse, you have an opportunity.” Whether or not players share his faith, Jauss feels, “The Lord allows love to come through my heart.”

That wasn’t enough, though, on the 2001 Red Sox. As bench coach—­ second in command on a major league team—Jauss was in the thick of what he calls “a dysfunctional office … absolutely no love in

coach with the Red Sox, Dodgers, Orioles, Mets, and, since 2012, the Pirates.

Team-building, Jauss stressed, begins at the individual level: “When you earn the trust of each player, and … they know you care about them, … then all of a sudden the third thing that can happen is they will be open to learning from you what you know, what we want to develop as a winning team, as a successful team, as a team that plays together.”

Hurdle made personal connections as players streamed onto the field, taking an extra moment for a handshake and a word 54 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

[that] team in Boston.”

Owners fired the manager in August, and new owners who took over the Red Sox the following spring fired the replacement manager and Jauss.

R During infielder drills in

Bradenton, seven players took their positions: All had major league experience, but at most six would be with the Pirates when the season started on March 28. Only the first baseman worked solo. Pairs of players at second, shortstop, and third base knelt on white towels spread over the grass as they alternated fielding grounders.

For each, the day loomed when “one will be taken and the other left,” whether to the major league bench or a minor league roster.

On an adjacent field, nonroster players worked out. Among them was Ke’Bryan Hayes, less than a month past his 22nd birthday, a touted prospect with high hopes. Nearby was Nick Franklin, almost 28.

Like Hayes, Franklin was a first-round draft pick out of high school—but that was 10 years ago, and he’s yet to play a full season in the majors. The Pirates are his fifth club.

Into this anxious environment, Jauss brought the love. He praised a minor leaguer’s progress: “I read those box scores, you know!” He embraced the Pirates’ stated goal to “grow boys into men,” saying, “I’ve never been in an organization that has that as a goal. … That’s why I love being here.”

Other coaches also worked to connect: First-

year hitting coach Rick Eckstein huddled over his phone with a player, reviewing video of batting practice swings. Another player, unsettled after some at-bats, sought out Eckstein. The coach checked back later: “Did you feel any difference?”

Assistant pitching coach Justin Meccage worked his Spanglish, asking a pitcher to throw “maybe two or three mas” and commending his ball movement: “Action bueno.”

Players bridged gaps, too: Korean third baseman Jung Ho Kang spoke the international language of teammate harassment, launching a handful of sunflower seeds that cascaded down Venezuelan catcher Francisco Cervelli’s back. A Dominican pitcher chatted with Kang, their short English phrases punctuated by gestures illustrating a baseball’s flight past a hitter.

The key to forming a team, said Hurdle, is ­“getting them to play for something bigger than themselves, to find a way to really embrace celebrating the success of others. … At the end of the day, they want to be the last team jumping around on the field.”

For Jauss, though, it’s about more than winning it all: “You can walk away with a really good year, a really good team, and not hold a trophy. People don’t write [about] those things.

But you know when it’s been a successful impact on yourself, on others.” A —Laura G. Singleton is a World Journalism Institute midcareer course graduate

DAVID GOLDMAN/AP

a women’s Bible study. The contact person, Billie Jauss, is the wife of Pirates coach Dave Jauss.

Dave Jauss, 62, has led teams in four different countries and at all competitive levels, with over 30 years in professional baseball. He’s been a big league

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Technology

Double jeopardy TWO THREATS POSE SERIOUS RISKS TO THE AMERICAN ELECTRIC GRID, BUT THE UNITED STATES COULD PREPARE

by Stephen Patton

The Trump administration recently announced U.S. ­intentions to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, alleging repeated ­violations of the treaty by Russia. In response, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that new advanced weapons could be aimed at American targets if the United States withdraws from the treaty.

Military analysts are reassessing the threat of nuclear war, given ­concerns about China, North Korea, and Russia. The horrors of blast damage and radiation are well-known, but the Electromagnetic Defense Task Force of the U.S. Air Force released a detailed report last November on the threat to the electric grid. One nuclear explosion high in the atmosphere could cause an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that could disrupt or destroy America’s electrical grid and much of our electronic equipment.

The likelihood of this happening is small, but if it did, America might enter a new dark age without any of the services required by a modern industrial society. An EMP could also result from natural causes, as occurred in 1859.

That year Fred Royce was working for the American Telegraph Company.

GERALD HERBERT/AP

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He saw brilliant auroras in the sky at his office near Washington, D.C. As Royce worked his telegraph, he received a severe electric shock. A witness saw a spark jump from his forehead to the equipment. Magnetic compasses gyrated wildly. Telegraph communications were severely disrupted.

Scientists now know the sun causes frequent disturbances on Earth, though most are brief and far less severe than what became known as the Carrington Event, named for a British astronomer. If such an event recurred in our electronic age, the results could be as catastrophic as a nuclear-caused EMP. The type of solar disturbance most likely to cause disruption on Earth is a coronal mass ejection (CME), an explosion of plasma and magnetism from the ­surface of the sun.

In March 1989 a geomagnetic storm caused by a CME resulted in the collapse of the Hydro-Québec power system. This event plunged Quebec into cold and darkness for nine hours, while technicians struggled to overcome the effects of the Earth’s violently fluctuating magnetic field. In 2012, space probes detected a massive CME that faced away from Earth. University of Colorado physics laboratory director

Daniel Baker said in a 2013 paper, “If that CME had hit earth, the resulting geomagnetic storm would have been comparable to the Carrington Event.”

Peter Riley, a physicist with Predictive Science Inc., estimated the probability of a Carrington-class storm at 12 percent in the next 10 years.

Another factor increasing geomagnetic disturbances comes from the Earth itself. Measurements from satellites of the European Space Agency show the strength of Earth’s magnetic field is steadily decreasing, perhaps as quickly as 5 percent per decade. This field protects the planet from the effects of solar storms. As it continues to weaken, it may allow solar storms to cause more damage.

Congress has been aware of these issues since at least 2000, when it established the EMP Commission.

This commission provided extensive reports in 2004 and 2008 detailing the seriousness of the EMP threat to ­modern American society. The reports also gave practical and affordable guidance for improving the resiliency of the electric grid. Professor and EMP Commission member George Baker testified before Congress in 2015, stating that the cost of grid enhancements would be $3.30 per month per electric ratepayer.

If lawmakers, regulators, and industry leaders understand these issues, what makes progress on ­hardening the electric grid so elusive?

Utilities say the U.S. government has responsibility in preventing a nuclear attack and should set regulatory requirements. The government has had compelling reports on the risks of the EMP threat for at least 10 years.

Yet Congress fails to pass relevant bills and regulators remain largely silent. A —Stephen Patton is a technology-fluent graduate of the World Journalism Institute mid-career course April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 55

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Politics

Left behind

THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN PROMISED TO CHAMPION PERSECUTED CHRISTIANS, BUT THE NUMBERS TELL A DIFFERENT STORY by Harvest Prude in Washington

56 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

Obama administration had ­overlooked the plight of persecuted Christians and said his administration would be different. “We are going to help them,” he said. “They’ve been horribly treated. If you were a Christian in Syria, it was impossible, at least very, very tough, to get into the United States. If you were a Muslim, you could come in. But if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible.”

Much has been made of the 80 ­percent of white evangelicals who voted for Trump, a key political bloc he continues to court. Yet he runs the risk of growing disillusionment among Christians for whom their persecuted brethren is a key concern.

Among them is a community of Chaldean Christians in a Detroit ­suburb in Michigan. The National Catholic Register reported that a growing community of Christian r­ efugees from Iraq and Syria helped flip Macomb County, a key suburb, red.

Trump won Michigan by a mere 10,704 votes. Chaldean Christians were largely

VAHID SALEMI/AP

When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Christians had good reason to believe the United States had turned a corner when it came to prioritizing persecuted believers overseas. But under his administration refugee admissions have plunged to historic lows, with persecuted Christians in the Middle East suffering from the fallout.

The number of Middle East Christians admitted into the United States in 2018 fell by a staggering 98 percent from 2016. Christians from countries Open Doors ranked highest for religious persecution saw a 76 ­percent decline from 2016 to 2018. The trend continues in 2019. By March 2019 the United States had welcomed only 30 Iranian Christians, 25 Iraqi Christians, and zero Syrian Christian refugees.

To some believers, these numbers tell a different story than Trump himself told in the past. In a January 2017 interview with Christian Broadcasting Network News, Trump implied that the

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responsible for Macomb’s flip. They voted for Trump because of “what is happening to Christians in Iraq and Syria, because we have loved ones in the area,” according to Martin Manna, A worshipper president of the attends a Chaldean service at a Chaldean Community church in Foundation.

Tehran, Iran.

But rather than welcoming their families into the United States, Chaldean Christians saw their own families threatened with deportation back to Iraq. In 2017, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained around 130 Iraqi Christians from the area, some for criminal offenses committed decades ago. The community turned out on the streets, touting signs with pictures of Trump and the words “You vowed to protect us” and “Stop the Deportation.”

(The deportation has been temporarily halted, in part due to the ACLU and local leaders’ ­lobbying efforts.)

Cliff Sims, a former administration staffer who wrote Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House, noted in his book that Trump kept his promises on many things important to evangelicals, “but not the ones he made to persecuted Christians.”

Instead, persecuted Christians have become collateral damage in the administration’s tough policies on immigration and refugees.

In fiscal year 2018 the United States set a refugee ceiling of 45,000 people, but only welcomed 22,491 refugees, roughly half the goal. A good chunk of those were Christians, but often not from the areas where religious minorities face the harshest persecution and even genocide.

For fiscal year 2019 Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced a cap of 30,000. It is the lowest cap since President Ronald Reagan signed the Refugee Act into law in 1980. The United States has admitted 10,700 refugees so far in fiscal year 2019, which began Oct. 1, 2018—2,000 are Christians from countries where they face persecution (28 from Iraq, and three from Syria).

“You have two things in conflict,” Sims told me. “Trump’s hard-line

Moore, appointed by Trump last year to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, said the administration’s focus was on deploying resources to Christians in places like Iraq and Syria rather than pushing for more to be admitted into the United States because “most ­refugees don’t want to immigrate unless they have to.”

The plummeting numbers have caused consternation in some Christian circles. In February 2018, a group of evangelical leaders signed a letter that ran as an ad in The Washington Post asking the administration to reconsider its policies. Last August, the Evangelical Immigration Table also sent a letter to Pompeo, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and Ambassador-at-Large for Religious Freedom Sam Amal Hana joined Brownback askhundreds of others in Detroit ing them to keep to protest the the cap high for ICE raids in which 2019. Christian more than 100 leaders, including Iraqi nationals Franklin Graham, were detained.

have also spoken out against the deportation of the Chaldean Christians.

World Relief is one of the nine ­private organizations that partner with the State Department to resettle refugees. Matthew Soerens, World Relief’s U.S. d ­ irector of church mobilization, expressed ­concerns about changes from ­personnel to ­policy that have slowed down the admissions process.

“We are all for an extremely ­thorough vetting process. But I’m not convinced the process that’s been developed since 9/11 has failed us,” Soerens said. “Our DHS has a good record.”

Soerens is also skeptical of the argument that refugees want to stay in their homeland. “No one has ever forced people to come to the United States as a refugee,” he said. “I interact with some of their family members here—they want to come to the United States.

They want to be safe and have the opportunity to worship Jesus. Would they prefer to go back to their country and have that religious freedom there?

Of course. But few of them think that is happening tomorrow.” A

TANYA MOUTZALIAS/MLIVE.COM VIA AP

­ osition on immigration and refugees; p then you have a more nuanced piece of that—hey, but there are persecuted Christians there who are fleeing ISIS in Syria, in northern Iraq. If we don’t help them, who is going to?”

When Sims raised the issue to Stephen Miller, a key driver of the administration’s immigration and ­refugee policy, Miller reportedly responded that he “would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched American soil.”

A number of evangelical leaders had almost unprecedented access to the Trump administration through an informal evangelical advisory board, and Sims says he never saw any of them remind him of the plight of ­persecuted Christians.

Spokesman for the evangelical advisory board Johnnie Moore said there were meetings where refugees were discussed. “I have [been] in several of them and I was privy to others,” he told me, though he did not respond to ­questions for specifics on what kind of concerns faith leaders raised.

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April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 57

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Money

Not enough plunder TAKING FROM THE RICH STILL WON’T PAY FOR DEMOCRATS’ DREAM PROGRAMS by Stephen Patton

t­ rillion in spending for fiscal year 2020. One way to raise this revenue in a progressive manner would be to ­confiscate all income, starting with the wealthiest Americans. Based on the latest Social Security wage statistics tables from 2017, raising $4.7 trillion starting at the highest income levels would require all the taxable earnings of over 35 million Americans. The ­government would have to take away completely all taxable income of ­individuals earning over $65,000 in 2017 in order to cover the proposed spending for fiscal year 2020.

If, on the other hand, we were to “outlaw billionaires,” a good place to start would be the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans. So what if we confiscate billionaires’ money until we have funded the 2020 federal budget?

Surely that would cover years of ­federal spending and leave plenty left over for new programs. Or would it?

The budget proposal of $4.7 trillion annually represents $13 billion daily. If we start with Forbes billionaire No. 1, Jeff Bezos, with $160 billion in net worth, we can fund the federal government for 12 days. Now who’s next?

Ocasio-Cortez, Warren, and de Blasio

58 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

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PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE; PAUL SANCYA/AP; JOHN LOCHER/AP; JOSE LUIS MAGANA/AP

As April 15, income tax day, approaches, Congressional Democrats are proposing significant increases in taxes to fund new programs. U.S. Rep. Alexandria OcasioCortez, D-N.Y., has proposed a 70 percent f­ ederal income tax on incomes above $10 million. Other Democrats have proposed similar levies. Proposals such as providing Medicare for all and the Green New Deal would require significant new expenditures and ­revenue to support them.

Is it really possible to tax the rich to fund fully such new initiatives?

Many Democrats certainly think so.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio says, “Here’s the truth, brothers and sisters, there’s plenty of money in the world.

Plenty of money in this city. It’s just in the wrong hands!” Ocasio-Cortez says “a system that allows billionaires to exist” is immoral. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., says, “We are the wealthiest nation in the history of the world — of course we can afford these investments.”

Let’s try some hypothetical exercises to test out the theory. The Trump administration has asked for $4.7

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Bill Gates and his $97 billion can take us about out to Jan. 20. Next up is Warren Buffet with $88 billion, who takes us out to Jan. 27. This isn’t going very well. We have reduced the three wealthiest Americans to food stamps, and we are not even out of January yet!

It is obvious where this leads. Take all the wealth of the Forbes 400 (a total of $2.9 trillion) and we can only fund the federal government for 225 days, or into the middle of August.

Now all those billionaires are a welfare expense to the government rather than a revenue source for the government. And we also have bankrupted state and local governments that are equally dependent on the success of these wealthy Americans.

Progressives might protest and say corporations are not paying their fair share. When they lobby for tax loopholes and then use those loopholes, or when cronies in government give them preference over competitors, they deserve criticism. Many reforms are worth discussing, but remember: Corporations provide the majority of the income to the working Americans paying the individual income tax. The stocks and bonds of corporations are central parts of the pension, investment, and college funds of many Americans. Impairing or confiscating those investments will only increase dependence on government. A

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Money

Playing with ‘FIRE’ EXTRA-EARLY RETIREMENT HAS BECOME A NEW FINANCIAL FAD by Collin Garbarino The Protestant Reformation taught us that “vocation”—a ­calling from God—belongs to all Christians, not just clergy. Often this vocation expresses itself in our work, and in the last few years Gene Edward Veith, Tim Keller, and others have written books that help Christians develop a theology of work and ­vocation. At the same time, another movement has spread in America with a different perspective on work. Its followers call it FIRE. FIRE stands for “Financial Independence, Retire Early,” and when people say “early” they mean very early. Many people pursuing a FIRE lifestyle dream of retiring in their 30s. Most workers in developed countries labor for 40 years before retiring, but the FIRE folks want their own lives to be mostly retirement.

People in the movement often trace FIRE’s rapid spread to a single blog

KRIEG BARRIE

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post. Pete Adeney worked as an engineer for 10 years before retiring at the age of 30 thanks to a high savings rate and a frugal lifestyle. In 2012 he wrote a post, “The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement,” that advises consistently saving half of one’s income. By his calculations a typical working career need not last more than 17 years.

Adeney’s blog post went viral, and the FIRE community developed a rule of thumb: Have 25 times your annual expenses saved in investment accounts, then retire. But what will early retirees do? In a 2016 post called “Happiness Is the Only Logical Pursuit,” Adeney describes the human person as “nothing more than a complex machine made of meat,” and he suggests people should do whatever gives them a hit of dopamine.

One person at a FIRE meet-up in Houston, former car seller Chris

Stam, told the group that anyone not working toward a 50 percent savings rate is not making progress. Stam retired last year at age 47 so he could “live life” while still young enough to enjoy it. He struggled to articulate what he does all day, but he assured everyone he stays busy: When he retired he gave himself “self-care” and likes choosing what he does and with whom he does it.

Tristan Sarremejane, a 29-year-old structural engineer from France, also was at the FIRE meet-up. He likes his work but doesn’t want to do it for the next 30 years because it leaves him insufficient time for leisure. He and his wife, a Texan, don’t have children yet, but he says a desire for family prompted his interest in FIRE. He fondly remembers his own childhood in France: His parents, who were teachers, had months of vacation time each year.

Some people note that focusing on early retirement can become a selfish squandering of talents. Vicki Robin, 73, wrote Your Money or Your Life in 1992, years before FIRE existed, but many leaders in the movement cite her book as inspiring their journey. In the book, Robin advocates getting out of debt, building wealth, and having a life of service to others: “We are not just lone wolves out there for our own personal agenda—for our own personal needs, wants, and desires. Lives shine when people discover how to be of service.”

Robin defines jobs as what we do for money, but “work” is something we do to improve our community and the world. Her emphasis on work echoes the Christian doctrine of ­vocation, and she’s right to reject the goal of retiring early to focus on ­ourselves. Christians can prepare for paying careers that satisfy and also allow us to be of service in business or nonprofit work—but there’s nothing wrong with seeking financial independence. What matters is whether our heart’s desire is to love God and our neighbors through our work, paid or unpaid. A —Collin Garbarino is a World Journalism Institute mid-career graduate April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 59

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Mailbag

Against the grain

[ March 2, p. 46 ] The Children’s Books of the Year issue is definitely my favorite. As a youth librarian, I take seriously my role in guiding our patrons to excellent literature. This issue and the children’s books column in every issue are a lifeline in a world overflowing with attractively packaged books filled with untruth.

—DARLA DYKSTRA / Kansas City, Mo.

My 10-year-old daughter was asking for more books like the young adult version of The Boys in the Boat. Then your Children’s Books of the Year issue arrived, and now at least four books my children will enjoy are ready to pick up at the library. Thank you!

—ABBY BRANDENBERGER / Fort Wayne, Ind.

Books of the resistance

[ March 2, p. 54 ] As an aspiring author, I have read hundreds of children’s books recently. Many new books and award winners strike me as leftist ­propaganda and moralizing, so I appreciate your careful reviews.

—ROBIN NEWMAN / West Bloomfield, Mich.

Parents should skip the propaganda and let little ones read the beloved old books that have built generations of strong Americans.

—DARLENE PAJO on Facebook

Janie B. Cheaney writes that Christian parents should evaluate with their teens whether the logic of these books holds up. That assumes Christian ­parents have been taught logic.

—JANET BELL on wng.org

A flawed design

[ March 2, p. 6 ] Socialism is becoming attractive because we have allowed those who control large corporations to escape their civic responsibilities and enrich themselves at the expense of workers. Executives who cut ­underfunded pensions while earning huge bonuses and stock options are just one example.

—PHILIP TAYLOR on Facebook

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Winston Churchill said it the best: “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

—RANDY CREWS / Spokane, Wash.

Socialism is far worse than a practical failure. It is by nature anti-freedom, always requiring a dictator to enforce it. It also violates the Eighth and Tenth Commandments, which command us to keep our hands off our neighbor’s chickens and keep our minds from desiring them for ourselves.

—BOB GROSSMANN / Vero Beach, Fla.

As Margaret Thatcher observed, the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.

—ROGENE HINGSTON / Mount Vernon, Wash.

Death of a poet

[ March 2, p. 67 ] Andrée Seu Peterson helped me sort through conflicting emotions surrounding the loss of Mary Oliver’s creative voice. The message came through loud and clear: Beware the road “soft underfoot,” no matter how beautifully it has been described.

—MICHELE MORIN / Warren, Maine

Creative unbelievers will always be among us, much like the poor. Peterson shows we must be circumspect when the words of man collide with the words of God. —BRIAN CAGE / Shawnee, Kan.

I am disappointed. It is not compromise to recognize Mary Oliver’s accomplishments and skill as a poet.

We who celebrate God as the true Creator should be the first to celebrate what is truly beautiful even if the artist is ensnared in sin, as we all have been.

—ANTHONY RODRIGUEZ / Swannanoa, N.C.

Bravo to Peterson for her column on living art and honoring truth. She ­consistently grapples with issues thoughtful Christians face and gives WORLD a distinctive edge.

—JOE MARTIN / Montreat, N.C.

The rise of the ‘YIMBYs’

[ March 2, p. 40 ] The biggest issue with trying to increase housing units in major California cities is that the infrastructure is built-out. Traffic is already insane, and they can’t put in more roads to support the extra traffic that would result from more housing.

And not providing adequate parking will create other problems.

—GARY CARDINALE / Torrance, Calif.

If working-class people in California such as firefighters and teachers ­continue in their jobs although they are basically homeless or live under insane conditions, why would their communities change? Real change will come when enough of those ­people have had enough and move.

Then the law of supply and demand will work it out.

—PHILLIP WOECKENER on wng.org

Necessary trips?

[ March 2, p. 68 ] I am thankful for brave scientists who dare to voice April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 61

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Mailbag

their honest criticism of Darwinism.

This issue is crucial, for if evolution is true, then death did not come into the world as a result of the Fall, as the Bible states, but was merely God’s tool for creating higher forms of life.

—CATHERINE BOEHME / College Park, Md.

Darwin’s theory of evolution is a ­dangerous, largely discredited fairy tale that scientists should have ­discarded long ago.

—JERRY DOYLE / Sheboygan, Wis.

Something cannot come from nothing, no matter how many billion years you throw into the equation. Some men will just not have God rule over them.

—HENRY SCHNABEL / Bristol, Colo.

Inside the Iglesia family

[ March 2, p. 36 ] The Iglesia ni Cristo’s influence in politics is real. I was in

Manila in 2014, and all elected officials, right down to barangay district ­captains, erected signs and posters offering their congratulations for the church’s 100th anniversary.

—MATTHEW TUBBS on wng.org

Constricted by ‘constructs’

[ March 2, p. 18 ] Excellent column.

It made me wonder if the American Psychological Association’s attacks on masculinity contribute to the declining number of men on college campuses. Given the APA’s influence in education, is it any wonder that men are taking themselves elsewhere than to university?

—JASON LEININGER / Strafford, Mo.

Corrections

Shane Anderson formerly ran the blog The Daily Genevan (“A matter

of a­ ttribution,” March 30, p. 55).

Eight species, two genera, and one family of organisms are named after Günter Bechly. Dragonfly adults ­possess helicopterlike flight. Sugar code on the cell membrane is necessary to produce a viable fetus. Michael Behe used empirical data from drug resistance in malaria to calculate the waiting time for genetic changes (“If rocks could talk,” March 2, pp. 28-29).

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LETTERS and COMMENTS Email mailbag@wng.org Mail WORLD Mailbag, PO Box 20002, Asheville, NC 28802-9998 Website wng.org Facebook facebook.com/WORLD.magazine Twitter @WORLD_mag Please include full name and address. Letters may be edited to yield brevity and clarity.

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Andrée Seu Peterson

On being had

THE ‘PRO-CHOICE’ SIDE WAS NEVER ARGUING HONESTLY ABOUT ABORTION We have been had. The saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” And we have been fooled six ways from Sunday.

They said who knows when life begins. So we said, OK, let’s talk about when life begins.

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you,” we quoted from Jeremiah 1, verse 5.

We’re not into religion, they replied. So we said fair enough, forget the Bible, let’s talk ­science, you like science, right? And if the ­science proves when life begins, then you’ll stop killing babies in the womb, agreed?

They said not so fast, we grant that life of some kind starts when sperm and egg unite and make a being with a separate set of chromosomes and blood type from the mom, but, well, it’s just a fetus at that point, and not a person, and a fetus is a blob of protoplasm lacking consciousness.

What if we show you that the fetus does feel pain, we said, would that make you rethink your policy? Maybe, they said. And so we came bristling with ultrasounds of babies flinching and recoiling in the womb at stimuli and mentioned how the state of Utah passed a law three years ago requiring docs to give a fetus slated for abortion anesthesia if it has passed 20 weeks in its gestation.

Well, pain is a subjective thing, they countered. You don’t know for certain that the flinching is from pain. And even if it is, it’s only after third-trimester pregnancies that that would be an issue. We’re good people, we don’t do abortions after 24 weeks like that horrid Dr. Gosnell who did them at 25 weeks—may he rot in prison.

But you do perform abortions after 24 weeks, we reminded them. Oh, they said, in extreme cases: Only when it’s really, really necessary, or the mother would feel really, really bad to have a baby at this time, and has a doc’s permission

KRIEG BARRIE

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 aseupeterson@wng.org

Beware the scorpion who with smooth words seduces hapless frogs to ferry it across the pond, for in the end the poor naïve amphibian will rue his gullibility.

slip to prove how bad she feels. We care about the mother’s health, they said, don’t you?

But they had their fingers crossed behind their backs. And when we blinked, they passed a brand-new law in Albany, N.Y., that said you can kill babies up to 40 weeks or any time you want until the day they’re born. And when Virginia and Vermont saw what New York had done, they both took courage and suggested we could go still further.

And we stood with mouths agape and stuttered: “What about the things you said for years to us about not knowing when a fetal life is viable outside the womb? You said the matter hinged on viability. Big questions of biology, you said, as if you, like us, searched for truth. And now it looks like you were lying all along, and like your wrestlings were but so much dandelion fluff that blew away upon a puff of air.”

Kermit Gosnell has been had. The now-­ forgotten poster boy you used and cast away, the one you once found it convenient to revile as someone monstrous and so different from you. No mention of him now, I see, who did no worse than your new law allows, but dons an orange jumpsuit in a cell while you shine pink lights on One World Trade Center. Stalin did no worse airbrushing Trotsky out of history.

Note well, all ye who take upon yourselves to dialogue with people of this world who with feigned searchings of the soul would plead their case on matters from abortion to aberrant sexuality. Beware the velvet glove that hides the iron fist. The pattern of persuasion will be ­similar across the board: at first the plaintive cry of suffering and social justice, to enlist your sympathy.

Then follows, in the blush of victories won, removal of the mask, abandonment of pretense, and the cackle of contempt toward all who thought they cared a whit about their former ratiocinations. Beware the scorpion who with smooth words seduces hapless frogs to ferry it across the pond, for in the end the poor naïve amphibian will rue his gullibility. A April 13, 2019 • WORLD Magazine 63

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Marvin Olasky

Easter heroism HOW MANY GREAT STORIES DID THE GREATEST HISTORY LAUNCH?

64 WORLD Magazine • April 13, 2019

Christ’s death on the cross offered healing to billions over the past 2,000 years— and it also inaugurated a different kind of storytelling.

Gandalf confronts the Balrog in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

 molasky@wng.org  @MarvinOlasky

SCREEN GRAB FROM MOVIE

Christians know why Jesus had to die.

Substitutionary atonement. Propitiation for sin. Payment for the debt we have incurred through willful disobedience.

Read just about any book of the New Testament and you’ll find plenty of Biblical backing for these concepts. For example, 1 Peter 2:24 tells us, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.”

But Christ’s death on the cross offered healing to billions over the past 2,000 years—and it also inaugurated a different kind of storytelling.

The hero no longer had to be a Hercules whose strength moved huge stones. He could be one who gave his life for another—and then God would roll away the stone.

Gen. George Patton, famous for believing in reincarnation, claimed he had been a Roman legionnaire. His most famous saying certainly sounded like something a pre-Christian Roman could have uttered: “You don’t win a war by dying for your country. You win a war by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his.” But Christians in the Roman Empire flipped the adage from prosperity gospel to the cross: They won adherents by dying for their faith and their neighbors, imitating through their sacrifice the greatest sacrifice of all.

Ever since then, memorable characters have done the same. The most famous: Sydney Carton in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Since Carton loved Lucie Manette but she loved the imprisoned Charles Darnay, Carton had every cruel reason to relish the ­guillotining of his rival. Carton, though, out of love for Lucie, saves Darnay’s neck by replacing him in prison and going to his death.

Carton’s oft-quoted next-to-last thought: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.” But my takeaway: Once Jesus provided the real-life example of sacrificing all to save

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enemies, and millions of people saw that as ultimate virtue, Dickens could write a far, far better ending than was commercially viable when a story was supposed to end with killing enemies.

Forty years after A Tale of Two Cities came The War of the Worlds. Author H.G. Wells, the youngest child of a Protestant mother, had studied with Thomas Huxley, known as “Darwin’s Bulldog.” Their dueling teaching led to Wells giving a mixed message. By survivalof-the-fittest logic the Martian invaders should have been the heroes: They were more evolved and showed their fitness by creating better weapons than Earthlings had.

But Wells wrote of human heroes in a small boat sacrificing their lives to destroy Martian ships and allow ­refugees to escape.

Forty years after The War of the Worlds, J.R.R. Tolkien began writing The Lord of the Rings. The scene my children found most dramatic was of Gandalf saving his band from the Balrog, at the cost of falling into an almost-bottomless pit and fighting the infernal beast up an almost Endless Stair. Gandalf dies and is then resurrected, going from Gandalf the Grey to Gandalf the White.

Different characters, different eras, but all motivated by heroic compassion of the kind that ancient literature did not have. Nearly a century ago James Frazer, in The Golden Bough, audaciously suggested that early Christians ­plagiarized the story of Christ’s death and resurrection from pre-Christian religions. Thirty years ago, though, University of Chicago professor Jonathan Z. Smith showed Frazer’s case for an abundance of “dying and rising deities” to be based on “imaginative reconstructions.”

Some mythic gods, Smith observed, returned from a far place but had not died.

Others died but were not resurrected. Smith wrote, “There is no unambiguous instance in the history of religions of a dying and rising deity.” None, that is, until Jesus Christ. He really did it: not just story, but true history.

Gaining victory by compassionate sufferingwith-others was a new idea in Rome. Gaining individual resurrection to the next life, as opposed to a collective national revival, was a new idea in Jerusalem.

At Easter I’m primarily thankful that up from the grave Christ truly arose, and because of God’s grace we can too. But as a writer I’m also glad for the great stories that the greatest history inspired. A

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