WORLD Magazine, Oct. 17, 2015 Vol. 30 No. 21

C H U R C H E S P R E PA R E F O R L G B T L AWS U I T S

OC T OBE R 17, 2 0 1 5

Pregnant pause More women postpone childbearing— and trust technology to beat the biological clock

TEENS HAVE TOUGH QUESTIONS, GIVE THEM STRAIGHT ANSWERS The Apologetics Study Bible for Students works to equip Students with thoughtful and practical responses for whenever the core issues of their faith and life are challenged. In addition to contributions from today’s most popular youth leaders, including general editor Sean McDowell, this well designed resource builds Confident Faith in students with tools such as: • 120 Essays addressing the most asked questions from teens today • 60 “Twisted Scriptures” explanations • 50 “Bones & Dirt” entries (archaeology meets apologetics) • 50 “Notable Quotes”

• 25 “Tactics” against common anti-Christian arguments • 20 “Personal Stories” of how God has worked in real lives • 20 “Top Five” lists to help remember key apologetics topics

16 WEEKS 16 VIDEOS

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SEAN MCDOWELL TAKES ON 16 REALLY TOUGH QUESTIONS.

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OCT1715 / VOLUME 30 / NUMBER 21

COVER STORY

Battling the biological clock

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More young people are turning to fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization, but often without considering the ethical problems, failure rates, or emotional strain

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F E AT UR E S

40 Bar the doors?

The U.S. Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision may increase the likelihood churches will face LGBT lawsuits. Here’s how some are protecting themselves

44 Sounding the alarm

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The only economist in Congress, newcomer Dave Brat never tires of warning about the government’s reckless fiscal habits

48 Going to pot?

As both the social costs of and tax revenue from legal marijuana explode, it becomes increasingly difficult to reverse direction

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ON THE COVER Photo illustration by Krieg Barrie (stock photo, posed by model; by annebaek/iStock)

DEPARTMENTS

3 Joel Belz 5 DISPATCHES News Human Race Quotables Quick Takes

18 Janie B. Cheaney 21 CULTURE Movies & TV Books Q&A Music

32 Mindy Belz 53 NOTEBOOK Lifestyle Technology Science Houses of God Sports Religion

61 Mailbag 63 Andrée Seu Peterson 64 Marvin Olasky

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Editor in Chief Marvin Olasky Editor Mindy Belz Managing Editor Timothy Lamer News Editor Jamie Dean Senior Writers Janie B. Cheaney • Susan Olasky Andrée Seu Peterson • John Piper Edward E. Plowman • Cal Thomas • Lynn Vincent Reporters Emily Belz • J.C. Derrick Daniel James Devine • Sophia Lee • Angela Lu Correspondents Megan Basham Julie Borg • Anthony Bradley • Andrew Branch Tim Challies • Michael Cochrane • Kiley Crossland John Dawson • Amy Henry • Mary Jackson Michael Leaser • Jill Nelson • Arsenio Orteza Stephanie Perrault • Joy Pullmann • Emily Whitten Mailbag Editor Les Sillars Executive Assistant June McGraw Editorial Assistants Kristin Chapman • Mary Ruth Murdoch

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JOEL BELZ

Everything’s religious

FROM BUSINESS TO POLITICS TO EDUCATION, THERE IS NO AVOIDING RELIGION

It was a week of tough choices. Suppose you’re the editor-in-chief of USA Today.

You’ve already done a couple of stories on the pope’s historic visit to America and several more on the scandal over falsified software at Volkswagen. Your religion editor and your ­business editor have both done some good work over the last few days—but they’re also both looking for a new angle.

How about this? How about just swapping their assignments? Tell the business editor you want some thoughtfully fresh insights on what the pope really thinks about capitalism. Tell your religion editor you want a similarly insightful piece on what kind of ethical gaps might have led to so profound a moral collapse in one of the world’s biggest manufacturing entities.

And if neither of those stories strikes your fancy, there’s a pretty long list of others where so-called “religion” sneaks out of the corner, demanding to be brought into the conversation.

There’s Ben Carson, the talented and softspoken surgeon who’s running for president and who seems fully as comfortable talking about faith and values—and even some aspects of constitutional law—as he does more secular subjects. Just how is that?

There’s Kim Davis, the Rowan County clerk from Kentucky, where it seemed so obvious at first that she was just a slightly kooky gal who obviously should have expected to have to keep the law. But then it wasn’t so clear, as we learned a bit more about some of her cultish tendencies.

And we all were forced to wonder again just who might be our cellmates if down the road we too were jailed for sticking by our consciences.

There’s Donald Trump, waving a big black Bible in his right hand, for all the world prompt-

JOSE LUIS MAGANA/AP

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The fact is that we are religious beings through and through. …

God made us that way.

Trump holds up his Bible, given to him by his mother.

ing viewers to think of him as a television e­ vangelist. He’s said he’s a Presbyterian—but still undefined is what his text is for this evening’s message, or when he’s on the public record using the Bible’s content as a reference for any of his speeches.

There’s the ruckus in Jersey City, N.J., where devout Muslim parents have been calling for an extra vacation day for public schools, so that their families can celebrate just like the Christians and Jews already do. In denying the request—at least for now—the school board argued pragmatically that they simply needed more advance notice before making such a change. Trouble is, the administration says, such concessions will push the school year into late June.

There’s Carly Fiorina, claiming flat out on NBC’s Tonight Show that Ben Carson was out of bounds when he said he couldn’t advocate for a Muslim who might run for president. “That’s wrong,” she said. “You know, it says in our Constitution that ­religion cannot be a test for office.”

And there’s Hillary Clinton, blasting Marco Rubio—and indeed the whole slate of 15 Republican candidates—for what she says is an inhumane response toward illegal immigrants now living in the United States.

There, in short order and from just one ­evening’s newscast, are six examples of how this troublesome issue of “religion” intrudes into an average day’s agenda. And all that without so much as mentioning the divisive role of “religion” in the volatile Middle East.

The fact is that we are religious beings through and through. All of us, as R.C. Sproul says, are theologians. God made us that way.

Even on a day when everyone concedes that the pope might otherwise dominate the news, half a dozen other “religious” stories crowd their way onto the table of contents.

Our society, to be sure, isn’t too deft at discerning the “religious” aspects of a typical day’s news. But that clumsiness is due in many respects to our own failure as Christian believers to highlight the central role God demands in the drama being played out on every corner of the human stage. A O C T O B E R 1 7, 2 0 1 5 W O R L D

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SEPT. 27

MOLLY RILEY/AFP/GET T Y IMAGES

PAPAL VISIT Nearly 1 million people flooded the streets of downtown Philadelphia to watch Pope Francis conduct an open-air Mass on the last afternoon of his six-day visit to the United States. The tour marked Pope Francis’ first visit to the United States, and the first time a pope has addressed Congress. The leader of the Roman Catholic Church spoke to U.S. lawmakers during a joint session, calling for action on climate change and income inequality. Some pro-life supporters were disappointed the pope didn’t directly mention abortion during the speech that came two days after Senate Democrats blocked a lateterm abortion ban.

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O C T O B E R 1 7, 2 0 1 5 W O R L D

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DISPATCHES

NEWS SEPT. 27

A NEW NATION?

SEPT. 27

KREMLIN RISING Iraqi officials joined Russia, Iran, and Syria in an agreement to share military intelligence about Islamic State fighters in the Middle East. The nations’ deepening alliance came as Russian leaders expanded their military involvement in Syria and threatened to eclipse Western influence in the region. At the United Nations, President Barack Obama clashed with Russian President Vladimir Putin, as the pair offered dueling goals for Syria’s horrendous civil war: Obama insists on the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Putin has vowed to continue backing the Syrian dictator.

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Putin meets with Russian officers after military exercises in Russia

CATALONIA: EMILIO MORENAT TI/AP • PUTIN: ALEXEI NIKOLSK Y/RIA-NOVOSTI, KREMLIN POOL PHOTO VIA AP • V W: JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/GET T Y IMAGES • MECCA: STR/AFP/GET T Y IMAGES

Pro-independence parties in Spain’s northeastern region of Catalonia won a majority in regional parliamentary elections and set up a potential showdown for independence from Spain.

Government officials in Madrid vowed they would fight any bid for Catalonia’s secession, but many residents of the culturally distinct region say they pay too much in taxes for too ­little in return.

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SEPT. 23

DIESEL DECEPTION Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn stepped down from the company’s top post in the wake of revelations the Germanbased automaker had rigged cars to cheat emissions tests.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported VW had falsified U.S. pollution tests on some 500,000 diesel engine vehicles by installing software that made the cars appear “clean” during tests. Once the cars hit the road, they emitted as much as 40 times the allowed level of pollutants.

Volkswagen off icials admitted the scandal could aff ect up to 11 million cars worldwide.

CATALONIA: EMILIO MORENAT TI/AP • PUTIN: ALEXEI NIKOLSK Y/RIA-NOVOSTI, KREMLIN POOL PHOTO VIA AP • V W: JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/GET T Y IMAGES • MECCA: STR/AFP/GET T Y IMAGES

SEPT. 24

MECCA STAMPEDE An annual Muslim pilgrimage to the city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia turned disastrous, as a crushing stampede erupted among the massive crowds navigating the narrow streets. At least 769 persons died, and more than 900 were injured. Rescue workers sorted through white-robed bodies of Muslim pilgrims from around the world, and some witnesses reported security off icials had temporarily blocked exits before the stampede began.

The disaster came less than two weeks after a crane collapse at Mecca’s Grand Mosque killed more than 100 visitors.

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DISPATCHES

NEWS

‘Trust but verify’

PRO-LIFE GROUPS ARE OPTIMISTIC ABOUT A POST-BOEHNER HOUSE by J.C. Derrick in Washington

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but his track record has pro-life groups feeling optimistic.

Since becoming majority leader in mid-2014, McCarthy has met with ­pro-life groups four times. While some leaders think McCarthy is not as personally pro-life as Boehner, as majority leader he’s had the most influence in getting their legislation to the floor.

In January he changed the House schedule to arrange a vote on the 20-week abortion ban during the March for Life. Pro-lifers were frustrated that McCarthy subsequently allowed members of his own party to scuttle the legislation, but they praised him for working behind the scenes to bring back what many called an even better bill.

“The real test of a true leader is how you recover,” Dannenfelser said.

“He did make a mistake in my opinion, but he made something really good out of something really bad.”

The January debacle also proved the mettle of Majority Whip Steve Scalise,

BOEHNER: ASTRID RIECKEN/GET T Y IMAGES • McCARTHY: J. SCOT T APPLEWHITE/AP • SCALISE: ANDREW HARNIK/AP

“Life is fragile,” Republican John Boehner said during brief remarks when he was sworn in as the 61st speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in January 2011. “All is on loan—including this gavel.”

Boehner’s tumultuous life as the nation’s third-most-powerful elected official will come to an end when he resigns in October. Many conservatives danced on his political grave—blasting him for what they called his failed leadership—but the pro-life community mostly mourned his passing.

“I do think he’s the most pro-life speaker that we’ve had,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, told me. “During his time as speaker we’ve seen an unprecedented level of pro-life activity.”

Prior to Boehner, pro-life groups were accustomed to seeing one token pro-family vote each Congress, often right before an election. On Sept. 25, when Boehner announced his retirement, the House was days away from taking its fifth pro-life vote only nine months into the 114th Congress: a 20-week abortion ban, a ban on taxpayer abortion funding, a bill to protect babies born alive during abortion, and two votes to reallocate Planned Parenthood funding.

Ironically, a life-related issue led to Boehner’s demise: Conservatives in the party said he should reallocate Planned Parenthood funding at any cost—including shutting down the government. Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the ­leading candidate to replace Boehner, probably won’t be any more eager to engage in budget brinksmanship than Boehner (left), his predeMcCarthy (top), and cessor, Scalise (bottom)

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who now wants to climb the GOP leadership ladder to majority leader. The GOP had a long-standing policy against whipping—or putting pressure on members to support legislation— on social issues. The pro-life community was left to whip its own bills, which led to January’s breakdown.

Scalise changed that: In May the PainCapable Unborn Child Protection Act became the first pro-life bill to benefit from the full whip operation.

The tea party conservatives who instigated Boehner’s ouster did not immediately have a ringleader to put forward in the leadership races, so they may settle for securing concessions on key issues such as the Export-Import Bank. (McCarthy previously said he favors allowing the bank to expire.)

McCarthy’s ascension may make immigration reform slightly more likely—his district includes Silicon Valley—but overall his tenure is unlikely to differ significantly from Boehner’s.

That will leave many tea party conservatives unsatisfied, but for pro-life groups, consistency is a good thing.

“I am optimistic that we will continue in a very strong pro-life direction,” Dannenfelser said. “But our motto has become ‘trust but verify.’” A

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Around the globe

MORE NEWS OF THE WORLD IS ON OUR WEBSITE: WNG.ORG

UNITED STATES President Obama welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping to the White House with a pomp-filled ceremony, but protesters outside called on China to release persecuted Christians and other prisoners of conscience.

NIGERIA Boko Haram militants killed at least 80 persons in bombings in the northeastern city of Maiduguri.

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NEPAL Assailants bombed two churches to protest a new constitution that declares the former Hindu kingdom a secular nation.

YEMEN The poorest nation in the Middle East totters on the brink of collapse after six months of Saudiled airstrikes against Houthi rebels.

INDONESIA A Christian church near Jakarta held its 100th worship service outside after authorities padlocked its building. The believers have faced repeated harassment from protesters in the Islamic nation.

OBAMA & XI JINPING: ANDREW HARNIK/AP • YEMEN: HANI MOHAMMED/AP

PANAMA The country’s murder rate dropped 21 percent in the first nine months of the year.

Authorities attributed the drop to an intensive vocational training program for gang members.

IRAN American pastor Saeed Abedini marked his third year of imprisonment in Iran. His wife, Naghmeh, said his treatment has deteriorated since the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal.

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CLINTON: SCOT T OLSON/GET T Y IMAGES • SANDERS: LE BASKOW /L AS VEGAS SUN VIA AP • BIDEN: EVAN VUCCI/AP • MEDICARE: NODEROG • ELECTIONS: AMR NABIL/AP REUNION: KIM JU-SUNG-KOREA POOL/GET T Y IMAGES • FURY: ALEX LIVESEY/GET T Y IMAGES

UNITED STATES The Council for Christian Colleges and Universities averted a looming split when two schools resigned after changing their hiring policies to include employees in same-sex marriages.

Looking ahead OCT. 13

Democratic presidential contenders will take the stage for their first official debate tonight in Las Vegas, Nev. Anderson Cooper will moderate the bout Clinton Sanders Biden among Hillary Clinton, upstart Bernie Sanders, and other contenders. Vice President Joe Biden, who is reportedly mulling whether to make a late entry into the race, will likely watch closely.

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CLINTON: SCOT T OLSON/GET T Y IMAGES • SANDERS: LE BASKOW /L AS VEGAS SUN VIA AP • BIDEN: EVAN VUCCI/AP • MEDICARE: NODEROG • ELECTIONS: AMR NABIL/AP REUNION: KIM JU-SUNG-KOREA POOL/GET T Y IMAGES • FURY: ALEX LIVESEY/GET T Y IMAGES

OCT. 15

Older Americans looking for health insurance coverage will have their chance to sign up for Medicare coverage today during open enrollment. Over 52 million seniors and disabled Americans use Medicare already, and nearly 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day.

OCT. 18

Egyptians will head to the polls for parliamentary elections beginning today for residents of the North African state. Expatriates will begin voting one day earlier. The elections will be the nation’s first since President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi took office, and experts believe al-Sisi loyalists are likely to be big winners. The elections will take place in stages and results won’t be confirmed until Dec. 2.

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OCT. 20

South Korea and North Korea will today allow elderly family members separated by the Korean War in the 1950s to reunite for six days at the Diamond Mountain resort in North Korea.

Family members seeking to attend the reunion must wait to see whether North Korea pulls out of the effort at the last minute as it has done in the past.

OCT. 24

Boxing’s heavyweight title belts will be up for grabs when challenger Tyson Fury gets his turn with longtime champion Wladimir Klitschko in Germany today. The 27-year-old challenger is undefeated, while the 39-year-old champion’s last defeat came more than a decade ago at the hands of Lamon Brewster in 2004. Since then, Klitschko has won 22 consecutive bouts.

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HUMAN RACE

THREATENED

ALERTED

Pregnant mom Jessica Mann and the ACLU are threatening legal action against a Michigan Catholic hospital for refusing to sterilize her. Mann has a brain tumor, which her doctors say makes another pregnancy dangerous.

Mann will be fully anesthetized at an Oct. 24 C-section (necessary for her condition), during which Mann wants doctors to tie her tubes. Catholic directives allow sterilizations in some lifethreatening situations, but

Two American soldiers say they’re losing their careers for confronting the tradition of Afghan men using boys as sex slaves.

Then-Army Capt. Dan Quinn and Sgt. 1st Class Charles Martland physically attacked a U.S.-backed Afghan commander in 2011 for allegedly raping a boy and beating his mother. Quinn says the Army relieved them of duties, and while he has left the military, Martland is facing involuntary discharge.

The men, who were part of the Army’s Special Forces, accuse the military of systematically ignoring the practice, largely because of their mission to promote local commanders, governments, and law enforcement. Pentagon officials deny the claim. Quinn and members of Congress are demanding that the Army restore Martland’s career and service record.

Genesys Regional Medical Center

Quirky baseball legend and World War II veteran Lawrence “Yogi” Berra died Sept.

22. He was 90. The Hall of Famer supported the 1944 D-Day landings from a Navy gunboat before beginning his New York Yankees career in 1946. The 15-time All-Star won 10 World Series with the Yankees, going on to manage both the Mets and Yankees. Whether he said every “It ain’t over ’til it’s over” one-liner attributed to him is a subject of controversy. His wife of 65 years, Carmen, died in 2014.

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O C T O B E R 1 7, 2 0 1 5

RESIGNED A Texas assistant football coach resigned Sept. 24 after a now infamous attack on a high-school referee. Two players from San Antonio’s John Jay High School blindsided Robert Watts in a Sept.

4 game. The players, Michael Moreno and Victor Rojas, accuse Watts of racial slurs and coach Mack Breed of ordering retaliation.

Before he resigned, Breed corroborated the students’ story, but he now recants, saying his corroboration was an attempt to prevent the players’ expulsion. Watts denies making any racial insults. Police are investigating the incident.

GENESYS: JAKE MAY/THE FLINT JOURNAL/L ANDOV • QUINN: KIRSTEN LUCE/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX • BERRA: ASSOCIATED PRESS

DIED

in September said Mann doesn’t qualify. The ACLU argues against requiring Mann to find a new doctor and hospital in the final seven weeks of pregnancy. Having a second surgery elsewhere at a later date is also risky, it argues.

Federal conscience protections for doctors don’t apply, the ACLU says of its attempts to coerce the hospital to follow “medical standards” rather than “religious directives” given by bishops.

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BL AT TER: SHAUN BOT TERILL/GET T Y IMAGES • PARNELL : DON PETERSEN/AP • FANNING: DUNCAN WOOD/U.S. AIR FORCE/AP • MORGAN: EMILY MORGAN/AP • DeLUCA: TONY K YRIACOU/REX/AP

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By the numbers INVESTIGATED

SENTENCED

ARRESTED

Swiss authorities on Sept.

25 placed FIFA President Sepp Blatter under criminal investigation for corruption in the latest blow to soccer’s governing body. The Swiss attorney general’s office searched Blatter’s offices on suspicion of criminal mismanagement and misappropriation of FIFA money. Blatter, 79, is set to step down in February because of ongoing investigations. FIFA suspended Secretary General Jerome Valcke, Blatter’s right-hand man, on Sept. 17 because of his alleged involvement in a black market ticket scheme.

A former peanut company executive will spend 28 years in prison after knowingly shipping salmonella-tainted peanut butter, sickening 714 people and killing nine in 2009. A judge sentenced Stewart Parnell, 61, in front of victims and their families on Sept.

21. Parnell led the Peanut Corporation of America in Albany, Ga., where he oversaw faked lab test results to cover up contaminated products.

His brother, Michael, received 20 years. It’s the nation’s longest sentence related to foodborne illness, and attorneys plan to appeal.

Los Angeles police arrested a Saudi prince Sept. 23 for allegedly forcing a woman to perform a sex act on him.

Police responded to a bloodied woman crying for help at the LA mansion rented by Majed Abdulaziz Al Saud. An anonymous civil suit filed Sept. 25 claims he attacked other women earlier in the week. The prince posted his $300,000 bail.

Authorities do not believe he has diplomatic immunity, and he must appear in court on Oct. 19.

DIED Fred DeLuca, who co-

NOMINATED President Barack Obama nominated Eric Fanning Sept.

18 to replace Secretary of the Army John McHugh, who plans to step down by Nov. 1. Fanning would be the first openly gay nominee to the position. Four years ago McHugh oversaw the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” allowing practicing homosexuals to serve in the military. Fanning’s record includes periods as special assistant to Defense Secretary Ash Carter and as undersecretary of both the Air Force and Army.

The Senate must confirm the appointment.

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founded at 17 what became the Subway fastfood franchise, died Sept. 14. He was 67.

With the support of family friend Peter Buck, DeLuca opened the first shop in 1965 to help pay for

1.5 lbs.

The weight of premature baby Haiden Morgan, who survived being born at 23 weeks on board a

cruise ship 14 hours away from the nearest hospital. Haiden survived despite the lack of equipment for immediate treatment and is receiving medical care at Miami Children’s Hospital.

$69,000 Amount of money a former EPA official billed to taxpayers for what the Office of Inspector General called “excessive trips.” The Region 9 Administrator reportedly flew almost every weekend from his office in San Francisco to his home in Southern California.

college in Connecticut. It became the world’s largest fast-food chain, with more than 44,000 locations. This year, Forbes magazine put DeLuca’s net worth at $3.5 billion. His death followed Subway’s 50th anniversary, with his role as CEO slowly declining since 2013, when he was diagnosed with leukemia.

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DISPATCHES

QUOTABLES

‘If I was the one selling raffle tickets and I didn’t pay, I would be sued or in jail or both.’

‘Democrats, Republicans, libertarians, and vegetarians don’t like late-term abortion.’

RHONDA RASCHE, winner of $50,000 from the Illinois Lottery, on her lawsuit against the lottery for giving her an IOU instead of payment. The Illinois Lottery is continuing to advertise and sell tickets even though the state comptroller cannot sign checks for more than $25,000 due to a budget impasse between the governor and the legislature of the debt-ridden state.

Republican presidential candidate LINDSEY GRAHAM on polls showing widespread public support for a ban on late-term abortions.

Only three out of 46 Senate Democrats voted to bring the ban up for consideration on Sept. 22, even though a Quinnipiac poll found 46 percent of Democratic voters support it.

Republican presidential candidate JEB BUSH in a tweet after he admitted during a GOP debate to smoking marijuana in high school.

‘It’s all right on top of our dog’s house.’

MAYA DONNELLY of Nogales, Texas, on a 26-pound bundle of marijuana that dropped from the sky and through the carport at her home. Nogales Police Chief Derek Arnson said an aircraft smuggling drugs from Mexico likely mistakenly dropped the bundle.

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‘We always have the right to respond with our own opinions, but there is no right not to be offended.’

Wesleyan University President MICHAEL ROTH, along with two other Wesleyan off icials, in a blog post titled “Black Lives Matter and So Does Free Speech.” The post was in response to calls to defund a school newspaper that ran a column critical of the Black Lives Matter movement.

GRAHAM: CHARLIE NEIBERGALL/AP • BUSH: MIC SMITH/AP • MARIJUANA: COURTESY OF NOGALES POLICE DEPT. • ROTH: BOB CHILD/AP

‘Sorry mom.’

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GRAHAM: CHARLIE NEIBERGALL/AP • BUSH: MIC SMITH/AP • MARIJUANA: COURTESY OF NOGALES POLICE DEPT. • ROTH: BOB CHILD/AP

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DISPATCHES

QUICK TAKES

Left out

An Oklahoma teacher is in hot water after forcing a 4-year-old pre-K student to use his right hand to practice making letters.

Parents of an Oakes Elementary student in Okemah, Okla., say their child’s teacher sent home a letter after the September incident calling left-handedness evil and sinister.

The parents saved the teacher’s note, which said, “There are numerous instances of left-handedness being associated with wickedness.” School Superintendent Tony Dean said the school has corrected the unnamed teacher’s behavior and now teachers will have to filter all letters home through the superintendent’s off ice.

Monkey business

An animal rights organization is going to San Francisco in its quest to find a federal judge willing to grant a monkey legal personhood. Lawyers for the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals filed a federal copyright suit on Sept. 21 asking the court to deem photographs taken by a macaque monkey in Indonesia to be the intellectual property of the selfie-taking monkey. In 2011, nature photographer David Slater allowed a macaque monkey named Naruto to play with his camera, resulting in a comical animal selfie photograph. Media outlets have since published the photograph without paying for use because, according to the U.S. Copyright Off ice, animals can’t hold copyrights. In the suit, PETA has asked the judge to award PETA the rights to collect copyright infringement damages on behalf of Naruto.

About face

When confronted with clear evidence against him, 34-year-old Steven Felton of Emmaus, Pa., got creative. In his trial for a string of 10 armed robberies that occurred in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley in the fall of 2012, Felton knew multiple security cameras caught his bare face and him holding a pellet gun and demanding money. Once caught, Felton claimed an “evil twin” had carried out the robberies. A jury didn’t buy it, convicting Felton in August of the crimes. And neither did a judge, who sentenced him to between 62 and 124 years in prison for what a district attorney called a “reign of terror.”

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ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • NARUTO: DAVID SL ATER/COURT EXHIBIT PROVIDED BY PETA/AP • LEF T HAND: MICHELE CONSTANTINI/PHOTOALTO/GET T Y IMAGES • FELTON: HANDOUT

Add driving without a license to Adam Jones’ rap sheet. Police arrested the Lincolnshire, U.K., resident in April after a reckless driving spree caused thousands of dollars of damage to parked cars in Grantham on a busy Friday night. In court on Sept.

17, Jones was found guilty of multiple driving off enses and sentenced to 12 months in jail.

But before leaving the court, Jones admitted one other thing: He’s never really learned how to drive a real car, with his only experience being on video games. “Only learnt to drive on a PlayStation game,” Jones told the court, explaining that in the games, you simply drive as fast as you can without any care for the damage you cause or the people you injure.

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ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • TAG: THOMAS BARWICK/TAXI/GET T Y IMAGES • BROYHILL : NEBRASK A GRAND LODGE • L ANGLEY RABBIT: DEAN FOSDICK/AP • KINGSTON: KELLY MCEWAN/THE EXPRESS-TIMES/AP

Adam’s sin

ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • NARUTO: DAVID SL ATER/COURT EXHIBIT PROVIDED BY PETA/AP • LEF T HAND: MICHELE CONSTANTINI/PHOTOALTO/GET T Y IMAGES • FELTON: HANDOUT

ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • TAG: THOMAS BARWICK/TAXI/GET T Y IMAGES • BROYHILL : NEBRASK A GRAND LODGE • L ANGLEY RABBIT: DEAN FOSDICK/AP • KINGSTON: KELLY MCEWAN/THE EXPRESS-TIMES/AP

Designated trotter

Jake Williams may have been inebriated, but he had enough wit to stay out of the driver’s seat of his car.

And yet, the Watson, La., resident still had to get home from the bar on Sept. 15. So instead of driving, Williams hopped on his horse Sugar who had been cooped up in a horse trailer attached to his truck.

“When you get a little too much to drink, why not ride a horse?” he told WBRZ. “It’s safer that way. The horse knows the way home.” A local sheriff ’s deputy noticed Williams on the way home and ticketed him for public intoxication—but not for driving while intoxicated.

They’re it?

Long lost bill

More than 40 years after the fact, Kent Broyhill can still be moved to honor his promises. In 1974, the then-student at the University of Nebraska tried to pay off his parking debts with a check shortly before graduation. When the off icer told him the university only accepted cash, Broyhill promised to return with bills.

In the hullabaloo surrounding graduation, Broyhill forgot about the tickets and was only reminded of them this year. So he sent $100 with a letter of explanation to the school’s Parking and Transit Services. Services director Dan Carpenter returned the money to Broyhill, excusing his debt, but saying the school had since destroyed the paper records of his infraction.

Hopping mad

An $80,000 repair job didn’t convince Langley, Wash., city off icials to act on the city’s rabbit infestation, so the city’s school district may enlist help from above.

Residents of Whidbey Island are noticing the ubiquitous rabbit feces, the destroyed plants, and hopping pests, and earlier this year, a rabbit infestation dug up a middle school’s football field, causing tens of thousands of dollars in damage.

Still, Langley off icials aren’t willing to begin trapping and euthanizing the pests. So, in September, school district off icials met with a falconer about introducing birds of prey to the island to help restore balance.

To protect students from emotional torment and physical assault, the Mercer Island School District in Washington state has banned the childhood game of tag. Parents, who were informed by their children rather than the school district, are not happy. In an email, district communications director Mary Grady said, “Students are expected to keep their hands to themselves. The rationale behind this is to ensure the physical and emotional safety of all students.” But one parent told Seattle’s KCPQ that she’s upset because her children need unstructured playtime. “I totally survived tag,” Kelsey Joyce said. “I even survived red rover, believe it or not.”

Wedding heirloom

On Dec. 11, 1895, Mary Lowry Warren was married in Buff alo, N.Y. On Oct. 17, 2015, her great-great-granddaughter, Abigail Kingston, will be married in Perkasie, Pa.—and she’ll be wearing the same wedding dress. Kingston, 30, will be the 11th woman in the family to wear the dress for a wedding and the first since 1991. The dress had to be restored and altered to fit Kingston’s tall frame, and it remains so fragile that she’ll only wear it for the reception. Not every woman in the family has worn the dress; Kingston’s greatgrandmother, a flapper who married in the 1920s, reportedly rejected wearing the elegant gown. Kingston, though, told the Associated Press that she loves the dress: “It feels like the Cinderella dress.”

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JANIE B. CHEANEY

Shame on us?

THE WEST SHOULD FIND WAYS TO HELP REFUGEES—BUT NOT FROM A NEED FOR ATONEMENT OR RESTITUTION

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Our response is to show compassion and mercy wherever possible, because compassion and mercy are continually shown to us.

NILUFER DEMIR/AFP/GET T Y IMAGES

It’s a small world, after all—or not. Instant communication can make a provincial story blaze up on our virtual doorstep while we struggle to remember the names of our nextdoor neighbors. An image of a drowned toddler on a beach rockets around the globe and raises a heartfelt, unified cry—Do something!—before we know the details. The world is literally at our fingertips, accessible at a few taps on a keyboard.

All that immediacy makes it seem small, but societies and ethnic groups are still worlds apart, and hard to explain.

The image of 2-year-old Aylan (or Alan) Kurdi (or Shenu), whose body washed up on a Turkish beach in early September, became an instant icon of the Middle East refugee crisis.

How did the little boy come to be on that beach?

Obviously, his parents were fleeing the danger of a civil war because no one wants to be killed; that’s universal. How do we understand a ­conflict involving factions going back to the Middle Ages? Well, that’s cultural. What should we do about it? That’s a muddle. Take the refugees in! appeals to our hearts, while Keep the refugees out! attempts to make a rational case.

That usually means reaching for metaphors and dichotomies to explain how we (the West) are not like them (the East). More than one rationalist has suggested this interesting ­contrast: guilt vs. shame.

Soon after World War II, anthropologist Ruth Benedict published The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a study of the cultural underpinnings of Japan, “the most alien enemy the United States had ever fought in an all-out struggle.” What made the Japanese so alien?

Benedict decided it was essentially their “shame culture.” By contrast, the United States was a guilt culture: “a society that inculcates absolute standards of morality and relies on men’s developing a conscience.” Shame

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­cultures, as Benedict described them, “rely on external sanctions for good behavior” and tend to be clannish and subjective, with little sense of responsibility toward those outside the ­ethnic, national, or religious group. Shame is a feeling; guilt a legal judgment.

Even though Westerners feel shame and Easterners determine guilt, Benedict’s distinction seemed to explain a lot—not only to Americans but also to Japanese, who made her book a bestseller in Japan. As some critics have pointed out, societies don’t boil down to a ­single theory, and at its worst the theory may be used to excuse criminal behavior. If shame/clan/honor is what a culture is, no wonder its people occasionally act out its excesses, especially during wartime.

With these distinctions in mind, radicalized Muslim factions look like shame cultures: touchy, tribal, and dismissive of those outside their circles. Meanwhile, some Westerners are wallowing in guilt for creating, or at least exacerbating, chaos in the Middle East (don’t forget the Crusades), for which restitution lies in welcoming the refugees, no questions asked.

Shame vs. guilt doesn’t explain everything. But both are deeply embedded in human history, going farther back than Ruth Benedict knew. Shame was what Adam felt in the garden: embarrassed about his nakedness, defensive about his honor, distancing himself from “this woman you gave me.” Guilt is what the Lord imposed on him: moral culpability, personal responsibility, pending judgment.

Shame can’t be forgiven; only atoned for with one’s own life or another’s (as in Japanese ritual suicides and Islamic honor killings). Guilt can be forgiven when the guilty party makes restitution.

The Middle East (broadly speaking) still seeks blood atonement while the West, haunted by its Christian heritage, debates restitution for real and imagined sins. In God’s economy, guilt and shame come together as a single burden requiring atonement and restitution—and Jesus makes both.

But what about the child on the beach? Our response is to show compassion and mercy wherever possible, because compassion and mercy are continually shown to us. We are not required to commit cultural suicide or surrender all our goods. We are required to see clearly and act faithfully. If we don’t, as Jesus said in John 9:41, “your guilt remains.” A

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9/29/15 11:22 AM

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FREE E-BOOK! Why is charity not enough for families to flourish?

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21 CHEANEY.indd 19

Zenon and Uvita Run a tailoring business and farm HOPE BURUNDI

9/25/15 3:51 PM

CREDIT

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9/28/15 9:39 AM

CULTURE MOVIES & TV / BOOKS / Q& A / MUSIC

MOVIE

Unforgettable journey SONY PICTURES/AP

THE WALK IS A LIGHTHEARTED LOOK AT A TERRIFYING STUNT by Emily Belz

Studio movies, at their best, take our breath away with visual spectacle while still delivering a good story. The Walk, directed by

R

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the studio legend Robert Zemeckis, accomplishes that, and without Iron Man or the Hulk.

This is a retelling of tight-

rope walker Philippe Petit’s feat in 1974, walking a wire between the Twin Towers just as they were nearing completion. The story is part heist, as Petit and his accomplices must spy how to dodge guards, sneak gear onto the roof of the building, and rig a 450-pound wire between the towers before the sun comes up.

The first half of the movie, about the French Petit performing tricks in the streets of Paris and learning his trade from

­circus performers, almost feels like a children’s book.

My favorite scenes were of Petit constructing models of his wire walk at various dinner tables, using whatever was on the table—napkins, chopsticks, and bowls of rice.

Indeed, Zemeckis said he first wanted to make the film after reading the children’s picture book, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers.

The movie is lighthearted, even in its most serious moments. “Don’t go falling!” one cop yells helplessly O C T O B E R 1 7, 2 0 1 5 W O R L D

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Woodlawn (2015)

MOVIES & TV Man on Wire uses photographs and re-enactments.

An ethical question hovers: How could Petit risk his life for a stunt like this? His mentor begs him to wear a safety harness. For Petit, that would ruin the magnificence of what he wants to accomplish. He sees wire walking as a work of art. The film makes no reference to 9/11, nor does it need to: The final shot is enough tribute.

Several of the main actors are New York natives, and Gordon-Levitt went to the top of the towers right before the terror attacks, when he was in his first year at New York University. “Those towers were part of the fabric of my childhood,” said James Badge Dale, who plays one of the accomplices. In the film, Annie, Petit’s girlfriend, says to him at one point about the towers, “You brought them to life.”

The 9/11 memorial replicates the footprint of the buildings. Gordon-Levitt went there recently and walked an imaginary wire between the South Tower and the North Tower. “It’s a long walk,” he said. A

Bishop and Sizemore

MOVIE

Woodlawn R

BOX OFFICE TOP 10 FOR THE WEEKEND OF SEPT. 25-27 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 Hotel Transylvania 2* PG......... 2 4 2 2̀ The Intern* PG-13.................................. 4 2 5

3̀ Maze Runner:

The Scorch Trials* PG-13........... 2 6 4

4̀ Everest* PG-13.......................................... 1 5 1 5̀ Black Mass* R.......................................... 3 8 10 6̀ The Visit* PG-13....................................... 4 6 4 7̀ The Perfect Guy PG-13................... 6 6 5 8̀ War Room* PG.......................................... 2 3 1 9̀ The Green Inferno R.................... not rated 10 Sicario R....................................................... not rated `

No other genre of film champions faith themes more than the sports movie. MacFarlane USA , When the Game Stands Tall, The Blind Side, 42—the list could go on, and those are just from the last few years.

But many of these films tone down the Christianity of the real-life people who inspired the story to a quick prayer before a game or a shot of a family attending church. The Erwin brothers, the directing/screenwriting duo who brought audiences October Baby and Mom’s Night Out , get much more specific with their faith-based football flick, Woodlawn.

Reminiscent of Remember the Titans, it tells the true story of the integration of an Alabama highschool football team and the rise of former Miami Dolphins running back, Tony Nathan (nicely played by Caleb Castille).

What the PG-rated Woodlawn does well, it does very well, giving audiences not just a context for the reverberations of racial strife we’re still feeling today, but also a vision for the only solution to

overcoming that strife. The turning point doesn’t come near the end when the coach gives a motivational speech that leads to a big win (in fact, the coach’s speeches don’t seem to have much impact at all).

Instead, it comes early on when an uninvited evangelist (Sean Astin), inspired by the Billy Graham crusade, barges into practice and preaches until the entire team is won to Christ.

Unfortunately, for all its skillfully executed parts, Woodlawn’s whole lacks focus. Is this the story of how an entire football team’s conversion impacts a small Alabama town? Is it the origin story of a Super Bowl–winning athlete? Is it the story of a doubting coach whose cynicism is slowly dismantled by the belief of his players?

Woodlawn spends so much time chasing all these threads that none of them manages to have the impact they could have had alone.

Still, the cast is impressive (Jon Voigt steals scenes as the legendary Bear Bryant), and along with some deftly edited early scenes, they provide a palpable sense of the hope and energy of the Billy Graham era.

—by MEGAN BASHAM

AL AN MARKFIELD/ERWIN BROTHERS

from the roof as Petit waltzes between the skyscrapers.

(The film is rated PG for a few bad words, the general scariness of the walk, and a shadowed nude Petit who is trying to use his skin to find a fishing line in the dark.)

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is entertaining as Petit, delivering an impressive French accent. Petit himself, now 66 years old and a New Yorker, spent intensive time training Gordon-Levitt to tightrope walk. To film the Twin Towers scene, Gordon-Levitt actually walked a tightrope, except 12 feet off the ground instead of 1,300 feet. By not relying too much on movie magic, the scenes are more gripping. Skip the 3-D experience if you have a fear of heights.

The Walk is a very American movie, brimming with optimism and a can-do attitude. If this film had a French director to complement its French characters, it would have spent more time wrestling with Petit’s demons.

This is a weakness of The Walk: Petit says that his feats are mostly mental, and yet we don’t get a sense of his doubts and fears beyond one or two moments. You’ll be too busy sweating through your shirt to wonder about Petit’s psychological struggle.

But Zemeckis, who directed the Back to the Future series among other hits, is a spectacle director.

The visceral experience of the walk, Zemeckis said, is what he wanted to separate his film from the very good, Oscar-winning documentary about Petit, Man on Wire. He wanted the audience to feel vertigo. “There’s no moving picture of the walk ever recorded,” Zemeckis said.

*Reviewed by WORLD

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IN MY FATHER’S HOUSE: HANDOUT • THE MARTIAN: 20TH CENTURY FOX

CULTURE

DOCUMENTARY

AL AN MARKFIELD/ERWIN BROTHERS

IN MY FATHER’S HOUSE: HANDOUT • THE MARTIAN: 20TH CENTURY FOX

In My Father’s House R Teenagers on the street in Chicago ­recognize songwriter Che “Rhymefest” Smith, although he doesn’t have the fame of his Chicago contemporaries like Kanye West. Smith co-wrote West’s hit “Jesus Walks,” for which he won a Grammy, and “Glory” from the 2014 film Selma.

Like many young black men on Chicago’s South Side, Smith grew up without a father, an experience that left him with an “­emptiness,” he said. Now he has a son himself and has started fatherhood and mentoring initiatives in his neighborhood. In one moment in a new documentary, In My Father’s House, Smith talks to a young man whose brother just died: “You got someone you can talk to?” he asks the boy.

“Put my number in your phone.”

A few years ago Smith moved back into the house where he lived as a child, and where his father abandoned him. Little did Smith know that his father, Brian Tillman, was living homeless in the same neighborhood.

The documentary follows

their reunion, as Smith warily tries to repair their relationship, and to end his father’s reliance on alcohol.

During the course of the story, Smith must also admit to his failures as a father. Christianity is not a significant part of the film or Tillman’s recovery, but we catch glimpses of the family praying together before a meal, and of a to-do note that says, “Read Bible (whole thing).” The story is amplified with new music from Smith, which I hope he releases with the film.

Tillman’s struggle sometimes seems impossibly hard, as he regularly runs into his old wheedling friends on the street. “If you could survive on the street and homeless, you could’ve survived with your children,” one caller tells him when Tillman comes as a guest on his son’s radio program. Recovery from addiction is hard, but is relational reconciliation any easier? In My Father’s House comes out in 20 major cities nationwide Oct. 9, a rare feat for a documentary.

Tillman (left) and Smith

See all our movie reviews at wng.org/movies

21 MOVIES & TV.indd 23

—by EMILY BELZ

MOVIE

The Martian R Resilience is the theme of The Martian, a movie about an astronaut stranded on Mars. Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is left behind by his crew, who think him dead, completely alone and in a hostile environment with very limited resources. Watney simply takes stock of his situation and determines, “I’m not going to die here.”

The Martian is appealing not only because it takes place in space—watching people float around in zero gravity is always cool—but because its hero, while unlike the caped crusaders crowding the box office these days, is superhuman.

Watney never falters in his goal to survive, and despite ­multiple near mission ­failures, he somehow keeps his mind clear enough to constantly restrategize.

His powers include his brain and his training, and if nothing else, he certainly provides an argument for learning botany. But most of all, Watney demonstrates an incredible optimism that resembles faith. It is inspiring, even though its source is never explored.

Damon gives Watney moments of emotion that ground his gallows humor, and the jokes in the script keep the tone of the movie light. Based on a novel by Andy Weir that takes the science part of “science fiction” very seriously, the movie leaves out some key beats of the book’s plot.

Their absence in the movie allows it to stay intimately focused on Watney and his desperate bid for survival, but also keep the story oddly small. The Martian is closer to Gravity than Armageddon, with minimal attention on how Watney’s story impacts the world or even the crew (led by Jessica Chastain, as Commander Lewis). This movie is all about Watney’s space adventure.

The Martian is rated PG-13 for some strong language, injury images, and brief nudity. Watney is fond of the F-word, and the movie (mostly) creatively works around actually using it in ways that make it obvious what he’s saying.

The treatment of his injuries is sometimes graphic.

—by ALICIA COHN

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BOOKS

Highs and lows

AUTHORS GO UP AND DOWN THE LADDER OF ABSTRACTION by Marvin Olasky We train young journalists to stay mostly low on the “ladder of abstraction,” using specific detail rather than lofty rhetoric: It’s important to go high sometimes to explain a theory, but the goal is quickly to go low once again. That also works for me in books.

Many academics write tomes about Vladimir Putin, but Ben Judah’s Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin (Yale University Press, 2013) colorfully records his travels “to places where most Western journalists never go: catching rides in the trucks of wild gold miners on the ice road between Yakutsk and Magadan. … I tried to spend as much time as possible with ordinary Russians in unglamorous places, from the grease-bars of Kaliningrad to the roadside cafeterias on Nizhny Tagil and the mini markets of Khabarovsk.”

Judah’s street-level findings: Russia is in trouble.

Marcel H. Van Herpen

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concludes the same in the second edition of Putin’s Wars: The Rise of Russia’s New Imperialism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), but he also sees the U.S. in trouble because of “Obama’s selfconfidence in the field of foreign affairs.” Van Herpen examines the specific detail

Putin

of military plotting based in Putin’s mix of “populism, nineteenth-century Bonapartism, and Italian fascism,” topped with an appeal to “traditional values” that has even hornswoggled a few American conservatives.

Walter Laqueur’s Putinism: Russia and Its Future with the West (St. Martin’s Press, 2015) has extended musing but lacks a clear thesis and tends to sit high on the ladder. Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (Brookings, 2013) shows how Putin has six personalities: The Statist, The History Man, The Survivalist, The Outsider, The Free Marketeer, and The Case Officer. Both books show Putin on foreign policy using blackmail, intimidation, and blatant distortion in the defense of Russia, domestically using Russian history as a tool, and in both realms relying on exploiting the vulnerabilities of others.

Other examples of measuring books not by their covers but by their spots on the ladder of abstraction: Michael Oren’s Ally: My Journey Across the American-

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PUTIN: ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO/AP

The Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity, edited by Angelo Di Berardino, Tom Oden, Joel Elowsky, and James Hoover (IVP, 2014) is an awesome work that libraries should have. Its 3,000-plus articles about the first seven centuries of Christianity show the breadth of the faith as it grew in Asia, Europe, and North Africa, and its depth: We can learn about depictions of Aaron and Abaddon, study how early Christians dealt with abandoned children and abortion, find out basic information about Abibus Dolichenus and other little-remembered early bishops—and I’ve only gone through AB in the first of three volumes that total close to 3,000 pages. I hope the Encyclopedia is available in heaven. —M.O.

Israeli Divide (Random House, 2015) is boldly low, and Raymond Baker’s One Islam, Many Muslim Worlds (Oxford University Press, 2015) is obnoxiously high.

Oren grew up in New Jersey but became an Israeli paratrooper, and his thoughtful and enjoyable memoir jumps into his four years as Israel’s ambassador to the United States during President Barack Obama’s first term. There he dealt with the White House tendency to kiss up to Muslims who wanted to annihilate Israel, but also soothed congressional complaints about Israeli trade restrictions that denied Promised Land entry to 400,000 pounds of frozen Illinois carp.

Trinity College professor Baker, on the other hand, tells us that “Islam is telling an epochal story … of the cosmic human struggle for justice in the face of evil [as] Muslims stand with all other human beings in their dreams and highest aspirations.” Should we search for specifics, we’ll learn that “a river wends its way through this book. The river is Islam, the ‘River of Life.’ Its waters bring extraordinary generative powers. Midstream Islamic intellectuals report on the progress of the river, as it cuts innumerous [sic] channels through Islamic lands and to territories beyond.”

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DETROIT: BET TMANN/CORBIS/AP

CULTURE

Notable books

RECENT NOVELS OF INTRIGUE reviewed by Susan Olasky

SPOTLIGHT

GIRL AT WAR Sara Nović Ana Juric was 10 years old when the war between Serbia and Croatia began, upending her world overnight. Cigarette brands and last names separated friend from enemy. Serb bombers rained death from the sky, but death came to Ana’s family during a roadside stop on the highway from Sarajevo to Zagreb. In this compelling novel, war shatters a child’s world and forces her to take up arms. When family friends sneak Ana out of Croatia and into an adoptive American family, she gains physical peace and emotional respite, but it comes at a cost. Occasional R-rated violence and language.

THE 3RD WOMAN Jonathan Freedland As she celebrates publication of her undercover sweatshop story, prize-winning reporter Maddy Webb learns of her younger sister’s murder and begins to investigate. Was her sister’s death a suicide, a random act, or one of a series of murders? Freedland portrays a dystopian Los Angeles, where impenetrable smog reduces visibility and China exerts behind-the-scenes control on the press, public off icials, and policy. He stretches his sleepless protagonist beyond the breaking point, surrounds her with people she cannot trust, and piles on plot complications. This tautly written thriller has a sex scene and some R-rated language.

BACK CHANNEL Stephen L. Carter What if Americans and Soviets who wanted to avoid war used a comely African-American college student to carry back-channel messages between Kennedy and Khrushchev during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis? Suspicious minds would assume she was one of Kennedy’s many mistresses.

That’s the setup for Carter’s scrupulously researched Cold War thriller set in early-1960s Washington. Carter draws characters from the black upper class and sets in motion high-stakes moves and countermoves, which results in both an entertaining and an informative read.

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DETROIT: BET TMANN/CORBIS/AP

ONE NIGHT IN WINTER Simon Sebag Montefiore Just after World War II, some students at the elite Josef Stalin Commune School 801 form a secret society to celebrate Aleksandr Pushkin’s romantic worldview. As they act out the duel from Eugene Onegin, something goes fatally wrong.

Police interrogate and jail the students. They make a simple crime of passion out to be an intended coup against the state, dragging in more and more people to testify against siblings and well-connected parents. This riveting Stalin-era novel intermingles historical characters—including Stalin, his generals, and members of the Politburo—with fictional ones. It does include several brief sexual descriptions and occasional R-rated language.

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

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It’s hard to recall the Detroit that is the protagonist of the bittersweet Once in a Great City (Simon & Schuster, 2015). Presidential biographer David Maraniss zeros in on the years 1963 and 1964 when nearly everything was coming up roses for the Motor City. Music upstart Motown had discovered its formula and was cranking out hits, engineers at Ford were putting the finishing touches on the Mustang, city fathers were vying for the Olympics, and Martin Luther King Jr. united diverse groups into a peaceful march for civil rights months before the March on Washington. In this extensively researched book, Maraniss recreates personalities and projects from this optimistic period.

He also shows the unintended consequences on Detroit’s black middle class of urban renewal and a crackdown on organized crime. —S.O.

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CULTURE

BOOKS

Children’s books

FUN READS FOR AGES 12-15 reviewed by Janie B. Cheaney A SCHOOL FOR BRIDES Patrice Kindl This companion novel to Keeping the Castle (2012) off ers a lighthearted and literate Regency romance for today’s Jane Austen fans. The young ladies of Winthrop Hopkins Female Academy in Lesser Hoo, Yorkshire, aspire to become acceptable wives for eligible gentlemen, but there are none such in the neighborhood. That sorry state of aff airs ends when Mr. George Arbuthnot, galloping through Lesser Hoo, takes a nasty fall from his horse that requires a lengthy convalescence at the academy. Eligible male friends visit; problem solved! But complications ensue, including a shady governess, a missing jewel, and a possible betrayal. Little depth here, but no harm.

THE HIRED GIRL Laura Amy Schlitz Joan Skaggs flees her miserable role as drudge on her father’s Pennsylvania farm to become a housemaid for a wealthy Jewish family in Baltimore. Over the summer of 1911, she confides all her fears, hopes, challenges, triumphs, and disasters to her faithful diary. Joan is a gifted observer with insight beyond her 14 years, but also a naïve soul prone to the misperceptions and misplaced hopes of young teenhood. Certain romantic elements seem more appropriate to 16 than 14, but Joan’s voice is engaging and her journey to the Catholic faith, while relativistic about Judaism, is touching and believable.

FALLOUT (LOIS LANE) Gwenda Bond Lois, daughter of the famous Gen. Sam Lane, arrives at East Metropolis High with a reputation as a troublemaker.

On her very first day she becomes involved with a possible bullying scandal, but also catches the eye of editor Perry White, who recruits her to a team of teen reporters for his online newspaper, The Daily Buzz. During her investigation of black-clad gamers accused of high-tech mind control, Lois relies on her best online buddy (known only as SmallvilleGuy) for tips and encouragement. Although Lois bends some rules, her selfless, crusading spirit is a relief from the typical angst-ridden YA protagonist.

SPOTLIGHT Tonke (Antonia) Dragt, now 84, was already a successful illustrator in the Netherlands when she published The Letter for the King (De brief voor de Koning) in 1962.

The book was an international bestseller, with over 1 million copies sold, before it was finally translated into English in 2013. In September, Scholastic published the U.S. edition.

The story takes place in a medieval kingdom with a legendary “King Arthur” feel. Young Tiuri is keeping vigil on the eve of his knighthood when he hears a knock at the chapel door. Opening the door leads to an epic adventure involving treachery and heroism, as the 16-year-old risks everything to carry a vital message to the ruler of a neighboring kingdom. The novel, for all its 500-page length, is not especially rich in detail, and it lacks some dramatic tension. But the action seldom flags, and its Christian subtext will remind readers of The Pilgrim’s Progress. —J.C.

RANDOMS David Liss

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Why was Zeke Reynolds recruited to the four-member team of Earthlings applying for membership in the Confederation of United Planets? Off icial explanation: He’s a “random,” a youth of no particular attainment added to provide balance to three overachievers. But in a dustup with a hostile cruiser, which he accidentally blows to smithereens, Zeke acquires more notoriety than he needs. With no friends except two randoms of other species, he uncovers a scheme of crossed loyalties and purposes that threatens the Confederation. Great fun for sci-fi fans, but the solid characterization, witty narrative, and comprehensive world-building make an absorbing read for anyone.

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9/21/15 2:57 PM 9/28/15 10:37 AM

CULTURE

Q&A

RYAN ANDERSON

What’s next for marriage?

COMPARING THE LGBT AND ABORTION ONSLAUGHTS

by Marvin Olasky

Ryan Anderson, a Heritage Foundation senior research fellow, is the author of the newly released Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom (Regnery). Anderson, 33, received a BA from Princeton and a Ph.D. from Notre Dame.

This interview was in front of students at Patrick Henry College. We’ll publish three other parts of the interview at wng.org during the week of Oct. 11.

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In 1973, following the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, many pundits essentially said, “The abortion debate is over, decided, done. Everyone will live happily ever after.” That meant millions of unborn children would die, and 42 years later the debate rolls on. How is the Court’s 2015 establishment of same-sex marriage like that? Both rulings were unjustified. You can read

The abortion ruling led to many religious liberties conflicts. We forget now that in the late ’70s and early

’80s activists on the left were saying, “Abortion is healthcare like any other healthcare procedure. All doctors, all nurses, all hospitals, all health insurance programs should be mandated to perform or fund abortions.” It was an open question at the time whether you could be a pro-life physician, a pro-life nurse, a pro-life hospital. Thankfully, pro-lifers won that debate through a variety of protections, and we

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In what ways is the same-sex marriage debate different? My sense is that it’s easier for pro-lifers to

make the case for life than it will be for marriage people. You can frame the abortion debate very naturally within the framework that is our natural currency for political discourse: rights, as in the right to life.

Marriage is about an institution that protects the wellbeing of individuals, and we have a much harder time explaining how this institution of marriage promotes and protects human well-being by protecting the child’s right to a mom and a dad and avoiding the harms associated with nonmarital child-rearing. It’s more dots to connect.

Let’s connect more dots. One reason we’re winning on the abortion issue, slowly, is that the United States has a history of increasing inclusion—religious, ethnic, racial. Protecting unborn children increases inclusion, but the gay lobby has successfully portrayed opposition to homosexuality as exclusion. How do you deal with that? Your history is largely right, but the femi-

nist movement narrative says enlarging the circle to include women as full and equal citizens means a right to reproductive choice and now you are trying to take that away. Still, our pro-life narrative works better

MAT THEW STAVER/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST/GET T Y IMAGES

through the Constitution closely and you’ll never find a right to privacy that results in the right to kill a child in the womb. That was just legislating from the bench.

In the same way, read the due process clause and maybe the protection clause. Read the history of the 14th Amendment. Nothing in there says “redefine the nature of marriage.” Both these questions were simply issues our Constitution doesn’t speak to, so “We, the people” are supposed to debate, deliberate, and then vote about them.

established something of a consensus that pro-life citizens shouldn’t be coerced by the government to pay for or to perform abortions.

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you part.” Coming out of this ’60s sexual revolution you see spouses not saying “for as long as we both shall live” but “for as long as we both shall love.”

The current expression, “love makes a family,” grows out of that. And if love equals love, why not add

in another equal sign to make a throuple? How about “wedlease,” an idea introduced in The Washington Post two years ago? A wedlease would be a 5-year marriage contract that you could renew if you wanted to, but otherwise it has a presumption of ending after five years: lease a house, lease a car, lease a spouse.

If you say marriage is only for two people, will you be labeled a “twoist”? Or “polyphobe.” Lawsuits currently

in the federal courts may lead to constitutional rights of polygamy.

The growth of pregnancy resource centers that offer compassionate alternatives to abortion has led to

‘Only after 40 years of the cultural redefinition of marriage could you have five Supreme Court justices legally redefine marriage.’ a drop in the number of abortions, particularly when the centers offer ultrasound pictures. How can the Bible-based marriage movement show compassion?

MAT THEW STAVER/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST/GET T Y IMAGES

because we clearly include women in our community, and the question is: Does the inclusion of women as equal citizens entail the exclusion of unborn children?

Over time we’ll make progress in winning that.

But the marriage debate is harder. The problem is that we’re engaging the marriage debate 40 years too late. Gays and lesbians aren’t to blame for the problems that our marriage culture faces: It’s heterosexuals who bought liberal ideology during the sexual revolution of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Only after 40 years of the cultural redefinition of marriage could you have five Supreme Court justices legally redefine marriage. But little by little people are seeing the sexual revolution hasn’t been good for women, children, or men. The question becomes: How can we actually recover a more humane meaning of sexuality? That’s a challenge, but it can’t just be taking marriage away from gays and lesbians: It’s recovering a sound understanding of marriage for everyone. If we can’t do that, marriage dissolves into contract law of whatever size or shape the consenting adults choose to consent to.

No-fault divorce brought us a strange type of contract that could be broken unilaterally by one party.

Prior to no-fault divorce we had the three A’s—abuse, abandonment, and adultery—as serious reasons for a union expected as permanent to be declared over by the government. The expectation was, “Till death do

 molasky@wng.org  @MarvinOlasky

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Studies by Mark Regnerus and others are showing that children do best with their married mother and father. We now see adult children of gays and lesbians saying, “I love my two moms, but I wish I would have had a mom and a dad.” Single parenting or divorce show human frailty, but with same-sex marriage you now create an institution to deprive a child either of a mother or a father, not through human frailty, but intentionally.

How can we be compassionate toward people who have same-sex attractions but want to be chaste?

A VIDEO OF THIS INTERVIEW IN ITS ENTIRETY CAN BE FOUND AT WNG.ORG AND IN THE IPAD EDITION OF THIS ISSUE

For too long the church didn’t know what to do, but people like Wesley Hill and Eve Tushnet are working on this. There is a universal need for community, for relationships—and if people who are same-sex attracted aren’t going to get married, how do we welcome them into our homes? Everyone on Thanksgiving and Christmas needs somewhere to go.

How will we welcome gays and lesbians at our dining room table? It’s important that the church have a compassionate tangible response, in the same way you’ve looked at crisis pregnancy centers.

So Christians need to think, act, and speak? Many Christians have gone silent. If we’re not speaking for ourselves, someone else will. If you’re a secular liberal and all you’ve heard about the gay marriage debate is “God hates fags,” it’s reasonable to think we’re all bigots. A O C T O B E R 1 7, 2 0 1 5 W O R L D

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MUSIC

Public nuisances GROUPS WITH NEW RECORDS HAVE MORE IN COMMON THAN THEIR NAMES

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(often incorrectly) perceive to be the cause of black folk everywhere.

Fourth, both Lydon and D and Flav— their occasional cleverness, wit, and humor notwithstanding—rely overmuch on profanity. Thus they create more heat than light and do their myopic but by no means totally worthless causes less good than they otherwise might.

Fifth, both Lydon (a Brit) and D and Flav (Americans) view the United States through gimlet eyes. In What the World Needs Now’s “Bettie Page,” a tribute to the risqué 1950s pinup queen of the same name, Lydon declares the United States the “greatest pornographic country in the world.”

In Man Plans God Laughs’ “No Sympathy from the Devil,” Chuck D sympathizes with America’s 9/11 attackers.

Sixth, both PiL and PE have long had Christianity (or at least their perception of it) in their crosshairs. There’s nothing as scathing on What the World Needs Now … as “Religion I,” “Religion II,” or the anti-exorcism “Annalisa” (from PiL’s eponymous 1978 debut). But Lydon has described PiL’s latest cover art as an homage to Hopi Indian spirituality, the

Chuck D and both-and universalFlavor Flav at ism of which he Hard Rock considers superior to Hotel & Casino the divisive potential in Las Vegas. of either-or creeds.

And six tracks on Live from Metropolis Studios come from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, the 1988 album that put PE on the map and the lyrics of which ricocheted mostly within Louis Farrakhan’s and Malcolm X’s ideological parameters.

(Curiously, Malcolm X deplored profanity, a fact that seems to have been lost on D and Flav.)

Seventh, both PiL and PE extol universal brotherhood. “No matter your color,” howls Lydon in “Corporate,” “you are family to me!” And in Man Plans God Laughs’ “Earthizen” (as in “citizen of Earth”), Chuck D claims that “no lives matter if we don’t matter,” implying, of course, that all lives matter.

Last, both PiL and PE owe a debt to The Rolling Stones. Besides paraphrasing a Stones title (the aforementioned “No Sympathy from the Devil”), PE layers Man Plans God Laughs’ racism-reversing “Honky Tonk Rules” atop a “Honky Tonk Women” sample. And in the new PiL song “I’m Not Satisfied,” Lydon clearly can’t get no satisfaction. But at least, not unlike D and Flav, he’s trying.

Sometimes, in fact (also not unlike D and Flav), he’s very trying. A

LYDON: REX FEATURES VIA AP IMAGES • CHUCK D AND FL AVOR FL AV: ERIK K ABIK PHOTOGRAPHY/ RETNA LTD./MEDIAPUNCH/IPX/AP

Comparing the post-punk band Public Image Ltd. (PiL) and the hiphop band Public Enemy (PE) just because their names are similar might seem whimsical. But unlike, say, The Who and The Guess Who or Neal McCoy and Real McCoy, PiL and PE actually have a lot in common.

First, both have new albums: Man Plans God Laughs (Spitdigital) and Live from Metropolis Studios (Def Jam) (PE) and What the World Needs Now … (PiL Official) (PiL). And all three are loud, abrasive, and angry enough to appease fans of both acts’ long and controversial catalogs.

Second, both acts’ catalogs are long and controversial. Why controversial? Because PiL has sometimes confused legitimate bile with rank obnoxiousness and PE has sometimes confused black self-esteem with reverse racism.

Lydon Third, neither PiL’s John Lydon (the former Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten) nor PE’s Chuck D and Flavor Flav have mellowed with age. At 59, Lydon keeps raising the bar of the misanthropic high dudgeon that he’s been dishing with maniacal glee for almost 40 years. And at 55 and 56 respectively, D and Flav still hector, heckle, and jive with the goal of advancing what they

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 aorteza@wng.org  @ArsenioOrteza

9/28/15 3:06 PM

RICHARDS: MARKUS SCHREIBER/AP

by Arsenio Orteza

Caption

Notable CDs

NEW OR RECENT ALBUMS reviewed by Arsenio Orteza

SPOTLIGHT

DRIFTED: IN THE BEGINNING AND BEYOND Continental Drifters

The Continental Drifters were like a halfway house for once-famous ’80s pop-rockers. They ultimately included a dB, a Dream Syndicator, a Cowsill, and a Bangle. Also known as the Psycho Sisters, the latter two used their voices to transform the fellas from mere pop-rock eclectics into, for lack of a better metaphor, a sexy version of The Band—with good taste in cover tunes. So the group finished strong.

And because the Sisters and cover tunes dominate this collection’s second disc, this collection does too.

THE TRACKLESS WOODS Iris DeMent

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL HALLOWEEN Various artists

Subtitled “18 Halloween Party Classics,” this grab bag doesn’t treat Halloween as All Hallows Eve or as Samhain but simply as a chance to have fun pretending to get scared. It’s like an amusement park ride that way, so it makes sense that it feels like a roller coaster. Rob Zombie, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra & Chorus, Mike Oldfield, Bobby “Boris” Pickett, Warren Zevon—you’ll either enjoy the ride or get queasy. Ironic footnote: Sony apparently got spooked by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ and Ray Parker Jr.’s licensing fees.

CAROUSEL ONE Ron Sexsmith RICHARDS: MARKUS SCHREIBER/AP

LYDON: REX FEATURES VIA AP IMAGES • CHUCK D AND FL AVOR FL AV: ERIK K ABIK PHOTOGRAPHY/ RETNA LTD./MEDIAPUNCH/IPX/AP

The critic John Simon has called the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova “totally untranslatable into English” due to the unique “sonorities” of her native tongue. Iris DeMent either disagrees or doesn’t care. Using translations by Babette Deutsch and Lyn Coff in, DeMent has set 18 Akhmatova poems to hymnal-worthy melodies that she plays on the piano and that, given her Pentecostal Arkansas upbringing, make perfect sense. The results, as critics have noted, are arresting. What critics haven’t noted: DeMent’s quavery soprano enunciation often makes the lyric sheet essential.

Ron Sexsmith began writing really good songs and making pretty good records at the turn of the century, right after the expectations to which his 1990s output failed to live up coalesced into his reputation for being overhyped. How masterly a pop-song craftsman has he become? Paul McCartney could cover this album whole and get back onto the cover of Rolling Stone. The standout tracks are “Sure As the Sky,” “Loving You,” “Sun’s Coming Out,” and “No One.” But the rest will do as stand-ins.

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

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Few 2015 albums have been as eagerly anticipated by diehard rock ’n’ rollers as Crosseyed Heart (Republic), the new solo album by The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards. One reason is the expectations-stoking interviews that Richards has been granting.

Another is Under the Influence, a new Netflix documentary about Richards. Another is that his previous solo albums were either quite all right (Main Off ender) or borderline great ( Talk Is Cheap).

Completed 18 months ago when Richards was 70, Crosseyed Heart sounds least like the work of a septuagenarian when you listen to the guitars and most like one when Richards sings and you listen to what he’s singing. (Nicotine and drugs do take their toll, and Glen Campbell has better amnesia songs than “Amnesia.”) But, like Bob Dylan, Richards knows how to get the most from his voice. And when he rocks (“Heartstopper,” “Trouble”) or grooves (“Nothing on Me”), he gets the most from his drummer. —A.O.

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MINDY BELZ

Getting into the weeds

THE GARDEN YIELDS LIFE LESSONS ONCE AGAIN

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The sower is so confident of the harvest, He will allow weeds to grow among the real crop until the time when all may be reaped together.

CJP/ISTOCK

A killing frost cannot come soon enough to finish off my weeds. They have had their run of the tomato patch, the mint bed, and just about any other nook or cranny of the ­garden this growing season. They have twined around the roses and invaded the shrubs. They proliferated in the most unlikely places, like my driveway bed of gravel. I surrender.

I used to think weeds were what we decided they were, you know, the dandelion springing up in the middle of a suburban lawn that in another time and place is an edible, nutritious green. But we call weeds weeds for a reason.

For instance, many of them reproduce by something called apomixis, or asexually via their seeds. In other words, they don’t need ­pollination to produce an identical plant. That fluff of dandelion is quite literally waiting to blow, to colonize the whole place, while a rose is a rose: It requires cutting and grafting—in essence, the work of a gardener—to produce identical offspring.

It was an ideal summer for weeds in my yard, with heavy rains followed by long dry spells. From my desk I watched them spread. I took breaks to weed one bed, then another, and never ever seemed to win. Worse, kudzu, that “vine that almost ate the South,” has been creeping through our woods, lapping at the edges of my lawn and flower beds. Kudzu has a beautiful, dainty flower, did you know? Kind of like the sweet cowlick topping the head of a very naughty boy.

Jesus deployed weeds, thorns, and thistles to good effect. If the parable of the sower isn’t clear, then there’s the parable of the weeds. And if they aren’t clear enough, they are the only two parables in the Gospels Jesus actually explains point by point. In a modern-day ­culture where a lot of weeds keep springing up,

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overwhelming me sometimes the way I imagine kudzu might one morning overtake my house, I’m glad for His meaning made plain.

First, there is a sower. And He sows expecting a good—actually a bountiful—harvest. He is so confident of the harvest, He will allow weeds to grow among the real crop (Matthew 13:30) until the time when all may be reaped together.

Next, the harvest is dependent on the right conditions. We know weeds grow best where the ground is clayey, unnourished and unturned. My tomatoes went untended and grew scraggly, falling over, and that’s when the weeds attacked. A good harvest requires attention. Neglect—or, when good men do nothing— makes good ground for a crop of weeds. Note that the enemy sowed weeds while the sower’s men were sleeping (Matthew 13:25).

And last, perhaps obvious but often overlooked: that enemy.

He’s the one planting the weeds, though it often appears they sowed themselves.

From my vantage point, the weeds of distraction are having a banner year, and so are the weeds of moral indignation in support of immoral acts. And the reason we may feel we’re choking when we observe a world of terrorism, refugee crises, climate change fear, and family dissolution is that we are. And we’re being allowed to continue in that state for now.

I am especially convicted by my neglect of weeds from the interview in this issue with Ryan Anderson (see p. 28), author of the new book Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom. When it comes to talking about marriage and sex, Anderson points out, “Many Christians have gone silent.” If we aren’t speaking up in the places where we live using the words of truth and the conduct of good marriages and hospitable homes, the world will get the message others are sending about our alleged bigotry.

A final cold snap is coming to take care of my weed problem. For now, I’m humbled by the reality of wheat and tares growing together while the sower and the enemy do battle above and beyond us. A

 mbelz@wng.org  @mcbelz

9/28/15 2:57 PM

SEX, SIN &

SALVATION God’s Grace in a Fallen World

Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary APRIL 21 - 23, 2016

Christ Church at Grove Farm Sewickley, PA

SPEAKERS

CJP/ISTOCK

Dr. Rosaria Butterfield Rev. Tim Challies Dr. Peter Jones Dr. Heath Lambert Dr. George Scipione Dr. John Street Dr. Derek Thomas

TO REGISTER:

www.rpts.edu/news 21 MINDY.indd 33

9/25/15 3:55 PM

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Numbered test tubes sit in a container used to freeze human eggs in a laboratory for in vitro fertilization.

BATTLING THE BIOLOGICAL CLOCK More young people are turning to fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization, but often without considering the ethical problems, failure rates, or emotional strain

BY EMILY BELZ in New York PHOTO BY KOSTAS TSIRONIS/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES O C T O B E R 1 7, 2 0 1 5 W O R L D

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n a recent Thursday evening in SoHo—an upscale neighborhood in lower Manhattan, New York City—young women packed a reception room at the ritzy Nomad Hotel, fresh from work and dressed sharply. Servers brought glasses of sparkling white wine and tiny appetizers, cheese pastry puffs and hamachi on rice crisps. › A sign outside the room with a woman raising her arms in triumph read, “Smart women freeze!” On tables literature proclaimed, “Break free from your biological clock.”

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9/29/15 3:16 PM

SANG TAN/AP

PATRICK T. FALLON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GET T Y IMAGES

Eggbanxx, a network of egg-freezing fertility clinics, organized this happy hour event, as it does in major cities in the United States every few months to encourage women to freeze their eggs. That way, the women can wait to have children until later via in vitro fertilization (IVF).

In career-driven Manhattan, women often wait until well into their 30s. Double strollers filled with twins, often a result of IVF, are a common sight. The fertility industry boom in Manhattan is likely to move out to the rest of the country as more and more women delay child bearing because of career or later marriage, and as the various technologies like IVF become more available.

The first IVF clinic opened in the United States in 1983, but only in the last decade has the practice become mainstream. Few consider the ethical problems and high failure rates of IVF and other assisted reproductive technologies until they are in the throes of ­infertility and desperate for a child.

From 2000 to 2012, the rate of 35- to 39-year-old women having their first child rose 24 percent nationwide, and 40 percent in New York, according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. Over the same period that “first birth rate” rose by 35 percent among women aged 40 to 44. According to the CDC’s latest report, women gave birth to 67,996 babies in 2013 as a result of in vitro cycles.

In New York, a fertility boom is underway for those who have money for the expensive IVF process: In 2013, TriBeCa, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city, had one of the city’s highest birthrates. That same year, the highest rates of multiple births occurred in wealthy neighborhoods, and among women over 40, which the department of health said “is likely attributable to more frequent use of assisted reproductive technology.”

A few of the 100 or so women at the SoHo happy hour had on wedding rings, but most women I met were single and in their late 20s like me.

Several had recently gone through breakups and were discouraged about meeting a partner in time to have children naturally.

A few representatives from a genetic testing company chatted with the women.

One of the doctors at the gathering said the women she sees for ­freezing are younger and younger. That’s the fertility clinics’ goal: The younger women are when they ­harvest their eggs, the higher the quality of the eggs, which boosts the clinics’ success rates when they fertilize the eggs and implant them via IVF. Fertility doctors in cocktail dresses mingled and answered questions. Egg harvesting, and IVF, are physically intense processes for women and have low success rates. IVF has a 28 percent success rate in the United States, with success defined as live births per IVF cycle.

Egg freezing is still a relatively new technology with low success rates, but the fertility doctors argued that new freezing and thawing methods were increasing their success.

A few women talking afterward expressed reservations about the cost: Through Eggbanxx, two cycles of egg harvesting costs $13,000. Then egg storage costs, at a minimum, $500 a year. Then women would need to go through IVF to use the eggs, another few thousand dollars per cycle.

“We hope you’re empowered,” said Dr. Fahimeh Sasan, the chief medical officer at Eggbanxx and an OB/ GYN at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York.

“It’s such false hope,” said Chris White, the director of research and education at the Center for Bioethics and Culture (CBC), a nonreligious group. CBC does not outright oppose IVF but thinks women should be informed of its low rates of success and the health risks to the mother and the child. CBC does oppose involving donors or surrogates in the reproduction process.

Hank Greely, a law professor at Stanford University who directs the school’s Center for Law and Biosciences, gave a talk in 2014 titled “The End of Sex,” in which he argued that sex would be used less and less as a means

PATRICK T. FALLON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GET T Y IMAGES

SANG TAN/AP

An embryologist (above) works with an embryo at the Create Health fertility clinic in south London; guests chat at an EggBanxx Egg Freezing Party (left) in Beverly Hills, Calif.

of procreation, and that in the next 40 years most babies in wealthy nations would be born via IVF. “The biological clock could even disappear,” he said, according to the Duke Chronicle.

As more and more couples turn to fertility treatments, few couples consider ethics or the physical and emotional costs. IVF can create complicated legal situations: In California, a divorced couple is currently fighting over the custody of their five frozen embryos. The mother, Dr. Mimi Lee, wants to keep the embryos alive and have the children through a surrogate. She’s infertile and 46 years old. The father, Stephen Findley, wants the embryos destroyed. Courts have few precedents on such cases.

Christian bioethicists and couples who have gone through IVF are arguing that the church should speak about infertility more as it becomes more of an issue, and that infertility should be a topic in premarital counseling. Few Protestant denominations take a position on assisted reproduction technologies like IVF. Carson and Kate Royal married in their mid-20s and then found out they were infertile after a year of trying to have children. Following counsel with their parents and their pastor in Chattanooga, Tenn., they decided to try IVF. They now have three boys through IVF, a 5-year-old and twin 3-year-olds.

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Fertilize only the eggs that you can implant, he tells couples. Implant only the embryos that you can safely carry to term. He recommends not freezing any embryos, but if you do, commit to implanting all the embryos you have. Don’t do selective reduction, the fertility euphemism for aborting an embryo if multiple implanted embryos develop into a pregnancy.

On introducing third parties into reproduction— sperm donors, egg donors, or surrogates to carry babies—Reformed theologians, Catholic leaders, and the

ROYALS: BILLY WEEKS/GENESIS PHOTOS • TSIGDINOS: PETER DASILVA /THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX

The Royal After the Royals did their first family (above) round of IVF, which resulted in a found success, pregnancy, some of their but Pamela acquaintances started questionMahoney Tsigdinos ing the ethics of the practice. (right) did not.

Kate had thought her pastor and her parents’ endorsement was enough, but then realized they needed to ask more questions.

Before the Royals did the next round of IVF, they met with Bill Davis, an ethicist at Memorial Hospital in Chattanooga.

In his day job, Davis is a professor of philosophy at Covenant College, the denominational school of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), but he’s also an ethics associate for Catholic Health Initiatives. The Catholic Church opposes IVF entirely on the grounds that babies should only be conceived in the marital act of sex. But Davis sketched out a Reformed approach to the technology for the Royals over an hour-long lunch.

“There are biblically permissive ways to make use of the technology,” Davis said later. “We have to be equipped to deal with the temptations to recklessness.

But we do that with lots of other things.”

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ROYALS: BILLY WEEKS/GENESIS PHOTOS • TSIGDINOS: PETER DASILVA /THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX

couples he counsels find him Center for Bioethics and Culture via word of mouth. generally agree: Nope.

Sometimes years of IVF “Once you’ve agreed on that attempts never bring children. principle, the only really hard Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos, the part is to find a fertility specialauthor of Silent Sorority, spent ist who’s willing to do it within more than a decade doing fertilthe limits that you set,” said ity treatments, including IVF, Davis. “And even within that you HOW IT WORKS without having any children. By need to be persistent in asking The in vitro fertilization (IVF) process varies age 39, she was emotionally, questions.” depending on the patient’s needs and physically, and financially The reproductive endocriapproach. Generally, an IVF cycle starts exhausted. She and her husband nologists at the clinic the Royals with the woman taking daily hormone decided to stop trying. She says found in Chattanooga were injections for a week or two before her more people should be talking accommodating, never suggestmonthly ovulation. The injections stimulate the follicles in her ovaries, so that she will about the difficulty of fertility ing selective reduction of their create multiple eggs in that cycle instead treatments like IVF and their twins. Of the 10 embryos the of the usual one. During that time she must low success rates.

Royals created and froze, they visit the doctor regularly for monitoring.

“I really, truly felt like a lab have five remaining after having When the eggs are ready, the doctor will experiment,” Tsigdinos said. three children. When we talked, give the woman a shot that triggers ovula“People are under the illusion Kate was about to go in for tion. The next day the woman goes under that reproductive medicine is a another embryo transfer. anesthesia and the doctor surgically sure thing.”

“We decided we were going removes the eggs. The clinic will mix eggs In Tsigdinos’ first meeting back to get all of our embryos with fresh sperm from the father, and the with a reproductive endocrinoleven if it meant we were going fertilized eggs will develop in a dish for the ogist, the doctor recommended to have 10 kids,” Kate said. “So next several days. After a few days, the that she go straight to IVF. that’s been the hard part at ones that survive and develop will either be Tsigdinos likened that experitimes, when you’re overplaced in the woman’s uterus (what doctors ence to having chest pains and call an embryo transfer) or be frozen. Then whelmed with three little the couple will wait two weeks to do a a doctor immediately recomboys—we’re going back and pregnancy test. mending open heart surgery. doing this five more times, six “The discomfort burden is wildly dispro“This has become the go-to more times. But that’s someportionate for the man and the wife,” said procedure,” she said. “It comthing we decided we couldn’t Covenant College’s Bill Davis (see main pletely turns your life upside get around. How do you put an story). “Men need to think about that.” —E.B. down.” embryo up for adoption when Tsigdinos said clinics don’t you have no guarantee that prepare women for the “emothey’ll ever hear about Jesus?” tional gymnastics” of going through the motions of Kate and Carson told their doctor to treat each embryo pregnancy on a regular basis. She recalled going in for “like this is our only shot.” Kate said some people will go an embryo transfer, only to receive a call from a nurse back and have an embryo put in without taking all the two weeks later saying she wasn’t pregnant. The embryo right medications “just to kind of be done.” At her clinic, hadn’t survived, but the nurse’s response was, “Call next “They call things off if things aren’t perfect or close to week if you’d like to schedule another cycle.” perfect.”

Tsigdinos said women should seek advice from their Carson said the discussion about how to do IVF the primary care physicians or OB/GYNs, who have no right way amounted to three minutes of their hour-long commercial ties to fertility treatments. She urges couples lunch with Davis. The bulk of the time Davis spends with to think through their boundaries before “you are emocouples is counseling them through their sorrow. He tionally under pressure.” tells the people he counsels, “The world is broken. It has CBC’s White says questions about infertility should be a Redeemer. And between now and the full realization of a part of premarital counseling. Davis teaches bioethics that, the misery is not spread around equally.” courses at Covenant College, and he’s noticed that most “I went to get answers about the ethics of it,” Carson students haven’t considered the question. said. “And I left feeling very cared for. … We’re hurting. In “My experience in trying to talk to younger people vitro is not easy.” about it is they all assume it doesn’t happen to very many The church’s resources to address infertility appear to people, and it won’t happen to them,” Davis said. He tells be mostly organic rather than official. The Royals didn’t them, “Twenty percent of couples will go at least 12 know anyone who had done IVF when they started, and months of trying to conceive and not conceiving. So look they recalled googling “infertility” and “PCA.” They found around the room, one in five of you. Do not assume emotional support from their church friends, but it was that’s not going to happen to you.” A awkward to talk about initially. Davis said most of the O C T O B E R 1 7, 2 0 1 5 W O R L D

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BAR THE DOORS? The U.S. Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision may increase the likelihood churches will face LGBT lawsuits.

Here’s how some are protecting themselves

BY DANIEL JAMES DEVINE

GUS CHAN/GENESIS PHOTOS

ILLUSTRATION BY KRIEG BARRIE

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Chris McCombs was driving his freshman daughter home from summer camp on Friday, June 26, when a text message blinked on his phone with the news: The U.S. Supreme Court had just declared same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states.

The senior pastor from Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, felt stunned. But he knew it wasn’t the time for silence. He canceled his planned Sunday sermon about the Charleston shooting and decided instead to preach about marriage.

That weekend, McCombs stood in front of a congregation of 170 at Broadman Baptist Church and asked people to open their Bibles to the words of Jesus from Mark Chapter 10. “But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife,” he read. “Are we going to believe God, and even Jesus, or are we going to believe the world? …

Culture has this wrong, you all.”

The pastor told his church members they needed to love their gay neighbors, yet be prepared for persecution and prosecution. He reminded them bakers and photographers have already faced lawsuits and fines for refusing to participate in same-sex weddings.

“The church and charities are the next target. Mark my words as a prophet right now,” he said, raising his right hand. “I’m telling you, it’s coming.”

Prophet or not, lawyers agree with McCombs’ prediction of a legal attack on religious nonprofits and churches. The Supreme Court’s gay marriage ruling, Obergefell v. Hodges, has created a new legal climate across the United States, and what once was considered sacred— American religious liberty—has been overshadowed by homosexual “civil rights.” Pastors are worried courts may try to force their churches to recognize gay marriage or hire gay employees.

“My phone was ringing off the hook there for a few days,” said Lane Moore, the director of the Northwest Louisiana Baptist Association, which helped organize a July seminar for up to 400 local pastors and church leaders in response to the Obergefell ruling. Moore said pastors repeatedly asked him, “What are we going to do? What are we going to do?”

Pastor Chris McCombs preaches at Broadman Baptist Church.

Pastors need not panic, but half a dozen attorneys and legal experts WORLD contacted agreed the risks are real. Although churches are likely safe for the time being, they need to take ­concrete steps to maximize their legal protections. The question: Will they be able to do so without isolating themselves from the surrounding communities many hope to serve?

Nondiscrimination laws have already hammered nonprofits. In New Jersey, the civil rights division forced Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, a Christian camp, to stop hosting weddings at its beach pavilion because it did not allow same-sex weddings. In Idaho, the owners of the Hitching Post, a for-profit wedding chapel, are in a lawsuit with the city of Coeur d’Alene over whether they may turn away gay couples without the threat of fines or jail time.

Although apparently no church has yet been sued for declining to host a homosexual wedding, some gay couples have already asked evangelical pastors to perform marriage ceremonies or admit them to church membership.

Legal experts say activists may focus their attention on churches in coming years, testing legal arguments that might persuade a progressive judge to rule against a church holding to biblical ­standards of sexuality.

Churches have a powerful legal defense in their corner: the First Amend­ ment, which prevents the government from prohibiting the “free exercise” of

religion. Churches have so far been exempt from laws meant to prevent discrimination at places of public accommodation on the basis of race, sex, religion— or now—sexual ­orientation. It seems unlikely a court would force a church to host a same-sex wedding, but the question of churches and gay rights has not been ­litigated, so it’s difficult to make predictions. LGBT activists might appeal to “nondiscrimination” policies to argue a church cannot fire gay employees or turn away gay couples who want to rent church facilities.

All it takes is one or two motivated individuals for a lawsuit to arrive, said Jeremiah Galus, an attorney at Alliance Defending Freedom. “We know there are those out there that aren’t happy that churches are exempted from these laws.”

Worries about accusations of discrimination are already complicating some church efforts to build bridges with communities.

At Broadman Baptist, a church committee is re-evaluating whether to continue allowing the board members of a condo complex across the street to meet in the church fellowship hall for a fee of $50. McCombs is concerned that by ­renting the hall to community groups for nonreligious purposes, a same-sex ­couple might argue it also has a right to the space. At the same time, he’s frustrated, because he wants his church to have open arms to the neighborhood.

“We have voting here. But we’re thinking about stopping that because we don’t know what the government is going to do,” he said. “We have to protect ourselves now.”

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they had been treated with “dignity and respect, understanding God loves them.”

Last year Broadman Baptist added a marriage definition to its bylaws. And this year—nine days after Obergefell—the congregation unanimously voted on additional policy changes restricting facility use only to events that align with the church’s “ministry, religious, and worship purposes.” The church also added language defining wedding ceremonies as “a form of worship.”

Legal aid groups like ADF and the Christian Legal Society have published guides meant to help churches minimize the risk of lawsuits or discrimination charges. They say churches don’t need to bar all outside groups from their property or stop renting their buildings for weddings and receptions. But if they do rent, they should consider charging less than market rates, so they look more like a church and less like a business.

Could a church be sued for firing a gay staff member? A major 2012 Supreme Court case, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, ruled the government should not be involved in telling churches which ­“ministerial” employees they are allowed to hire or fire. That gave churches broad immunity from employment discrimination laws—at least when it comes to ministers.

The problem is that the Supreme Court left vague the question of who

qualifies as a minister.

“There’s this fuzzy area of, what about janitors?” said David Nammo, the executive director of the Christian Legal Society. “That has yet to be determined. And none of this has been litigated on the gay rights issue.”

Churches should consider writing detailed job descriptions for every e­ mployment position, specifying how it relates to the church’s religious mission. ADF, for example, recommends requiring employees to participate in devotional meetings, and requiring receptionists to be able to pray with callers or answer questions about the church’s beliefs.

A

key component to a church’s legal defense is that it must be consistent in how it applies its beliefs. A judge would likely consider a church inconsistent if it refused to host a gay wedding yet hosted a pro-gay marriage conference on its property.

The question of consistency has some church leaders wondering about another kind of relationship: Their sponsorship

CHURCH LEGALESE If a church does get sued, its defense costs might be covered under its general liability insurance policy. Or might not: Robert Bates, the president of Southern Mutual Church Insurance Company, said a lawsuit filed by a same-sex couple wouldn’t be covered under his company’s liability policy unless the couple was alleging bodily or personal injury.

But in response to the changing legal landscape, Southern Mutual last year began offering an add-on policy that would cover miscellaneous cases, including a same-sex marriage lawsuit.

“This is a unique coverage that our company has designed at the request of our churches to protect them,” said Bates, whose company insures churches, synagogues, and mosques in Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. The add-on policy would not cover court fines resulting from a lost case.

The Wisconsin-based Church Mutual Insurance Company offers similar protection policies that apply differently depending on the facts of the case, according to company officials. Churches should speak to their insurance agent to see which lawsuits would be covered. And whether for insurance or bylaw revisions, churches should always consult a local attorney, since laws vary from state to state. —D.J.D.

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they clearly state, for example, whether the church believes marriage consists of one man and one woman.

Many churches had already made such revisions before the Obergefell ­ruling, and others rushed to do so afterwards.

Greg Dumas, the lead pastor at The Crossing Church in Tampa, Fla., said that within weeks of the Obergefell ruling his office received an email from a woman asking if a pastor would marry her and her partner. The church leadership declined the request. After getting ­counsel from the Texas-based Liberty Institute, church officers updated the church’s constitution and bylaws to define marriage as between a male and female, as determined by birth sex. Dumas also made a public statement about the church’s beliefs regarding marriage.

“I think that as the world gets darker, the church gets brighter. We’ve got a great opportunity in this time to speak the truth in love,” Dumas said.

Mike Johnson, an attorney and Louisiana state representative, said his nonprofit law firm Freedom Guard is reviewing bylaws for about 30 churches, and has since July presented how-to seminars for over 2,000 pastors and ministry leaders: “You can’t just say, ‘Oh, it’s in the Bible, we believe it’ now. You need to have very specific things on paper so that it does provide an actual exhibit for the court—as crazy as this sounds—for your legal defense.”

One of Johnson’s clients is Summer Grove Baptist Church in Shreveport, La. Executive Pastor Dwayne McDow said the church leaders had to turn down a lesbian couple’s request to become members many months ago. The couple disagreed with the leadership’s decision, but maintained a friendly relationship with the church and continued to attend worship services until moving out of town.

Since then, Summer Grove has recognized the need for a written policy. In March the congregation voted to amend the church constitution and bylaws to define the church’s beliefs regarding marriage and sexual practice, and to require members to be “living in accord” with those standards. McDow said he hoped anyone who disagreed with Summer Grove’s beliefs would still feel

‘Whenever you open your mouth in disagreement, no matter how gentle you are, you’re labeled.’

GUS CHAN/GENESIS PHOTOS

—MC COM BS

of Boy Scouts of America. Over the summer the organization dropped its ban on openly gay Scout leaders. Although BSA still allows churches and religious organizations sponsoring troops to ban gay leaders, could a church’s partnership with BSA open it up to a discrimination lawsuit?

The uncertainty has motivated some churches to bail on Boy Scouts. First Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church in Lancaster, S.C., ended a 65-year-old relationship with BSA in July, concerned about the organization’s softened stance toward homosexuality and about legal entanglements. It had hosted Cub Scout and Boy Scout units involving more than 60 families in the church and community.

“We don’t have time or resources to fight a frivolous lawsuit,” said Kyle E. Sims, the pastor. “We felt like it was an unnecessary risk. … We’re not trying to be negative toward the Boy Scouts.”

First ARP Church has instead begun sponsoring a troop with Trail Life USA, an alternative Christian scouting group.

Trail Life’s general counsel, former Boy Scouts counsel Richard John Mathews, argues that the Boy Scouts’ new policy allowing gay leaders could jeopardize a church’s religious freedoms. For example, an activist judge might argue that

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since a church allows Boy Scouts to use its building, it must also open its space to other organizations that sanction homosexual relationships. Otherwise, the church is inconsistently applying what it claims are sincere religious beliefs about sexuality.

That argument is hypothetical at this point, and legal experts are divided about the likelihood of such a court ruling. BSA firmly denies its gay leader policy will leave churches vulnerable to lawsuits.

Ted Spangenberg Jr., the president of the Association of Baptists for Scouting, agrees with BSA’s legal analysis and thinks churches that pull out of Boy Scouts are making a mistake. The Boy Scouts’ popular brand gives churches an evangelistic opportunity to reach unchurched families, he said. “I want them to do Scouting with a troop that upholds what I believe—biblically consistent moral values. And so I want that evangelical church to be there with a troop for that family.”

L. David Henningson, a Minnesota attorney, pointed out the dilemma churches face: Avoiding legal entanglements with Boy Scouts and similar organizations means missing opportunities for interaction with the community. “It’s starting to cut off the ability of the

church to be involved in the Great Commission,” he said.

For some churches, reducing risks while maintaining relationships might require getting creative. Instead of hosting a “trunk-or-treat” event on church property this year, Broadman Baptist members plan to go “tract-or-treating,” passing out candy and gospel tracts door-to-door in the neighborhood.

(McCombs said he expects to host trunk-or-treat again next year, after the church’s facility use policy is revised.)

One thing attorneys say churches shouldn’t do is stay silent. Pastors should preach regularly on biblical sexuality so that both members and outsiders know where the church stands. That’s the opposite of what LGBT activists want.

McCombs said he realizes some people will construe any opposition to same-sex marriage as discrimination: “Whenever you open your mouth in disagreement, no matter how gentle you are, you’re labeled.”

After McCombs and his wife and three kids went to bed the Friday night of the Obergefell ruling, someone took sidewalk chalk and wrote “#lovewins GAY IS OK!!” on the family’s driveway under the cover of dark.

On Saturday, McCombs sprayed off the red and blue chalk with a hose. And on Sunday, he exhorted his congregation to show kindness to their gay friends and neighbors: “We need to be gracious to them. We need to plow their driveway.”

McCombs later told me, “We want to love everybody, best we can. … [But] we’re not going to condone and compromise our view.”

Meanwhile, he has made clear to his congregation the legal dangers Obergefell has created. The church committee is making final revisions to Broadman Baptist’s facility use policy, and hopes to submit them to a congregational vote by the end of the year. It will be Broadman’s third set of revisions in two years related to marriage or facility use.

“I think the church needs to take responsibility, and that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing right now,” McCombs said. “I wish I could sit here and say this is a waste of time.” A —with reporting by Katie Gaultney

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Sounding the alarm The only economist in Congress, newcomer DAVE BRAT never tires of warning about the government’s reckless fiscal habits

by J.C. Derrick

in Culpeper and Richmond, Va., and Washington, D.C. PHOTO BY BOB MARTIN

PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES Ted Cruz and Donald Trump headlined a September rally against the Iran nuclear deal at the U.S. Capitol, but they weren’t the only ones to receive star treatment. Virginia Congressman Dave Brat was barely inside the rally perimeter when a Maryland woman stopped him to get an autograph.

Others shouted for his attention, shook his hand, and posed for pictures— including a recent Virginia Tech graduate who proudly informed Brat that she wrote her senior thesis about his 2014 victory.

“Keep spreadin’ the word,” said a smiling Brat, whose energy didn’t diminish even as sweat soaked through

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his clothes in the 90-degree heat. It’s evident this is the favorite part of his new job: meeting people. He estimates meeting 200 per day.

When Brat took the microphone, he laid blame for the Iran nuclear deal at the feet of U.S. leaders and drew hearty boos when he named the two in his own party: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner.

“The situation we’re in right now is a result of poor leadership,” he told the crowd. “I’m Dave Brat from Virginia—I know what happens when leaders in Washington don’t listen to their voters.”

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up the entire budget before a single ­dollar goes to fund the military, educate children, maintain roads, or pay federal workers. That means even more borrowing and more deficit spending.

How long can the U.S. continue its spending binge before an economic ­collapse? Brat says 30, maybe 40 years, judging by the path taken in Europe. Brat won’t be around that long: He’s only 51, but he’s term-limited himself to 12 years. Before then, Brat hopes to shove Congress off the fiscal road to a Greecelike collapse.

Brat says his colleagues know the answers to what ails Washington but “crony interests” get in the way: “I can predict every vote according to this,” he said, rubbing his fingers together to illustrate the power of money. “When you see decisions that don’t make sense, that’s why. I’m voting for the country as a whole—and we’ll see how long I stay in office.”

Fifteen months after his primary win, Brat is still best known as the man who came out of nowhere to defeat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor—one of the biggest political upsets in American ­history. Now 10 months into his first term, Brat has established a conservative record on many issues, but it is fiscal concerns that drive his daily message.

From district town halls to hearings on Capitol Hill, one can find the lone economist in Congress sounding the alarm on the nation’s fiscal trajectory.

“We’ve got 11 years,” he says to constituents, colleagues, and anyone else who will ­listen—and even some who won’t.

Congressman Dave “Democrats just Brat speaks at the laugh [and say], Culpeper Chamber ‘I know what of Commerce. you’re going to say, Dave.’”

Brat’s 11-year warning is based on the Congressional Budget Office’s 2015 report on the long-term outlook of the federal budget. It projects that in fall 2026 (the start of fiscal year 2027) mandatory spending and interest on the federal debt will consume all federal revenue. That means programs including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps—which grow automatically as more people become eligible—will take

BRAT GREW UP in a small Michigan town where he played sports every day and endured teasing for his last name.

His father, a doctor, paid his three sons $10 for each book they read, and Dave finished 12 to buy his first 10-speed bike.

Brat’s parents took him to church and had him memorize the Heidelberg Catechism, but he says it took years for his intellectual knowledge to become real faith in Christ. Today he identifies himself as a “Catholic Calvinist”—a label he insists isn’t contradictory—and he’s a member of a Roman Catholic church in his district.

“The fundamental piece is faith in Jesus—that’s the main thing,” said Brat, whose favorite theologians include Reinhold Niebuhr, John Calvin, Augustine, and Karl Barth.

Brat graduated from Princeton Seminary and considers himself to be walking in the footsteps of his favorite founding father, James Madison, who lived in what today is Brat’s congressional district. Brat initially wanted to teach O C T O B E R 1 7, 2 0 1 5 W O R L D

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BRAT MADE A CAMPAIGN PROMISE to visit all nine counties in his district each month, and so far he says he’s kept it.

During August visits to two of those counties, Culpeper and Henrico, he met with the Culpeper Chamber of Commerce, dropped in on a Germanna Community College humanities class, and visited a Richmond hospital. “Cantor couldn’t do this,” a constituent told me while trailing him through the emergency department at St. Mary’s Hospital.

At the end of his hospital visit, doctors and staff formed a semicircle around Brat as he warned of the nation’s $18 trillion debt and $127 trillion in unfunded mandates. He recounted taking criticism in July when he filed an amendment to make a $9.3 billion medical research bill discretionary spending, rather than mandatory (the amendment failed). Brat said mandatory spending already consumes two-thirds of the budget, so the Budget Committee can only actually budget the remaining one-third.

“In 11 years, it’s gonna be zip,” he told the medical staff, standing casually with a hand in the pocket of his beige suit. “People think it’s partisan—it’s not the welfare state hampers the nation’s partisan. It’s all about K Street.” ability to welcome more immigrants.)

Brat argues it’s preferable to imple“I attribute it to God,” Brat told comment spending cuts now, rather than mentator Sean Hannity about his victory suffer the “terrible pain” that will come in on the night he won. “God acts through 10 years. Growing the economy at 3 or 4 people, and God acted through the percent annually is also key. He blames people on my behalf.” overregulation and high business taxes for handcuffing the economy, but the more important 2027: Autopilot Spending Exceeds All Revenue battle is ideological. Brat points out that people generally saw business as universally bad until Mandatory spending is greater than 200 years ago—a change that Discretionary revenue ushered in an era of unpreceSpending dented economic growth around the world—and the old mentality has again taken hold.

“Our graduating seniors don’t know much at all about running a Revenue business, and that’s going to be our economy,” he said. “Then Mandatory morally … kids are being told Spending business is terrible.”

Changing the country’s mood to pro-business may be an even bigger goal than trying to bring fiscal sanity to Congress, but Brat plans to keep trying—and with a smile: “Somehow, in the face of all 2017 2019 2021 2023 2025 2027 2028 2030 2033 2035 2037 2039 of this, I’m still happy to be alive.” A SOURCE: CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE

systematic theology, but in 1995 he earned a Ph.D. in economics and taught for 18 years at Randolph-Macon College.

He now says Judeo-Christian values and free markets are interlocking keys to spur economic growth.

Brat said his wife of 20 years, Laura, and his two children weren’t surprised when he decided to run for Congress, since he’d always had an interest in politics. He said he planned to win from the start.

Eric Cantor was only in his sixth term representing Virginia’s 7th Congressional District, but it was already his fourth year as House Majority Leader. Many constituents felt he no longer represented their interests and welcomed Brat’s challenge, which was largely ignored by national groups. Cantor burned more than $5 million defending his seat—a 40-to-1 spending advantage—but he still lost by 12 points.

Many pundits saw Cantor’s loss as a blow for immigration reform efforts, since the former House majority leader had supported the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” bill in 2013. But every constituent I asked during an August trip with Brat to his district said Cantor’s demise had more to do with ignoring them. Brat calls it a “perfect storm” involving many issues. (Brat still talks tough on immigration, but when he does, it generally ties back into his economic message. He says

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‘Our graduating seniors don’t know much at all about running a business, and that’s going to be our economy.’

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pot?

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As both the social costs of and tax revenue from legal marijuana explode, it becomes increasingly difficult to reverse direction by Warren C ole S mith

MANITOU SPRINGS, COLO., is a funky resort town on the shoulder of Pike’s Peak just west of Colorado Springs.

Along Manitou Avenue, the town’s main street, “No Vacancy” signs dominate the summer streetscape. In an era when most hotels ban smoking, another sign is also conspicuous: “Smoking Rooms Available.”

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The message is clear: Marijuana tourists are welcome.

An expected $25 million in marijuana sales in Manitou Springs has been a boon to the local economy. But Manitou’s neighbors are starting to demand the city pay a price for the problems it’s causing, too.

Colorado’s Amendment 64, legaliz-

ing recreational marijuana, passed in November 2012, three years ago this fall. The Economist called the new law “an electoral first not only for America but for the world.” Manitou Springs was one of the first towns to approve recreational sales, which began last fall.

Supporters said the law would boost economic development and provide tax

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money for schools and other essential services—and they haven’t been wrong.

Just ask Marc Snyder, the mayor of Manitou Springs. From his perch, ­marijuana revenue has been a badly needed financial windfall. Manitou Springs normally operates without a lot of extravagance on a budget of about $6 million a year, most of that money generated by hotel and restaurant taxes and other tourist-related income.

But three years ago, the Waldo Canyon Fire devastated the hillsides surrounding Manitou Springs.

Townspeople fled when the fire—at that time the largest in Colorado ­history—spread to the city limits. For more than a year after the fire, every time it rained the downtown area flooded. Several businesses closed or moved. The $1.2 million in additional tax money from marijuana sales has meant that Manitou has been able to accelerate its flood mitigation activities.

“That’s a significant amount of money for our small town,” said Snyder.

Money pouring into state coffers is also growing. In May alone, the last reporting month available, Colorado took in more than $11 million in marijuana-related taxes, licenses, and fees.

That doubled the total from May 2014.

The state is on pace to take in well over $100 million this year—not including

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(1) Partygoers smoke pot at the annual 4/20 marijuana festival in Denver. (2) A man rolls a marijuana cigarette in Trenton, N.J. (3) Shoppers try different weed at Organic Alternatives in Fort Collins, Colo.

the local option sales taxes levied by such towns as Manitou Springs.

Indeed, if Manitou Springs is your only data point, you might conclude that the benefits far outweigh the costs. The positives for Manitou are obvious: Buildings abandoned because of the flooding now have new and thriving tenants. Mayor Snyder says that not only is revenue up from marijuana tax collections but general tax revenue is up, too.

But Manitou’s experience is only one small part of the picture, and others are starting to ask: Has the new law unleashed a more powerful, higher law: the Law of Unintended Consequences?

Those “No Vacancy” and “Smoking Rooms Available” signs suggest most of the people now buying marijuana in Manitou are from out of town, many of them from out of state. Denver has its “Green Mile,” Broadway Street near downtown where a lot of pot is sold and smoked. But towns like Manitou, early adopters of recreational ­marijuana, have become tourist destinations.

FROM LEF T: BRENNAN LINSLEY/AP • MEL EVANS/AP • ERIN HULL/THE COLORADOAN VIA AP

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With sales of pot in Manitou Springs likely topping $25 million by next year, what’s sold in Manitou often finds its way elsewhere. That’s why adjoining states are crying foul, claiming Colorado is reaping the financial benefits of marijuana sales while exporting the problems to others.

Oklahoma, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Kansas have filed lawsuits seeking compensation from Colorado.

Some of the complaints are coming from closer to home. Of the 321 cities and towns in Colorado, less than 100 allow marijuana sales—many of them small towns like Manitou Springs surrounded by counties or other towns that prohibit recreational sales. The sheriffs in some of the counties that still prohibit marijuana have also sued the state of Colorado and Gov. John Hickenlooper, seeking clarification of the state’s law—and compensation for costs they will bear because of the problems marijuana will cause.

Colorado Springs, Manitou’s closest neighbor and the second-largest city in the state, continues to prohibit recreational marijuana. John Suthers served as Colorado’s attorney general for 10 years before becoming the mayor of Colorado Springs. He has been a staunch opponent of legalized marijuana.

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“Manitou is not paying for the problems marijuana is causing,” he said. Among those problems: “Marijuana has become pervasive in our schools. Most of our suspensions are because of marijuana. Legalization has lessened the perception of risk among young people, and when the perception of risk goes down, use

Laurie Phillips and Rob Lomas hang a sign for Maggie’s Farm, a recreational marijuana shop in Manitou Springs, Colo.

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“But the idea that marijuana is not a gateway drug is ridiculous,” he said.

“I have never had an addict tell me that his first illicit drug wasn’t marijuana.”

Finding answers to some—but not all—of the questions related to marijuana usage will take time—and data. But data have been slow to materialize. Beau Kilmer is co-director of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center and the co-author of what has become the essential book on the subject: Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs To Know. “What are the data saying?” he said. “Not enough. There’s a real data lag.”

One recent study from Washington state has marijuana opponents saying, “I told you so.” The Washington Traffic Safety Commission released an analysis of blood tests from drivers involved in fatal accidents.

Before the legalization of marijuana, about half of such blood samples had active THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. The new study found 85 percent of blood samples had THC. But all this cautionary data hasn’t discouraged marijuana supporters.

President Obama is on record in support of legalized marijuana. Ohio voters will decide on legalization of recreational and medical marijuana on Nov. 3. The National Organization for Women and the American Civil Liberties Union have campaigned in favor of pot in Ohio. In what could be a harbinger, on Sept. 15 Toledo voted overwhelmingly to change city ordinances to decriminalize marijuana, eliminating jail sentences for most possession offenses.

RAND’s Kilmer recommends a go-slow approach to marijuana legalization, saying governments could become addicted to the revenue before they know the true costs and who will pay for those costs. “If the states are a laboratory, a place to experiment, then we should at least wait until the results from the experiment are in before we draw conclusions,” he said. “And it’s far too early to do that yet.” A

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goes up.” He said school administrators often hide the consequences and costs of marijuana: “No school administrator wants to tell the public that drugs are out of control in their schools.”

Data from the National Poison Data System support Suthers’ claims.

Exposure to marijuana among children is up dramatically in recent years, especially in states where it is legal: Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, and the District of Columbia. Colorado Springs saw a spike in suspensions last year.

Statewide, possession of drugs accounted for 614 of the state’s 1,473 expulsions last year. The overwhelming majority of the incidents involved marijuana, according to Lt. Jeff Kramer, spokesman for the El Paso County Sheriff ’s Office. “We get occasional scenarios involving heroin or cocaine, but marijuana

definitely leads the way,” he told the Colorado Springs Gazette. “It’s more readily available to kids.”

Substance abuse is the “single most troubling school safety trend,” said Larry Borland, a retired school security chief who is now the administrator for the El Paso County Sheriff ’s Department. He said, “We have told our kids, ‘It’s OK to smoke marijuana, it’s OK to drink alcohol.

Mom and Dad are doing it.’ That kind of behavior is going to come right back into behavior on the part of the students.”

The problem has become so acute that in August Colorado rolled out a new advertising campaign to discourage young people from smoking pot. Marijuana tax money is paying for the program.

It’s the state’s second campaign: The first campaign, launched last year, was widely criticized for its cost—about $2 million—and lack of effectiveness.

Suthers also believes other social costs, and the direct costs to taxpayers, are much higher than most government bureaucrats will admit.

For example, Suthers said, “One of the dirty little secrets of the Social Security system is that the number of people collecting disability benefits has skyrocketed.” Suthers suspects one of the reasons is drug abuse.

The number of Americans receiving disability payments from the government has tripled since the 1990 passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act—during a time when job opportunities for disabled persons have never been greater. “Too many of these people,” Suthers said, “are not disabled in the classic sense. They are drug abusers who can’t hold a job.”

Suthers admits that many of these abusers are on hard drugs such as meth, cocaine, and heroin.

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NOTEBOOK LIFESTYLE / TECHNOLOGY / SCIENCE / HOUSES OF GOD / SPORTS / RELIGION

LIFESTYLE

Island of influence

DORIS BROUGHAM’S LIFE SHOWS GOD’S FAITHFULNESS IN UNLIKELY PLACES

by Angela Lu in Taipei, Taiwan

Under the watchful gaze of Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the Republic of China, and four red, white, and blue Taiwan flags, government workers met in a conference room in the Executive Yuan building on a Tuesday afternoon to learn English through singing songs, praying, and reading Scripture.

The topic is family, and about 40 workers with government badges around their necks read through the story of Solomon and the two babies. As Amanda Law, a New Zealand teacher from Overseas Radio and Television (ORTV), explains that God provided families for humans to grow and experience His love, a middle-aged man asks in stilted English: “How do you prevent conflicts in families?”

It’s only by the incredible influence of 88-year-old ORTV founder Doris Brougham that an openly Christian organization can hold a Bible study in the same room where the executive branch of Taiwan’s government meets to hammer out deals. Nearly everyone in Taiwan has heard of Brougham, or Peng Meng-hui, as she’s taught English to everyone from public

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school c­ hildren to government officials in the past 64 years. Yet the Seattle native never planned on coming to Taiwan, only arriving on the island after the Chinese civil war forced her out of China. She started the country’s first Christian radio ­program and TV show, receiving Taiwan’s highest civilian award—the Order of the Brilliant Star with Violet Grand Cordon. She’s even ministered to corporate headhunters.

The fiery, white-haired Brougham can still be found breezily playing the trumpet during ORTV’s morning ­chapel or hugging Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou. During Chinese New Year, Brougham and ORTV’s gospel group

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21 LIFESTYLE and TECH.indd 53

Heavenly Melody performed at a gala hosted by Cheryl Brougham Wang, the owner of (center) the cell phone comsurrounded pany HTC. by students On Brougham’s desk sits an orange and a note sent from Vice President Wu Den-yih, whose wife, Tsai Ling-yi, ­regularly comes for English lessons.

Tsai is a Buddhist, and Brougham greets her with a big hug and jokingly asks, “Did you believe in Jesus yet?”

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among, learning the language and sharing the gospel. In that first year, Brougham realized “that in order to reach people, you had to do something to get their attention. You have to connect, not just communicate.” So she decided to start a Christian radio program, an idea ­ridiculed by others at a time when Buddhists made up 99 ­percent of Taiwan’s population.

Yet the program was approved, and her show—which featured preaching

In the 1960s a new device, the television set, appeared on the island, and Brougham wanted to start a Christian TV show. There was only one channel, and TV producers had one slot for ­religious programming. Although she had to compete against better-funded Buddhists and Catholics, the producers chose Brougham’s show because of its musical content.

With televisions in short supply,

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(1) Brougham with a children’s choir.

(2) Brougham.

(3) Filming an English show.

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people would gather wherever one was available. Crowding around the glowing screens in a temple full of incense smoke, they’d watch choirs singing “How Great Thou Art,” children playing in orchestras, and pastors preaching sermons. “How often can you preach in a Buddhist temple?”

Brougham said. “God had a plan for that to happen.”

Brougham’s ministry grew to an English TV program, live English shows, Bible studies, evangelistic events, and concerts by Heavenly Melody. Soon Studio Classroom was taught in many of the public schools, and schools invited ORTV teachers to

connecting with young people in order to tell them about Jesus. Today, Studio Classroom teachers film in front of a blue screen that the visual effects team superimposes with a spaceship-like news studio. Magazine articles include QR codes so readers can find extra online content.

Brougham still travels across the world with Heavenly Melody and runs the day-to-day operations at ORTV. Earlier this year she performed the trumpet in front of a crowd of 45,000 for a World Vision event in Kaohsiung.

As for when she’ll take a step back from her work: “We’re retiring in heaven.” A

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and music—reached a diverse audience: “I would go around on the bike while the program was on, and people on the streets were listening [as well as] everyone in the temples.” She remembers one time a Buddhist nun called her over and secretly asked her where she could find a Bible.

At the time the United States provided the Nationalist government in Taiwan with financial aid, helping industrialize the agriculture-based island. With the increasing need to communicate with Americans, Gen. Chiang Kai-shek asked Brougham to teach English to his cabinet. She remembers biking down to the government offices to teach officials and recording the lessons for the radio.

Listeners at home subscribed to the Studio Classroom magazine, which included transcripts of the radio program.

visit schools and even at times encouraged them to share their testimonies.

“The main thing is that a person doesn’t know what they’re going to do, but God knows,” Brougham said, glancing around at the bustling ORTV office building. “I never thought I was going to do all this.”

Today Christians make up about 10 percent of the population of Taipei, with church crosses etched into the city’s skyline.

Foreigners teach English at cram schools, and other English TV programs offer competition for ORTV. As the needs and technology change, Brougham has learned to adapt to keep

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TECHNOLOGY

Refugee apps

FLEEING SYRIANS FIND A FRIEND IN SOCIAL MEDIA by Michael Cochrane

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Among the few personal possessions refugees fleeing the turmoil in Syria and other crisis areas bring with them, perhaps none is more valuable than their smartphone. Social media have taken on an increasingly important role of helping refugees deal with the hardships of life in exile.

Customized apps and social media sites provide practical information about aid and resettlement opportunities as well as employment opportunities.

Tech website Fast Company reported on one popular example—a smartphone app and website called Gherbetna. Designed by a Syrian refugee, Fast Company reports that “it’s something of a crossover between a Lonely Planet guide … and a Craigslist-style section for job ads and other services.”

Gherbetna users can select which country they’re in and where they desire to go and find tutorials in Arabic that provide tips about settling and adapting to life in the destination country. But the sheer number of refugees makes jobs hard to come by.

“Few people can benefit from the jobs section, because you have a few tens of jobs and thousands of job seekers,” Ahmad G., a Syrian refugee living in Istanbul, told Fast Company. But the tutorial on applying for a Turkish residence permit was especially useful, Ahmad added.

According to Fast Company, the app’s simple design and interface, which is geared toward Arabic speakers, “have turned it into an invaluable resource to refugees who have reportedly struggled with the language or security features of Facebook and other Westerndesigned social media.”

Syrian refugees check their phone while traveling through the woods near the Hungarian border.

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NOTEBOOK

BUllet brake With police forces around the country under scrutiny for instances of excessive use of lethal force, any less lethal options would seem to be welcome additions to their arsenal.

“The Alternative” is a clip-on device for semiautomatic pistols that positions a metal alloy ball in front of the muzzle that, according to developer Alternative Ballistics of Poway, Calif., “decreases the velocity of the bullet and allows the projectile to impact the threat, lessening the bullet’s penetrating energy. The result is serious pain with less internal injury to the body than a conventional bullet.”

The device is ejected from the pistol after firing, allowing an officer to fire a second, lethal round if needed. If the Alternative is not used, it is easily unclipped and returned to a belt storage pouch. —M.C.

Good screen time?

Parents everywhere will be delighted to know that their infant or toddler knows the difference between watching a broadcast of Sesame Street and Skyping with grandma and grandpa.

The Atlantic reported this month on research from several universities that is providing evidence that infants have the ability to discern between video broadcasts and video-based chat.

“Babies who are pretty young are able to pick up, in particular, whether or not an adult is actually responding to them in real time,” Elisabeth McClure, a researcher who focuses on children and media at Georgetown University told The Atlantic . “Some television shows try to imitate this. You see, for example, with Elmo, or on Blue’s Clues, they look directly at the camera and pretend to interact with the child. There’s evidence that babies can tell the diff erence as early as 6 months old.”

There is a large body of knowledge about how passive television viewing aff ects young children, but with the increasingly widespread use of interfaces such as Skype, FaceTime, and Google Hangout, scientists are learning that babies appear to thrive on real-time video interactions. —M.C.

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A decade after Dover

Protein Repairmen

COURTROOM LOSS HAS NOT STOPPED THE ADVANCEMENT OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN by Julie Borg said. “Politicizing it harms academic freedom.”

According to Luskin, that is what happened following the Dover trial. The verdict was used to justify attacks against ID scholars and ­academics, including at Iowa State University, which denied tenure to an astron-

its strengths, a strategy ­supported by the Discovery Institute. And in the realm of science, reputable, ­peer-reviewed journals now publish ID studies.

Luskin believes banning ID from the Dover classroom has actually stirred public interest in the viewpoint (see

Students demonstrate in Dover in 2005 against teaching ID in biology classes.

omy professor because of his belief in ID. But the Dover trial has resulted in many positive outcomes for ID, Luskin said. At least five states now require, or at least permit, schools to teach the ­weaknesses of Darwinian evolutionary theory, not just

also “Teach the controversy,” July 21, 2007). The Times Literary Supplement named Signature in the Cell by proID author Stephen Meyer as a top book of 2009, and two years ago Darwin’s Doubt, also written by Meyer, was No. 7 on The New York Times’ bestseller list.

Shock treatment Researchers at Imperial College in London have developed a new treatment for motion sickness, which occurs when the brain receives information from the eyes inconsistent with information it receives from the inner ear.

During testing, subjects sat in a chair that simulated motions similar to a boat or roller coaster and the researchers measured how long it took the volunteers to develop motion sickness. Then the researchers placed electrodes on the volunteers’ scalps. The electrodes delivered mild electrical currents that ­suppressed brain responses in an area that processes motion signals. The volunteers reportedly were less likely to feel nauseated and recovered more quickly when they wore the electrodes. The researchers believe a consumer device that users would attach to their scalps and plug into a smartphone could be available within 10 years. —J.B.

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This month marks the 10th anniversary of a trial LiveScience called “one of the biggest courtroom clashes between faith and evolution since the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial.”

In 2005, a federal judge ruled the Dover Area School District in Pennsylvania could not teach intelligent design (ID) in a biology class.

ID asserts that the complexity of the universe and living things points to an intelligent designer, not to the random chance mutations posited by Darwinian evolution.

Darwinists hailed their legal victory at Dover as a death knell for ID. But, a decade after the trial, ID is alive and well, said Casey Luskin, a program officer with the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.

The Discovery Institute did not support the Dover school board’s attempt to require ID in classrooms, fearing such debates take ID out of the scientific realm and push it into the political arena. “We want to see ID grow as a science,” Luskin

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University of North Carolina researchers have genetically modified white blood cells so they produce a healing ­protein and deliver it to the brain. The protein promotes the survival of brain cells and can reverse the progression of Parkinson’s disease, the researchers said.

The engineered cells avoid natural immune defenses by using the body’s own cells and, unlike most medicines, the cells can penetrate the blood-brain barrier. They can also “teach” the brain cells to make the protein themselves.

“Very soon I believe we will see these discoveries on the frontiers of science moving into clinical practice,” Alexander Kabanov, director of the university’s nanotechnology center, told Science Daily. —J.B.

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HOUSES OF GOD

NOTEBOOK

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DOVER: KRISTIN MURPHY/YORK DAILY RECORD/SUNDAY NEWS/AP • MOTION SICKNESS TESTING: IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON

BERLIN, GERMANY An Iranian asylum seeker wearing a Christian shirt awaits baptism in the Trinity Church on Aug. 30. He is one of hundreds of mostly Iranian and Afghan asylum seekers who have professed faith in Christ (see p. 59) at the evangelical Trinity Church in the leafy Berlin neighborhood.

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SPORTS enter the junior hockey system. Josh moved to a host family in Michigan and faced ridicule from teammates for his Christian worldview—until he proved his toughness.

Josh, now 19, said the experience of leaving home to pursue hockey “either makes you or breaks you.” Lots of children break, and that’s where groups like Hockey Ministries International (HMI) come in. HMI founder Don Liesemer says that amid that pressurized environment is “a beautiful thing. … We’re filling our locker rooms and our chapel services with kids that are hungry.”

The hunger begins early. Not long after sunrise on Sundays, parking lots at arenas in hockey hotbeds are jammed with cars.

The youth game is played on weekends, and some parents try to shuttle their child to a church between games—but hockey often is the priority, and youth level fees, equipment, and travel cost some families $8,000 or more annually.

“We want to reach the hockey community. That’s our calling,” Liesemer said. This past summer HMI put on more than 50 events for 2,000 children, offering instruction, mentoring, and good meals. In Raleigh this summer, I watched campers going through three hours of drills under Glen and Josh Wesley’s supervision. In the evening, spiritual bonds form. “You know, it hurt last night see a young, little 13-year-old in tears asking why bad things happen to good people,” Glen Wesley recalled. “And you know, only God knows that answer. But you know in saying that, he had a lot of courage to be able to speak up.”

A similar process occurs at the adult level. Of the 30 NHL teams, 23 have chapel programs. Many chaplains emphasize relationship building. “I think the part that really affected me was just the one-on-ones,” Vancouver defenseman Dan Hamhuis said. “Going for coffee together and just digging deeper into my life of what was going on.”

Icing the soul

HOCKEY’S MAKE-OR-BREAK SCENE MEANS NEW PLAYERS NEED REAL MENTORS by Andrew Branch in Raleigh, N.C. As the National Hockey League starts its 2015-2016 season on Oct. 7 with games in Toronto, Calgary, Chicago, and Los Angeles, thousands of Canadian and American boys dream of someday lacing up their skates for NHL play. Retired Stanley Cup winner Glen Wesley has a message for them: “Hockey is a dark, dark sport. And I’ve lived it, from a kid up into the pro level.”

Wesley spent 20 seasons in the NHL and helped start a hockey camp in Raleigh in 2009. The first camper drafted by an NHL team was Wesley’s son Josh, who left home at 15 to

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penalty minute leader in the NHL that next year.”

Baxter still has the dubious distinction of being No. 2 all-time for penalty minutes in one season—but he was a stereotype breaker. Still, doubts linger. A decade ago former NHL player Mike Rupp, now an analyst, faced off against a sports psychiatrist brought in to unify his team’s competi-

tive drive. The psychiatrist viewed Rupp’s faith as a weakness, something to put aside when he came to his job.

But Glen Wesley, now the Carolina Hurricanes’ director of defensemen development, says protecting your family and team is a biblical value: “No matter if it’s dropping your gloves and fighting and sticking up for a teammate, or if it’s going out there and blocking a shot that’s coming at you at 100 mph, that takes courage.” —A.B.

HMI: HANDOUT • BAX TER: BRUCE BENNET T STUDIOS/GET T Y IMAGES

Hard hits

Top hockey players hit hard, but for a long time some skeptics said Christian faith would weaken them. Three decades ago Toronto owner Harold Ballard publicly blamed Laurie Boschman’s newfound Christian faith for his on-ice struggles, eventually trading him. Yet in Pittsburgh, Don Liesemer of Hockey Ministries International says, “Paul Baxter became a Christian at one of our chapel services and went on to be the

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TCHIVIDJIAN: HANDOUT • MIGRANTS: SEAN GALLUP/GET T Y IMAGES

Wesley with campers

RELIGION

HMI: HANDOUT • BAX TER: BRUCE BENNET T STUDIOS/GET T Y IMAGES

TCHIVIDJIAN: HANDOUT • MIGRANTS: SEAN GALLUP/GET T Y IMAGES

Starting over?

“The return of Tullian Tchividjian to a ministry role is scarcely surprising,” Westminster Theological Seminary professor Carl Trueman lamented, “though the speed would no doubt make even Jimmy Swaggart green with envy.”

In June, Tchividjian—Billy Graham’s grandson—admitted to an affair and resigned from the pastorate of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. On Aug. 11, the South Florida Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) deposed him from ordained ministry. About two weeks later, Tchividjian filed for divorce from his wife, Kim. A few days after that, Willow Creek Church in Winter Springs, Fla., appointed him its director of ministry development.

But Kevin Labby, senior pastor of Willow Creek Church, told me, “We have not endeavored to restore Tullian to the off ice [of teaching elder], nor could we.” Though he apologized publicly to his congregation in September for the “poorly chosen title” for the new position, he emphasized that Tchividjian is “a non-ordained support staff member.” That’s an important distinction: In the PCA, a local church’s elders supervise the hiring of staff but not ministers, which the regional presbytery oversees.

Labby said Tchividjian has shown evidence of repentance: “He is a broken man who is demonstrating humility and compliance as we work diligently with him in the hopes that one day God would restore him.” —J.B.

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NOTEBOOK

New home missions

SOME ASYLUM SEEKERS ARE FINDING CHRIST by James Bruce Secular media are filled with stories about refugees coming to Germany, but they often skip one crucial angle: Because many asylum seekers come from nations with little or no religious toleration, Germany offers a new opportunity to investigate a Christianity they had only heard about.

Dennis Blea, who works with the Navigators in Germany, told me about two Iranian visitors to his church who “had always wondered what a Christian church looked like.” He called the refugee crisis a great open door for conversion: “I think we need to go to them and bring the gospel to them while they are ‘trapped’ in Germany.”

Others share Blea’s attitude. Even in southwestern Germany—not an arrival point for many asylum seekers—many Christians look forward to the arrival of refugees. Zach Linder, an assistant chaplain at Black Forest Academy in Kandern, said his community was excited to help and that a school is “even in the works of converting an old dorm into temporary housing for the refugees.”

But Vesam Heydari, an Iranian convert, claimed, “The majority of Iranians here are not converting out of

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belief. They only want to stay in Germany.” Although Germany does not give preferential treatment to Christian refugees, new converts to Christianity who seek asylum can appeal to a fear of persecution from their home countries.

Gottfried Martens, pastor of St. Mary’s Lutheran Church in Berlin, told The Wall Street Journal he has baptized about 400 people with Muslim backgrounds since 2011. Martens said “90 percent of the converts continue to come here even after they obtain asylum. They wouldn’t do that if they had done it just for papers.”

Jesus in Chapter 13 of Matthew’s Gospel spoke of a merchant who saw a fine pearl and sold everything he had to obtain it. Nariman Malkari can probably relate to that teaching: He told the Journal, “I live in a tent, but I have found Jesus.” Malkari, a 25-year-old computer engineer from Iran and recent convert to Christianity, was in temporary shelter while waiting for Germany to decide on his application for asylum.

Migrants disembark from a governmentchartered train in Schoenefeld, Germany.

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MAILBAG SEND LETTERS AND PHOTOS TO MAILBAG@WNG.ORG

SEPTEMBER 5

‘A good book is a good book’

 Regarding diversity among children’s books, one

of the most skilled YA novelists of the 20th century was Rosemary Sutcliff, author of the Carnegie Medal–winning The Lantern Bearers. She was severely disabled by childhood arthritis and some of her books feature disabled characters, but many do not. Her focus was on telling worthwhile stories.

sex and casual abortion. It’s rotten and needs to go.

BETH NEMATI ON WNG.ORG

, Janie B. Cheaney is right that “prolife” does not end with the birth of the baby. We must also equip the children for a productive and fulfilling life in Christ and support the families of children with special needs, who are far more likely to be aborted.

JIM CRAIG / RICHL AND CENTER, WIS.

HOLLY JOHNSON ON FACEBOOK

‘Classics for preschoolers’ g Through homeschooling I discov-

ered that abridged versions of books for younger children are an excellent way to introduce them to difficult content, especially Shakespeare and Don Quixote.. When they get older, they can tackle the real deal in all its grandeur.

‘An enhanced view of life’

g We should not slow down in working to end abortion. Planned Parenthood nurtures students from an early age into the culture of casual

KATHERINE POWERS ON WNG.ORG

g For older preschool and younger elementary children, I have found Scribner’s Storybook Classics to be excellent. The series includes Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Robin Hood, and The Last of the Mohicans.

 This very divisive social issue, abortion, is part of a larger pattern on which both sides can agree: We need to address problems of poverty and ignorance that lead to unwanted pregnancies.

JOHN ARNOT T ON FACEBOOK

‘A hot issue’ Berlin Wall, Germany submitted by Lauren Dunn

g The biggest story might be the false narratives that permeate our culture: Global warming is a crisis, there is a

CATHY SHELTON ON WNG.ORG

‘YA grows up’

 I’m 36 and I love young adult books and children’s books, as well as Dickens, Austen, and Brontë. Readers love good, well-written stories, regardless of the target age group.

GINNY CROWE ON FACEBOOK

g Many adults may read YA books for the same reason I do: to discern if a book is appropriate for my children and if so to be able to discuss it with them.

MARILYN LOFTSGARD ON WNG.ORG

, Mail/email g Website

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MAILBAG war on women, evolution is a fact, most people are racist, and so on. Our elections revolve around solving these faux crises while those who tell the truth are endlessly vilified. We live in strange times indeed.

RICK FL ANDERS ON WNG.ORG

, Joel Belz was “puzzled” that readers responding to his question about ­dealing with homosexual customers seemed more worried about their rights than communicating effectively. I find this disturbing but not surprising.

Too many Christian leaders emphasize maintaining and restoring the church’s influence, but for power, not service.

Christian Colleges & Universities is making a tragic mistake to lose soundly biblical members while retaining (even as affiliates) institutions such as Goshen and EMU. ERIC BEACHY ON WNG.ORG

‘Service centers’

, As a former city manager I found this article interesting, but it didn’t mention how a library’s outreach to homeless populations tends to repel existing patrons. The smell is particularly offensive. Libraries are looking for purpose in an electronic age, but it’s a poor use of taxpayer dollars.

WILLIAM CARLSON / LINCOLN, CALIF.

ELIZABETH KERR / ONTARIO, CALIF.

AUGUST 22

g As the baker, I would ask, “Were I to ask you to deny completely who you are, would you be able to do it? Nor can I. I’m sorry.” I’d then offer them a referral to another baker and call my lawyer.

TOM ALLISON ON WNG.ORG

‘War Room’

, We saw the movie, and this review did not do it justice. It had a lot of humor and many places for tears, and it wasn’t preachy at all. The Kendrick brothers are getting better all the time.

‘A tale of two museums’

g I’m another homeschooler who v­ isited the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago many times. My family did not shy away from grappling with the exhibits’ bold claims of the orthodoxy of macroevolution. When we consider the arguments of those who believe in theistic and macroevolution, we need to take God at His Word.

CHELSEY MCNEIL ON WNG.ORG

g I recommend this movie, but it’s a bit simplistic in suggesting our prayers will be answered as quickly and completely as they are in this movie.

, Fantastic article. The cover headline says, “Question authority.” Let students question their parents, teachers, ­pastors, and elected officials, lest they learn to be minions. They should even question God. Job, Moses, and David did.

JONI HALPIN ON WNG.ORG

MARK BURTON / ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.

JOHN & JAN TRIMBLE / FULTON, MO.

‘A league of his own’

 NFL receiver Ryan Broyles is a wise

man. Not many live within their income, let alone on a mere fraction of it.

JULIE MICHEL RUDIGER ON FACEBOOK

‘Christian crossroads’

g Goshen College’s decision saddens but does not surprise me. Mennonite institutions of higher learning sadly have helped drive their denominations further and further into the religion of political liberalism and away from their Anabaptist roots. The Council for 62

­coverage was headlined “No room for hate” but “Blindsided” provided plenty of room for it. You’re dressing up hatred as faith, and you are not fooling anyone.

‘Light preservers’

, I’m not surprised that LED blue light can kill bacteria in food. Blue light also contributes to age-related macular degeneration. I tell my optometry patients to use filters and coatings to block blue light. For retinal health, bring back my incandescent lights.

CHRISTOPHER K. KEATS / CLEARWATER, FL A.

J U LY 11

‘Blindsided’

, This issue was quite the contradiction. Your Charleston shootings

L ARRY SCHULTZ / SPRINGVILLE, N.Y.

JUNE 13

‘Gained in translation’

, The vast majority of Chinese Christians are unaware that printed versions of the Bible, other than the government-approved CUV, are ­available. As a missionary in China I found some people struggled with the CUV so I found several simplified Chinese translations. I ordered copies online, even in bulk, and had no issues with the government. The Xinyiben, for example, was an excellent literal translation that corrects some mistranslations in the CUV. BEN WELLSAND / COLUMBIA, MO.

Corrections

The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers produced the Common Core State Standards (“Testing the limits,” Sept. 5).

A letter from retired military ­officers had a total of 233 signatures

by Sept. 1 (“Deadline Iran,” Sept. 19).

Derrick Good’s daughters attend schools other than Hillsboro High School in Hillsboro, Mo. (Quotables, Sept. 19).

Clarification

Zion Harvey was 2 years old when his hands and feet were amputated and 8 at the time of the transplant surgery (“Healing hands,” Sept. 5).

LETTERS & PHOTOS , Email: mailbag@wng.org , Mail: WORLD Mailbag, PO Box 20002, Asheville, NC 28802-9998

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ANDRÉE SEU PETERSON

Don’t despise your sister

DEBATING KIM DAVIS AND HER TACTICS

It was inevitable, but it bruised me when it came—the first Christian Kim Davis hate mail to fall under my eye. In response to an online column of mine, the brother called her “the fraud Kim Davis.” My heart leapt to an ancient lament: “For it is not an enemy who taunts me—then I could bear it; it is not an adversary who deals insolently with me—then I could hide from him.

But it is you, a man, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend. We used to take sweet counsel together; within God’s house we walked in the throng” (Psalm 55:12-14).

This is the cruelest cut of all. For the brother did not say, “I believe my sister Ms. Davis is mistaken”; he went straight to “the fraud,” followed by invidious comparison to heartless “Jonah, who preferred Nineveh enter Hades with its eyes wide open than get their dirt on his feet.”

As a nation we are entering unchartered waters, a Christian generation unused to being the hated minority in a country once predominantly Christian. Brethren will have different views. Kim Davis evidently reasons from the civil disobedience of Peter and John, who “greatly annoyed” (Acts 4:2) the powers that be to the point of getting themselves locked up.

Upon release from jail they were warned by the judge (a striking parallel with Judge Bunning and the Davis case) not to violate law again, and they replied, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (verses 19-20).

That’s the way I see it too. But even if you don’t—“the fraud Kim Davis”? Really? What happened to Romans 14: “As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not to quarrel over opinions. One person believes he may eat

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Even if you think Davis is wrong (I don’t), she is following her conscience before her God and that is all God requires in debatable matters.

anything, while the weak person eats only vegetables. Let not the one … despise …, and let not the one … pass judgment …, for God has welcomed him” (Romans 14:1-3).

You don’t want to get before the Judge someday and have to hang your head like Puzzle the donkey for having despised a sister whom “God has welcomed.” If God has welcomed her, who made you heaven’s dean of admissions? Even if you think Davis is wrong (I don’t), she is following her conscience before her God and that is all God requires in debatable matters: “Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind” (verse 5).

This requirement to be “fully convinced in his own mind” is no low bar in the debased sense that people nowadays seem to reach “conviction” out of nothing more than emotion, hunch, or digestive issues. It is a stern requirement to investigate the matter thoroughly (Deuteronomy 13:14; 17:4; 19:18) and to arrive at a stance grounded in one’s best assessment of the situation and of Scripture. The author of “the fraud Kim Davis” epithet invokes Joseph and Daniel as examples of “believers who, even though somehow bound to secular, and more often than not, vile and wicked governments, … continued to perform their assigned duties.” But there is no evidence that Joseph and Daniel agreed to violate God’s law in deference to government law—and much evidence that they did not.

I have seen photos of frocked church leaders in Nazi Germany giving the “Heil Hitler” salute in tandem with Joseph Goebbels and Wilhelm Frick. They didn’t reach that silly posture overnight but by a series of small capitulations.

In Jesus’ time it was Pharisees with gotcha questions about divorce, eating with unwashed hands, and plucking grain on the Sabbath. In our day it’s homosexual couples targeting certain courthouses with gotcha requests for a marriage certificate. Picture Jesus giving in an inch to the request to affix his initials on a document pronouncing Fred and Harry husband and husband.

The Apostle says to “arm yourselves” with the idea that you are about to suffer (1 Peter 4:1) and not to react “as though something strange were happening ” (verse 12).

Kim Davis, a new believer, has been made to suffer for her faith in a way usually reserved for more seasoned Christians. Are you at odds with her?

Then pray for her. But bear in mind that “God has welcomed” her. A O C T O B E R 1 7, 2 0 1 5 W O R L D

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MARVIN OLASKY

Grace to be a hero FROM WHERE’S WALDO TO WHERE’S DANIEL?

thrice-divorced Kim Davis and gave her the will to take a stand for marriage. The world looks at her personal history and sneers.

WORLD looks and cheers the change.

If Daniel was AWOL in Chapter 3, his ­courage later is even more impressive.

Summoned into Belshazzar’s presence to interpret frightening handwriting on the wall, Daniel speaks of the king’s imminent doom. Facing a national unity decree that prohibits for 30 days requests to any god or man except the king, Daniel does not stop praying in his house.

Over the centuries some commentators have asked why Daniel didn’t shut the windows and draw the curtains: Why make it easy for his e­ nemies? But Calvin pointed out that had Daniel prayed secretly, those foes “would have counted him timorous and without all courage … it was necessary for him to do as he did that his faith, courage and ­constancy to his first principles might appear to all people.”

If Daniel, instead of being brave from birth, was a sinner like the rest of us, needing to be born again, maybe you and I, with God’s grace, can be heroes as well.

Some of us these days want to hunker down, but see how Daniel neither withdrew from Babylonian culture nor abandoned his Biblecentered message. It seems that God loved him and had a wonderful plan for his life—to grow him through t­ ribulation. That may be God’s wonderful plan for us too. A

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KRIEG BARRIE

My children and millions of others have enjoyed the Where’s Waldo? series of books by English illustrator Martin Handford.

They’re even popular in other countries where Waldo has other names: Charlie in France, Jonas in Lithuania, Holger in Denmark.

But here’s a question that leaves me curious when I read Chapter 3 of the book of Daniel: Where’s Daniel? That’s the chapter where King Nebuchadnezzar erects a 90-foot golden statue and demands that all bow to it. Daniel’s three friends will not, so he throws them—but not Daniel—into a fiery furnace.

Commentators typically suggest that Daniel must have been somewhere else, Who can turn because how could he have sat quietly as his a skulking friends faced fire? But some Reformation coward into theologians went deeper. John Calvin suggested that Daniel was in Babylon but escaped a hero? prosecution because the king liked him.

Christ can.

English clergyman Andrew Willett suggested that Daniel protested at first but then was silent.

Those speculations lead to thoughts that could be depressing: During the events of Chapter 3 was Daniel, like Peter I try to answer personally every letter sent to me, but I’ve been overwhelmed (or six centuries later, warming his at least whelmed) by the hundreds of story suggestions sent to Joel Belz in response to a column he wrote asking members what they’d like WORLD to hands by the enemy’s fire? pursue. He forwarded letters to me, and I’ve learned a lot by reading them: We are Instead of hearing a rooster blessed to have intelligent and thoughtful readers. crow three times, did he see Here are a few of the topics members want articles about: mainstream journalthree of his friends scheduled istic biases, judicial twisting of the U.S. Constitution, mental health, long-term for execution? problems of children raised by same-sex parents, aggressive Islam, biblical views But if that’s so, it’s not of immigration, how to improve race relations, global warming, Christians in depressing: It’s inspiring, as is ­southeast Asia, church responses to LGBT claims.

Peter’s story. Who can turn a The great quantity of letters means that this time I’ll make a group response. skulking coward into a hero?

My answer to most of the suggestions is yes, that’s interesting and important, Christ can. Look how God and we’ll try to pursue that question as we are able, with the resources God has reaches into a prison cell to given us. make Joseph fit to rule and into One other note: If you’re 30 to 65 years old and interested in occasional reportdesert brush to light a fire in ing for WORLD, several spots are open in mid-career course No. 7 (February 2016).

Moses. More recently, he took Go to worldji.com for details.

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 molasky@wng.org  @MarvinOlasky

9/25/15 4:08 PM

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Bethany’s story: College student

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