WORLD Magazine Sept. 6, 2014 Vol. 29 No. 18

isis drives out 1 million: will iraq survive?

e u ss i l a i c e p S

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ols o h c s c i l b sts o c n o i Online pu t a c du e r e h g i h na Lowering i h C n i s l o ho c s n a i t s i r Ch re o C n o m m Co Plus more

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Wherever God calls you, We Will equip you.

At Southwestern Seminary, we equip you to preach the Word with confidence, knowing it is the means by which people hear and believe. We also give you the tools to reach the world with the Gospel, and then we take you there and show you how to use them. Are you ready? Let’s go.

preach the word reach the world

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Contents S e p t e m b e r 6 , 2 0 1 4 / V O L UME 2 9 , N UMBER 1 8

f e at u r e

38 Risking genocide

As the Islamic State rages from Syria to Iraq, it threatens to wipe out Christians and other religious groups with singular roots in ancient Mesopotamia SP EC IA L SECTI O N

42 Groundhog reform day

Back to school 2014 finds American education in the midst of yet another expensive revolution

44 Uncommon pushback

With a rebellion growing, Common Core no longer looks inevitable

46 Public school @ home

Online charter schools are growing, with growing pains

49 Lone Star laboratory

dispatch es

Texas is likely the next school choice frontier Seeking the peace of a very liberal city by helping to rejuvenate a deteriorating school

9 News 20 Quotables 22 Quick Takes

52 Risks and rewards

revi ews

55 Homeschool debate

27 Movies & TV 30 Books 32 Q&A 34 Music

50 Portland public

Amid limited resources and a hostile government, a Chinese Christian school movement is growing How to keep a few bad apples from spoiling the bushel

58 Good credit

9

notebook

Competency-based programs offer college credentials without the debilitating cost

65 Lifestyle 68 Technology 70 Science 71 Houses of God 72 Sports

COVER illustration by krieg barrie. inset: Yazidi refugees in Zakho, Iraq; photo by Gail Orenstein/NurPhoto/Sipa USA/ap

27

38

voices

6 Joel Belz 24 Janie B. Cheaney 36 Mindy Belz 75 Mailbag 79 Andrée Seu Peterson 80 Marvin Olasky

65

visit our website—wng.org—for breaking news and more!

world (ISSN 0888-157X) (USPS 763-010) is published biweekly (26 issues) for $59.95 per year by God’s World Publications, (no mail) 12 All Souls Crescent, Asheville, NC 28803; (828) 232-5260. Periodical postage paid at Asheville, NC, and additional mailing o ­ ffices. P ­ rinted in the USA. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. © 2014 WORLD News Group. All rights reserved. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to world, PO Box 20002, Asheville, NC 28802-9998.

S e p t e mb e r 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D

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“The earth is the L’s and the fullness thereof; the world and those who dwell therein.” —Psalm :     Marvin Olasky  Mindy Belz   Timothy Lamer   Jamie Dean   Janie B. Cheaney, Susan Olasky, Andrée Seu Peterson, John Piper, Edward E. Plowman, Cal Thomas, Lynn Vincent  Emily Belz, J.C. Derrick, Daniel James Devine, Sophia Lee, Angela Lu, Edward Lee Pitts  Megan Basham, Anthony Bradley, Andrew Branch, Tim Challies, John Dawson, Amy Henry, Mary Jackson, Michael Leaser, Jill Nelson, Arsenio Orteza, Tiffany Owens, Stephanie Perrault, Emily Whitten   Les Sillars

   David K. Freeland    Robert L. Patete   Rachel Beatty  Krieg Barrie    Arla J. Eicher     Dawn Wilson   Arla Eicher, Al Saiz, Alan Wood  ..    Jim Chisolm  ..

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the always-on streaming radio station, features biblical preaching and teaching, Scripture, news, audiobooks, music and more. Available for free through your app store or online at RefNet.fm.

 worldoncampus.com  Leigh Jones

  Warren Cole Smith   Jonathan Bailie   Debra Meissner    wng.org

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  Mickey McLean   Leigh Jones   Lynde Langdon, Angela Lu, Dan Perkins   Whitney Williams    worldandeverything.com   Nickolas S. Eicher   Joseph Slife ’    gwnews.com  Howard Brinkman

    worldji.com  Marvin Olasky   Edward Lee Pitts    David Strassner (chairman), Mariam Bell, Kevin Cusack, Peter Lillback, Howard Miller, William Newton, Russell B. Pulliam, David Skeel, Ladeine Thompson, Raymon Thompson, John Weiss, John White   To report, interpret, and illustrate the news in a timely, accurate, enjoyable, and arresting fashion from a perspective committed to the Bible as the inerrant Word of God.

Contact us: .. / wng.org      ,    ,  ,        memberservices@wng.org  wng.org/account (current members) or members.wng.org (to become a member)  .. (within the United States) or .. (outside the United States) Monday-Friday (except holidays),  a.m.- p.m. ET  WORLD, PO Box , Asheville, NC -   , ,     .. /    .. or mailbag@wng.org WORLD occasionally rents subscriber names to carefully screened, like-minded organizations. If you would prefer not to receive these promotions, please call customer service and ask to be placed on our    list.

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8/11/14 12:00 PM

Joel Belz

You filled my mailbox Now I’d like to fill yours as well!

>>

I’     couple  . I asked you in this space on June  if perhaps you had a few good ideas about using the media to reach out to the next generation—claiming the allegiance of our children, and our children’s children, to this dynamic we call “biblical worldview thinking.”

You filled my mailbox. I wasn’t ready for the mountainous stack of ideas you sent along. I’m still studying my way through them, trying to sort out and prioritize some common threads and fresh perspectives.

Along the way, though, as I’ve read your letters, I’ve been forced to realize that among the many thousands of WORLD’s readers, a huge number are quite unaware of the media link WORLD already enjoys with young children. If that includes you, let me catch you up to date!

Starting  years ago, in , the company that now produces WORLD launched a small newsprint magazine for children called It’s God’s World. Aimed at fourth- and fifth-grade elementary students, the eight-page weekly reported on current events. It also made a point of trying to help its young readers interpret those world events from a God-centered perspective.

To say that It’s God’s World was popular is an understatement. Exploring God’s World followed in  for second- and third-graders, and God’s Big World in  for kindergartners and first-graders. Suddenly we found ourselves publishing six different graded editions every week of the school year.

But, we discovered, that still wasn’t enough. More and more, parents of our young readers got in touch with us to say: “We like this. We read it with our kids.

When are you going to do one for our age level?”

And that, my friends, is the story of the  birth of WORLD magazine itself. Our magazines for children were, quite literally, the parents of the parents’ magazine.

Nor was that a small and incidental matter. If WORLD had been launched apart from such a background, I think it would have been dry, academic, tedious, and destined to die after its first few issues. Publishing for



WORLD • SEPTEMBER 6, 2014

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children taught us that even grown-ups like color, photos, maps, charts—and a little bit of fun here and there.

And yes, we’re still doing business with tens of thousands of those kids, with their parents, and with their schools. Candor (and honest journalism) compel me to report that our circulation is down significantly from our best years in the early s, when we went every week to at least a quarter-million children. The internet and the whole digital enterprise have taken their toll with our children’s ministry, just as they have with the whole secular world of publishing.

So can God still use the internet and similar digital efforts with our kids and grandkids? We are confident that He can—and will. With that optimism, we are ready to greet the new school year in a few days with new—and significantly enhanced—products for your kids and teens.

That lineup starts with a bimonthly magazine at each of three grade levels: God’s Big WORLD for beginners, WORLDkids for those in the middle, and WORLDteen for adolescents. Beyond the refreshed physical magazines, we have also now added a lively and interactive website for each of the three levels. The websites guarantee that our content is lively and engaging. The physical paperand-ink magazines will provide broader and deeper background, while the web version will offer more interaction and timeliness. Students, with guidance and permission from their parents, will find themselves going back again and again to both sources.

Am I excited about this  version of what I first envisioned  years ago? You’d better believe it! Do I think it is faithful to that original vision? Yes—and almost certainly does it better than we did it in the early years. Is this the final word in communicating with and persuading the boys and girls who are otherwise bombarded with secularism and godless explanations? Not at all—and for that I am thankful as well. Some of the ideas some of you have sent our way need to be incorporated in the new lineup I’ve described above. If you wrote me about that, please be patient. I’ll be responding soon.

In the meantime, I think you’ll want to make sure all the kids and grandkids in your extended family make these new WORLD-related magazines and websites a regular part of their weekly schedules. You can do that best, perhaps, by going to our user-friendly website at gwnews.com.

Or you can use regular mail at PO Box , Asheville, NC .

Or you can even pick up your phone and call us at --KIDS or ---.

Whichever way you do it, we’ll be looking for your response. A

Email: jbelz@wng.org

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Dispatches News > Quotables > Quick Takes

A community inflamed Violent nighttime riots but also peaceful daytime marches mark crisis in Ferguson, Mo.

BY ANGELA LU Protesters march in Ferguson on Aug.  CHARLIE RIEDEL/AP

SEPTEMBER 6, 2014 • WORLD

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Dispatches > News

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W ORLD • S e p t e mb e r 6 , 2 0 1 4

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conversations about racial reconciliation and what they can do to help heal the broken city.

For some this meant cleaning streets and supporting ­mom-and-pop shops in Ferguson that the riots hurt. Jones, a student at Covenant Seminary, brought a group of mostly white seminarians to Ferguson to walk the streets, see the ­living conditions, visit the memorial for Brown, and pray. She hoped they would connect to what’s going on and see what the community needs: “It’s not just justice, it’s Christ.” A

top: Michael B. Thomas/AFP/Getty Images • middle: Charlie Riedel/ap • bottom: Jeff Roberson/ap

During the 10 days and nights after a ­suburban St. Louis police officer shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown on Aug. 9, protests escalated—and authorities seemed unsure how to calm a community inflamed over that death and larger racial tensions.

Prayer meetings. Community forums. Looting and shooting. Smoke bombs. Armored vehicles. Tear gas.

Curfews. SWAT teams. Missouri National Guard. All of that and more grew out of Brown’s confrontation with Darren Wilson of the Ferguson, Mo., police force.

Witnesses differed on whether the unarmed Brown, with his hands in the air, was running away from or toward Wilson. More than 40 FBI agents came to Ferguson to investigate the incident, and the state was conducting a separate investigation.

Reports out of Ferguson have mainly centered on nighttime clashes between police in riot gear and angry protesters looting and throwing objects. As news outlets showed video of domestic warfare, some questioned the police’s militarized response. Michelle Higgins, worship and outreach coordinator of South City Church, said that even when the police are patient and polite, “their appearance is so daunting that it creates a tension that does not have to be there.”

Tensions increased after police tensions: A released a video apparently showdemonstrator on West Florissant ing Brown robbing a convenience Avenue; police store, and social media drew to wait to advance; Ferguson many people from other a man prays as cities. Police arrested dozens of police disperse a small group of protesters, including a few jourprotesters (from nalists who didn’t clear out top to bottom). quickly enough. In a statement on Aug. 18, President Barack Obama called for calm, asking those in Ferguson to address “the gulf of mistrust” between residents and law enforcement. African-Americans are heavily underrepresented on the police force and in city leadership.

Yet during the day, a different scene emerged. The main throughway, West Florissant Avenue, filled with peaceful demonstrators holding signs, raising their arms (as witnesses said Brown had), and praying for change. Dawn Jones, an intern at South City Church, said the daytime demonstration she joined was “very emotional, I saw a unity that we needed in the city,” as people of many ages and races came together. Even police marched with demonstrators as church groups passed out water bottles and a choir performed on the sidewalk.

Events also brought together churches of different ethnicities and denominations. Jones noted that “St. Louis is so segregated that it’s easy for anyone who is not black to see this as ‘not their problem.’” But since the protests began, she’s seen “a lot of lamenting and crying out” as churches engage in

Download WORLD’s iPad app today; details at wng.org/iPad

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8/18/14 4:22 PM

Dispatches > News T h u r s d a y, A u g . 

Explosive recall

We d n e s d a y, A u g . 

Penalty kicked

The Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation reported that nine out of  uninsured Americans won’t pay the Obamacare penalty for not having health insurance this year, due to numerous hardship exemptions the administration has carved out for various groups. The joint finding, which showed as few as  million nonelderly people paying  billion in fines, stoked fears that younger Americans do not have enough incentive to obtain health insurance—a scenario that would drive up premiums and could result in a “death spiral” for the unpopular law.

 

General Motors faced more embarrassing safety questions when federal safety regulators revealed faulty power window switches could cause  and  GM model SUVs to catch fire. GM told owners to park the vehicles outside until the part could be replaced.

The recall covers , vehicles—one of more than  total GM recalls covering almost  million vehicles this year.

Walsh resigns Republicans moved closer to a Senate takeover as Sen. John Walsh, D-Mont., announced his withdrawal from the November election in the wake of a plagiarism scandal.

Walsh, an Iraq War veteran, was appointed to the position earlier this year when Sen. Max Baucus resigned to become the U.S. Ambassador to China. Democrats on Aug.  chose state Sen. Amanda Curtis to run in Walsh’s place.

OBAMACARE: CHARLIE RIEDEL/AP • TAVENNER: MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES • GM: GENERAL MOTORS CO/AP • WALSH: CHARLES DHARAPAK/AP • BARNEY: JOE BURBANK/ORLANDO SENTINEL/MCT/LANDOV

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner

Battled James Barney Jr., a -year-old Floridian, made international news after he wrestled a -pound alligator—and won. Barney was riding his bicycle when he decided to take a quick swim in a restricted area of a lake in central Florida. Barney, recounting what happened from his hospital bed, said he was startled when he reached down and felt the -foot-long gator’s jaw and teeth. The boy sustained about  teeth marks and claw scratches and said he will find a new place to swim. 

WORLD • SEPTEMBER 6, 2014

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IRAQ: HASAN JAMALI • RISCOLL: MARS HILL CHURCH • MISSOURI: SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES • MAKHMOUR: SAFIN HAMED/AFP/GETTY IMAGES • ABERCROMBIE: MARCO GARCIA/AP

More missing emails Another administration official’s emails have disappeared, and the person again happens to be at the center of a congressional investigation. The Department of Health and Human Services informed House lawmakers it couldn’t turn over subpoenaed documents related to the botched rollout of Healthcare.gov. The Internal Revenue Service previously informed investigators email records for more than a dozen officials were unrecoverable due to computer crashes.

S a t u r d a y & S u n d a y, Aug. -

IRAQ: HASAN JAMALI • RISCOLL: MARS HILL CHURCH • MISSOURI: SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES • MAKHMOUR: SAFIN HAMED/AFP/GETTY IMAGES • ABERCROMBIE: MARCO GARCIA/AP

OBAMACARE: CHARLIE RIEDEL/AP • TAVENNER: MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES • GM: GENERAL MOTORS CO/AP • WALSH: CHARLES DHARAPAK/AP • BARNEY: JOE BURBANK/ORLANDO SENTINEL/MCT/LANDOV

Bleeding Missouri

F r i d a y, A u g . 

Back in Iraq

The U.S. military began carrying out air attacks on Islamic State targets in Iraq, less than  hours after President Obama announced he was authorizing limited action to protect U.S. personnel in the country (see p. ). As Obama left for a two-week vacation, Iraq’s new president, Fouad Massoum, named Haider Al-Abadi to replace Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who on Aug.  agreed to step down. On Aug. , Islamic State terrorists beheaded American freelance journalist James Foley in what they said was retaliation for the U.S. air strikes and threatened to kill kidnapped American journalist Steven Sotloff if the strikes didn’t stop.

Acts  action

A police officer in Ferguson, Mo., shot and killed an unarmed -year-old black man during an altercation, sparking protests, looting, and vandalism in the St. Louis suburb. Authorities initially declined to release the name of the officer who shot Michael Brown but days later identified him as Darren Wilson. Two witnesses say the officer shot Brown while he was trying to surrender, but the incident was not captured on video footage.

Missouri’s Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon eventually deployed the Missouri National Guard in response to the subsequent rioting and violence. (See p. )

Towns retaken

Kurdish military forces retook two towns in northern Iraq, one of the first instances of setback for the radical Islamic State group. Officials said Kurdish troops repelled extremists from Makhmour and al-Gweir, while U.S. forces carried out a fourth round of air attacks in nearby Irbil. Most countries limited involvement to humanitarian aid, and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry reiterated U.S. resolve not to send ground troops.

Acts  removed Seattle pastor Mark Driscoll’s church, Mars Hill, and its  satellite campuses from membership in the church-planting network he helped found in . Acts , led by Texas megachurch pastor Matt Chandler, asked Driscoll to “step down from ministry for an extended time and seek help” for “ungodly and disqualifying behavior.” Recent charges against Driscoll include accusations of plagiarism, inflating book sales, and posting profane comments online. The Southern Baptist Convention’s LifeWay Christian Resources announced it will pull Driscoll’s books from its  stores.

Lost The same week Hawaii endured two rare hurricanes, it experienced a political earthquake: Gov. Neil Abercrombie, a Democrat, became the state’s first incumbent governor to suffer defeat in a primary. State Sen. David Ige soundly defeated Abercrombie,  percent to  percent, even though Abercrombie outspent him -to-one and picked up an endorsement from President Barack Obama. An unpopular proposal to increase taxes last year played a key role in alienating Abercrombie from his base.

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SEPTEMBER 6, 2014 • WORLD



8/20/14 9:40 AM

Dispatches > News Tu e s d a y, A u g . 1 2

Aid war Ukrainian authorities said they would not allow 280 Russian humanitarian trucks to cross its border, claiming the convoy was a covert attempt to smuggle arms to pro-Russian separatists. Andriy Lysenko, spokesman for Ukraine’s National Security and Defense

Against the grain After a string of losses over 14 months, a state gay marriage ban finally withstood a court challenge. Tennessee Judge Russell Simmons ruled that neither the federal government nor other states are allowed to dictate marriage laws to another state, a decision affecting gay couples who want a divorce in a state that doesn’t recognize same-sex unions. Simmons rejected the argument that the Constitution’s Full Faith and Credit Clause forces one state to recognize marriages from another state and said the Supreme Court’s 2013 U.S. v. Windsor decision does not topple state sovereignty on the issue.

Cease-fire sequence Israel and the terrorist group Hamas began a three-day cease-fire ­agreement while indirect peace talks unfolded in Cairo. The two sides made little progress on the long-term disagreements they have with each other, but the parties later agreed to extend the cease-fire an additional five days. Hamas then broke the cease-fire on Aug. 19 by firing rockets at Israel, and Israel launched air strikes against Hamas in retaliation.

Council, said his country would accept humanitarian aid, but only if the items were unloaded off the trucks at the border or approved by the Red Cross. Russia eventually allowed ­border officials to inspect the trucks.

O-verify The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) began mailing notices to more than 300,000 Obamacare enrollees who have questionable immigration statuses. The letters require recipients to respond with verification of U.S. citizenship or legal status by Sept. 5, or risk losing coverage. Originally almost 1 million Obamacare enrollees had immigration questions, but CMS resolved 660,000 of the cases. Texas and Florida ­residents account for 146,000 of the remaining 310,000.

Killed NASCAR racing champion Tony Stewart, 43, struck and killed a 20-year-old driver at Canandaigua Motorsports Park on Aug. 9. Stewart, who has more than 60 career wins on multiple racing circuits, caused Kevin Ward Jr. to spin out into the wall, prompting Ward to confront Stewart the next time he came around the track.

Although other drivers went around Ward, Stewart clipped him, sending him flying 50 feet. Stewart, whose temper is legendary, had just returned to dirt track racing after triggering an accident at the same track last year.

14

WORLD • September 6, 2014

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Ward

Stewart

same-sex divorce: Mincemeat/shutterstock • ceasefire: ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images • Russian aid: Pavel Golovkin/ap • Ward: Empire Super Sprints, Inc./ap • Stewart: Derik Hamilton/ap

M o n d a y, A u g . 1 1

Visit our website—wng.org—for breaking news and more

8/20/14 9:40 AM

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same-sex divorce: Mincemeat/shutterstock • ceasefireROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images • Russian.aid: Pavel Golovkin/ap • Ward: Empire Super Sprints, Inc./ap • Stewart: Derik Hamilton/ap

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8/18/14 4:24 PM

Dispatches > News F r i d a y, A u g .  

Power plays

Ebola’s toll

A day after another leading physician died from Ebola in Sierra Leone, three American missionaries who returned to the United States from Liberia on Aug.  remained in a -day quarantine to ensure they aren’t infected. Modupeh Cole, the physician who died on Aug. , was an American-trained doctor who had tested positive for the disease only a week before his death. Ebola has this year infected more than , persons and killed more than ,. The World Health Organization predicted the situation will worsen, saying the scope of the outbreak may be vastly underestimated.

Power transfer

Going to jail

Major League Baseball team owners voted to approve Rob Manfred to replace retiring Commissioner Bud Selig. Manfred, who bested Boston Red Sox chairman Tom Werner for the position, is MLB’s chief operating officer and was the lead negotiator for the last three collective bargaining agreements. Selig spent two decades leading the league, avoiding another labor stoppage after the disastrous  strike but also presiding over baseball’s steroid era.

A Maryland judge sentenced Nathaniel Morales, a former youth leader at Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Md., to  years in prison for sexually abusing teenage boys in the s. Judge Terrence McGann during sentencing called Morales, , a “pathetic human being” and a “cowardly pervert.”

Covenant Life, which was at the time the flagship church of Sovereign Grace Ministries, maintains that it knew nothing of the abuses when they occurred, but testimony at Morales’ May trial revealed three teens came forward in the early s.

Perry

project. He is the third potential GOP presidential candidate to face legal attacks from opponents, joining New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

Died Legendary actress Lauren Bacall, , died from a stroke on Aug. . Bacall’s first leading role came at age  in the  film To Have and Have Not, starring opposite -year-old Humphrey Bogart, and on-camera love developed into real love: The two married in  and remained together until Bogart’s death in . Bacall won Tony Awards for leading roles in two musicals adapted from classic movies, Applause () and Woman of the Year (). She won an honorary Oscar in  for lifetime achievement. 

EBOLA: CARL DE SOUZA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES • MANFRED: RICARDO ARDUENGO/AP • LEHMBERG: TRAVIS COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE/AP • BACALL: JOHN ENGSTEAD/ALBUM/NEWSCOM

T h u r s d a y, A u g .  

A Texas grand jury indicted Gov. Rick Perry on charges that he abused his power when he vetoed a budget item—authority he has under Texas law. The Republican governor called for Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg to resign last year after a wellLehmberg publicized arrest and drunken driving conviction, but she refused. Perry then pledged to cut . million in funding for Lehmberg’s public integrity unit, which was at the time investigating a Perry-backed

WORLD • SEPTEMBER 6, 2014

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8/20/14 8:49 AM

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8/18/14 4:25 PM

M o n d a y, A u g .  

Hospital hacking

S a t u r d a y & S u n d a y, A u g .   -  

Gridiron greats The Associated Press released its long-awaited ranking of the top  teams in college football, naming the defending national champion Florida State Seminoles the best team in the country. Florida State starts the season No.  for the sixth time—but the first since —after winning last year’s national title game, -, over Auburn University. The University of Alabama, the only other school to receive first-place votes, begins  at No. , leading a record-tying eight teams from the Southeastern Conference in the top . The college football season opens Aug. .

Killer floods Nepal and India reported more than  deaths after several days of torrential rains led to massive flooding. The inundation displaced thousands and governments dispatched military personnel in hundreds of boats to rescue those who were stranded. Earlier in the month, a mudslide buried an Indian village, killing more than .

theft included names, Social Security numbers, home addresses, birthdays, and telephone numbers for patients who received treatment in the last five years. The company is working closely with the FBI to apprehend the perpetrators, whom investigators determined are in China.

How much to spend?

A Department of Agriculture annual report found the average middleclass cost of raising a child born in  would top ,—not including college costs.

Housing continued to account for the largest expense, about  percent, followed by education and child care. The report in  estimated a middle-income family would spend ,, equal to , today, to raise a child to age . But it doesn’t have to cost that much: The average includes those on shoestring budgets and parents who fork over ,. for a stroller.

SEMINOLES: HARRY HOW/GETTY IMAGES • MEDICAL RECORDS: JEAN-SEBASTIEN EVRARD/AFP/GETTY IMAGES • FLOODING: NIRANJAN SHRESTHA • BABY: NIKUWKA/ISTOCK • TOMB: SAKIS MITROLIDIS/AP

A network of more than  hospitals in  states announced hackers breached its computers and stole more than . million patient records.

Community Health Systems said the

Found Archaeologists exploring terrain almost  miles north of Athens, Greece, have found what could be the lost tomb of Alexander the Great (- ..). At the very least, it’s a massive, ,-foot tomb of a very important Greek leader, including a -step entrance with ornate sphinx statues on either side. Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras visited the site and called the finding “extremely important.” The tomb dates to between  and  B.C., and archaeologists hope to have a definitive answer about its occupants by the end of August.



WORLD • SEPTEMBER 6, 2014

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ROSE: CHRISTOPHER PASATIERI/GETTY IMAGES • RUCKER: RICK DIAMOND/GETTY IMAGES • JETER: CHARLES REX ARBOGAST/AP • COOK: ERIC RISBERG/AP • ALS: JARED C. TILTON/GETTY IMAGES • TODD: WILLIAM B. PLOWMAN/AP

Dispatches > News

SEMINOLES: HARRY HOW/GETTY IMAGES • MEDICAL RECORDS: JEAN-SEBASTIEN EVRARD/AFP/GETTY IMAGES • FLOODING: NIRANJAN SHRESTHA • BABY: NIKUWKA/ISTOCK • TOMB: SAKIS MITROLIDIS/AP

ROSE: CHRISTOPHER PASATIERI/GETTY IMAGES • RUCKER: RICK DIAMOND/GETTY IMAGES • JETER: CHARLES REX ARBOGAST/AP • COOK: ERIC RISBERG/AP • ALS: JARED C. TILTON/GETTY IMAGES • TODD: WILLIAM B. PLOWMAN/AP

Sept. 2

Pete Rose, disgraced former major leaguer, will make a return of sorts to baseball today. Rose, banned from major league events since  following a betting scandal, will coach first base for Kentucky’s Florence Freedom of the independent Frontier League.

Before the game that night, Rose will charge for autographs.

Sept. 3

Brian Vickers Tu e s d a y, A u g .  

More than a drop in the bucket The ALS Association released fundraising numbers for the Ice Bucket Challenge, an internet sensation supporting Lou Gehrig’s Disease research. The association said it raised . million in a threeweek period, compared to . million in the same time span last year, including , new donors. The challenge featured people, including many celebrities, posting videos of themselves dumping a bucket of ice water on their heads and challenging others to do the same—or make a donation. Many people elected to douse themselves and still donate.

LOOKING AHEAD Sept. 7

The New York Yankees will honor Derek Jeter tonight in a retirement ceremony as the end of the season approaches.

Jeter, , has spent  seasons in the big leagues, every one of them with the Yankees. The tribute will honor the man who has more hits, stolen bases, and games played as a Yankee than any other player.

Jeter’s last home game will come Sept.  against the Orioles.

Darius Rucker, who became prominent with s rock group Hootie and the Blowfish before transitioning to country music superstardom, will appear on Good Morning America to announce the nominees for this year’s CMA Awards. The CMAs, country music’s premier awards, will be handed out in a Nov.  event.

Apple CEO Tim Cook

Sept. 8 Former

   .

Find more news about the Ebola outbreak, tensions in Ferguson, Mo., and the fighting in Iraq, and read more commentary by Marvin Olasky, Janie B. Cheaney, Andrée Seu Peterson, Mindy Belz, and others.

New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin will report today to a federal prison in Oakdale, La., to fulfill his -year sentence stemming from a guilty verdict on  counts of corruption. Nagin has appealed his conviction.

Sept. 9 Insiders report that

tech giant Apple has planned a media event today to release the much-anticipated iPhone . The upcoming months could be big for the California-based company.

Apple is also close to releasing an iWatch device to be worn on wrists to provide users with health and fitness data.

Jeter waves to the crowd after Chicago Cubs shortstop Starlin Castro gave Jeter a Wrigley Field live scoreboard plate with Jeter’s jersey number on it on May .

Replaced NBC on Aug.  announced its political director, Chuck Todd, will replace David Gregory as host of the Sunday talk show Meet the Press. Gregory, , took over Meet the Press when host Tim Russert died in , and the show suffered a steady ratings decline after a decade of dominance. NBC, which reportedly paid Gregory  million to leave quietly, did not allow him a farewell show. Gregory rose to stardom as NBC’s chief White House correspondent, the same post Todd will now vacate.

Listen to WORLD on the radio at worldandeverything.com

18 NEWS 3.indd 19

SEPTEMBER 6, 2014 • WORLD



8/20/14 9:21 AM

Dispatches > Quotables ‘130 percent’ The growth, according to a study by the THOMAS B. FORDHAM INSTITUTE, in nonteaching staff at American public schools since . During the same period, the number of teachers grew about  percent and the number of students grew less than  percent. The study found that a fourth of all public school spending in the United States now goes to nonteachers, a far higher share than in almost all other countries.

‘Great nations need organizing principles, and “Don’t do stupid stuff” is not an organizing principle.’

CHRISTINE MOUTIER, chief medical officer at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, on an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tweet, which said, “Genie, you’re free,” after actor Robin Williams committed suicide. (Williams voiced the Genie in Aladdin.)

“Suicide should never be presented as an option,” Moutier said. “That’s a formula for potential contagion.”



WORLD • SEPTEMBER 6, 2014

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‘Possible détente.’

Description by the GLOBAL TIMES, a staterun Chinese newspaper, of Vatican-China relations after authorities in Beijing on Aug.  allowed the plane carrying Pope Francis to South Korea to use Chinese airspace.

Pope Francis paraphernalia for sale at a cathedral in Beijing

‘[A lot of people] don’t want to believe that Obama wants to crack down on the press and whistle-blowers. But he does. He’s the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.’

Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter JAMES RISEN, who has been for six years resisting administration efforts to force him to reveal confidential sources.

WILLIAMS: CHARLES SYKES/AP • CLINTON: FRANK FRANKLIN II/AP • CHINA: NG HAN GUAN/AP • RISEN: ALEX MENENDEZ/AP

‘If it doesn’t cross the line, it comes very, very close to it.’

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8/20/14 8:54 AM

CREDIT

Presumed  presidential candidate and former Secretary of State HILLARY CLINTON, in an interview with The Atlantic. Clinton’s willingness to criticize President Obama has increased as she tries to separate herself from the increasingly unpopular president.

CREDIT

Williams: Charles Sykes/ap • Clinton: Frank Franklin II/ap • china: Ng Han Guan/ap • Risen: Alex Menendez/ap

8/20/14 9:13 AM

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Dispatches > Quick Takes    

 

 

The offending shoes



WORLD • SEPTEMBER 6, 2014

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  Somewhere in the tiny hamlet of Lea in Lincolnshire, a , diamond is up for grabs. The stone belongs to  Diamonds, a London jeweler, but if you find it, you can keep it. As part of a marketing stunt, on Aug.  the jeweler attached a .-carat custom-cut diamond to a weather balloon, which reached , feet above the small English town before falling back to earth.

The company then took to its Twitter account, creating the hashtag “Diamonds in the Sky,” to announce that whoever found the stone could keep it. The diamond drop ginned up considerable interest, with hunters taking time from work to search the area for the precious stone or the balloon apparatus. “So tempted to go look for [the diamond] instead of going to work tomorrow,” Becky Wild mused on her Twitter account. “Could be much more lucrative.”

ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • PALMER: THOMAS R. CORDOVA/DAILY BREEZE/PRESS-TELEGRAM/AP • DIAMOND: HANDOUT • NOTE: OMAHA WORLD-HERALD

unable to wear a shoe or put weight on her left foot.

Palmer filed a workers’ compensation claim because the injury occurred at her job. But Palmer then entered the Long Beach Grand Prix beauty contest later in March and posted videos of the competition on social media, where investigators found them.

Police arrested Palmer on Aug. . Her charges could bring her one year behind bars and a fine up to ,.

The KFC restaurant in North Platte, Neb., received an unusual letter in August. The letter, handwritten in blue cursive script, details how its anonymous sender felt bad for taking pieces of chicken home with her from the all-you-can-eat buffet. “I took more on my plate than I could eat,” the woman explained.

“So I put it in my purse and took it home. I do love your chicken!”

Included in the letter was  to repay the restaurant for what she stole. “God has forgiven me, and I hope you will too. I will not be so quick to take so much next time.” Restaurant owner Rocky Rasmussen told the Omaha World-Herald he forgives the anonymous woman. “I really wish I knew who it was,” he said.

“I would buy them a few meals.”

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LEMONS: CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL • TIGER: JENNIFER SZYMASZEK/AP • ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • KITTEN: LENORLUX/ISTOCK • HIGH BEAMS: SHOJI FUJITA/TAXI/GETTY IMAGES

Nicholas Cunliffe of Stratford, Conn., managed to post bail and leave the police station after he was arrested for stealing a taxicab on Aug. , but he didn’t get far. Apparently overcome by drowsiness—and more bad decision making—Cunliffe allegedly broke into a nearby car to take a nap. The car happened to be a police cruiser. Shortly after, officers discovered Cunliffe sleeping in the front seat of the police vehicle, placed him under arrest again, and charged him with breaking and entering a motor vehicle.

When fraud investigators saw Shawna Lynn Palmer of Riverside, Calif., wearing high heels, her game was up. Palmer, a supermarket clerk, had claimed that a March  accident had left her with a broken toe and

 

ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • PALMER: THOMAS R. CORDOVA/DAILY BREEZE/PRESS-TELEGRAM/AP • DIAMOND: HANDOUT • NOTE: OMAHA WORLD-HERALD

LEMONS: CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL • TIGER: JENNIFER SZYMASZEK/AP • ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • KITTEN: LENORLUX/ISTOCK • HIGH BEAMS: SHOJI FUJITA/TAXI/GETTY IMAGES

  Motorists in the San Diego area were soured to their morning commute on Aug. . The problem began when a pair of cargo trucks collided north of San Diego on Interstate . One of the trucks’ cargo, a shipment of unripe lemons, spilled onto the roadway. The citrusy mess blocked all but one lane on the northbound side of the freeway, jamming traffic for more than three hours.

There are only a few months left to buy tiger selfies legally in New York state. On Aug. , New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill that would make it illegal to charge money for having a picture taken with a tiger in the Empire State. The law, the brainchild of Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal of Manhattan, seeks to shut down the burgeoning business of roadside zoos and county fairs in the state that offer selfie-style pictures with big cats. The law, which goes into effect beginning in , will provide for a  fine for first-time offenders.

  One Indian schoolteacher won’t be winning any awards for perfect attendance any time soon.

According to an investigation by school authorities, biology teacher Sangeeta Kashyap has missed  of her  years as an employee of the nation’s public schools. Officials believe the -year-run of missing work marks the nation’s high-water mark for absenteeism. According to records, Kashyap began working in  as a biology teacher at a school in central India. Then, according to records, she took maternity leave, was transferred to another school, and never came in for work after that. She occupied an official teaching position until August. Government officials say they aren’t certain whether she had been paid during her two-decade hiatus.

  If they could think it or say it, the stray cats of Nashville would be thanking James Talbot. The -year-old Nashville resident who died earlier this year left a , cash inheritance for the care and provision of the homeless cats of the city. Officially the money will go to Nashville’s Metro Animal Care and Control. But according to a provision in Talbot’s will, the animal adoption clinic may only use the money to care for cats— not dogs—and to find loving homes for them.

   Bad drivers in Shenzhen, China, who blast oncoming motorists with high beam headlights will now face in-kind punishment from police. Police officials in the Chinese city said drivers who abuse the use of high beams will be stopped by police, ticketed for roughly , pulled from their car, and forced to stare into police cruiser headlights for five minutes. According to an official post on Chinese social networking site Weibo, a department spokesman called the punishment an “appropriate experience.”

SEPTEMBER 6, 2014 • WORLD

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8/20/14 8:58 AM

Janie B. Cheaney

A little religion

marriage was over. Their original plan of living together for a year before getting married— an accepted practice in secular America— would have alerted Kayla to Adam’s problems The problem with love and marriage in America’s Bible Belt and forestalled the agony of divorce. It’s obvious to the academics that secular bluestate mores actually protect the institution of marriage H’   : “Are Evangelicals better than those of religious red states.

Bad for Marriage?” In the article under the title, But not so fast. The truth behind the headlines is Maggie Gallagher commented on a cultural that reports like Glass and Levchak’s don’t make a model developed by June Carbone and Naomi distinction between religious affiliation and religious Cahn in their book, Red Families vs. Blue Families: practice. We’ve all heard that divorce is as common, Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture (Oxford, or almost, among Christians as it is among secular ). The authors’ premise is that liberal-leaning couples, but that’s true only if all professing states have fewer teen mothers and lower divorce rates, Christians are lumped together: those who talk the while the more conservative states count more of both. talk and those who walk it. Among self-identified Since the red states are more religious, this seems Christians who marry early (between  and ), counterintuitive: Why is marriage less stable in the evangelicals who attend church regularly are about very region that’s so politically vocal about “traditional half as likely to divorce as their professing peers. and family values”?

Faithfully attending Catholics are only about oneJennifer Glass and Philip Levchak (of the universifourth as likely. The others know the words to ties of Texas and Iowa respectively) suggested an “Amazing Grace” (first verse anyway) and claim to answer in the American Journal of Sociology. “Red love Jesus while they neglect his body—and the States, Blue States, and Divorce” concluded that community support a fledgling marriage needs. “conservative religious beliefs and the social instituIn the heart of red-state America, where even towns tions they create, on balance, decrease marital stability of “Pop. ” have at least one church and every city of through the promotion of practices [like discouraging , or more boasts a megachurch, an outsider might easily confuse affiliation with adherence. But if you live here, you may have a neighbor who can explain the basic gospel while a succession of live-in boyfriends take up residence in her house. The homeless men at the local shelter will readily pray with you and admit their sins, but won’t repent of them. “My mama reads the Bible all the time,” they say, while Mama enables the irresponsible behavior of her kids. “I believe in the beliefs, but I don’t exactly walk every line you’re supposed to walk,” admitted the aforementioned Kayla.

Just as “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” (to quote the much-quoted Alexander Pope), a little religion is likewise perilous, creating a sense of sanctity in the absence of the real thing. “In my experience,” writes David French at National Review Online, “the casual Southern Christian has very high expectations for others’ behavior at the same time that they are quite forgiving of themselves.” That’s a universal human trait, “but it’s rendered far more destructive cohabitation] that increase divorce risk.” As Michelle when sprinkled with selective Christianity. In fact, it’s Goldberg pithily put it in The Nation, “Conservative hard to imagine an attitude better-calculated to lead family values don’t work to conserve actual families.” to divorce.”

Take the case of Kayla and Adam, a young Ohio Self-justification from the Bible is the worst kind; couple whose pastor refused to marry them unless selective Christianity more damaging than rigorous they stopped living together. They moved to separate humanism. It’s an all-or-nothing religion, a demanddwellings and advanced their wedding date by one ing religion, a countercultural religion, even in the year. But soon after, Kayla discovered that Adam was “God-haunted” South. The only way to be in with abusing drugs, a problem that only got worse. When Jesus is all in. A she found a love note addressed to another woman, the

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WORLD • SEPTEMBER 6, 2014

18 CHEANEY.indd 24

KRIEG BARRIE



Email: jcheaney@wng.org

8/20/14 9:01 AM

Exercise Science Club French Club Global Outreach Health Science Club Honors College Jazz Band Petit Jean Yearbook Roosevelt Institute

Pursue your passion.

Whatever their academic pursuits, Harding University students can cultivate friendships and interests within more than 110 academic and professional organizations and 30 social clubs. Ranging from the arts, music, politics, business, diversity, children, missions and service, organizations on campus offer a variety of interests to explore. You can develop your career skills in the Christian college environment of Harding University.

KRIEG BARRIE

Faith, Learning and Living Harding.edu | 800-477-4407 Searcy, Arkansas

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8/15/14 10:23 AM

W

Drawing Water from the Wells of Salvation

hat happens in a church and a family when the Gospel is central? The conference will focus on the spiritual foundation of church and family life—the transforming power of the Gospel. We will examine the various elements of the Gospel’s power at work in repentance, faith, worship, the filling of the Holy Spirit and the Word of God, as well as divine love operating through foreknowledge, justification, sanctification, perseverance, sovereignty and glorification.

LOCATION: Asheville, North Carolina at Lifeway’s Ridgecrest Christian Conference Center

Carlton Mcleod

Joel Beeke

R.C. Sproul, Jr.

John Snyder

Jeff Pollard

Kevin Swanson

Joseph Morecraft

Craig Houston CREDIT

Scott Brown

Other speakers include: Don Hart, Jason Dohm, Dan Horn, Geoff Botkin, Marcus Serven and Steve Hopkins

NCFIC.ORG/GOSPEL

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8/15/14 10:25 AM

Reviews

Movies  TV > Books > QA A > Music

Losses and gains MOVIE: When the Game Stands Tall rises above its competitors in the sports genre BY MEGAN BASHAM

TRISTAR PICTURES

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“I   that if I could find a production that would help inspire young boys to become men I would do it, and this was that film.” This was what Jim Caviezel recently told me of his starring role in the new sports drama, When the Game Stands Tall (rated PG for mature themes and a scene of violence).

At first glance, Caviezel (perhaps best known to Christian audiences as Jesus in The Passion of the Christ and to television fans as John Reese on CBS’ hit drama Person of Interest) may seem like an unusual choice to play a high-school football coach. To say that the -year-old actor is soft-spoken might be an understatement—I had to strain to catch some of his answers to my questions. But then I watched a video of the legendary Bob Ladouceur, and it became immediately clear that Caviezel was perfectly cast. The two men share not only a devotion to their Catholic faith and a penchant for obscure theological references, but also a strikingly unassuming demeanor. As sports journalist Neil Hayes noted in the  book the film is based on, Coach Ladouceur stands out in his industry for rarely raising his voice and avoiding the customary locker room speeches.

Perhaps that’s why the film about California’s De La Salle High School football team doesn’t focus on the bulk of Hayes’ original book—how Ladouceur led his program to achieve a staggering -game winning streak—but rather on the events that made up the epilogue. That is, how he handled losing it.

The movie begins, as many sports movies do, on the night of the big game. Only our protagonists aren’t the underdogs—far from it. With  consecutive undefeated seasons under its belt, De La Salle is the winningest

Email: mbasham@wng.org

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Reviews > Movies & TV

After the day In the days following Robin Williams’ death by suicide, social media sites and news outlets were afire with quotes from the brilliant actor’s best-loved films. The scene that most affected his fans, at least as measured by Twitter mentions, seemed to be the carpe diem ­monologue from Dead Poets Society, which The Hollywood Reporter dubbed “perhaps the most iconic speech of [Williams’] career.”

In the scene, Mr. Keating (Williams), an English teacher at a ­prestigious prep school, shows his students a photo of a century-old

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graduating class and invites them to ponder their own mortality: “Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable?” Keating asks. “Because you see, gentlemen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils. But if you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. … Carpe diem, seize the day, boys, make your lives extraordinary.”

As an unbelieving junior-high student, I, too, remember finding the mantra and the story arc of the students’ learning to live by it terribly wise. As an adult Christian, however, I see how much frustration and even despair can come from a worldview that focuses solely on seizing our present days.

It’s a wonderful thing to use one’s God-given talents to strive for excellence. That said, we are fundamentally flawed creatures, meaning even the most productive of us will waste more opportunities than we capitalize on and fail every day, to quote the film and Thoreau, “to suck all the marrow” from life. Claiming otherwise is vanity. Yet living what the world might call a merely ordinary life breeds no anxiety if you have an eternal perspective.

Contrary to Dead Poets’ message, this life is a dress rehearsal of sorts. You will sometimes flub the lines and miss your cues, and sometimes other performers will steal your show. But none of it should rob a redeemed person of joy because we understand that our earthly existence is but a breath compared to what’s before us. We don’t lose heart even over those days we neglected to seize because we know that they are light and momentary compared with eternity.

This is a truth that eluded Dead Poets Society and, seemingly, tragically, Robin Williams. —Megan Basham

WORLD • September 6, 2014

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8/20/14 11:41 AM

Ragamuffin: color green films • What If: Entertainment One

there are other, quietly unexpected elements that work to place When the Game Stands Tall above many competitors in the sports genre. It may not be all that unusual for a coach character to have a few faults. But to have the coach admit it and ask his family for forgiveness for not always living up to the principle of sacrifice above self is fairly uncommon.

Similarly refreshing is that the film shows Ladouceur as a spiritual as well

as an athletic mentor to his players. In one scene he encourages a student to consider different angles of a particular Gospel story for a senior thesis. In another, he challenges a player dealing with loss to look for biblical answers for doubt and anger.

The movie doesn’t make a spectacle of these moments, but subtle as they are, they help form a significant aspect of the film’s tone and help the audience understand how Bob Ladouceur built such an enduring legacy. As Caviezel puts it, “This guy won 151 football games in a row. Never has there been such a winning streak. … Yet he never focused on winning. He focused on changing [his players’] character and the byproduct of that was winning.”

When the Game Stands Tall: TriStar Pictures • williams: Everett Collection/REX features/ap

team not only in high-school football history, but in all of American sports history. They are the over-over dogs, so to speak, though thanks to a pair of tragedies and a general attitude of ­entitlement, that will change in the film’s first few minutes.

The rest of the story focuses on how Ladouceur goes about teaching his players to overcome the sting of public defeat and what it means to serve one another in love. Or, as Caviezel describes it, “teaching them how individual egos must die in order for the team to live.” These are hard lessons that don’t sink in until a few more losses lead them to visiting the recovery ward of a veteran’s hospital.

From there, much of the film follows the expected sports film arc, but the performances, including Laura Dern as Beverly Ladouceur, are so spot-on, it’s an enjoyable ride despite its familiarity. And

MOVIE

What If WHEN THE GAME STANDS TALL: TRISTAR PICTURES • WILLIAMS: EVERETT COLLECTION/REX FEATURES/AP

  

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DVD

Ragamuffin   

RAGAMUFFIN: COLOR GREEN FILMS • WHAT IF: ENTERTAINMENT ONE

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B   “A G” and “Sing Your Praise to the Lord,” Rich Mullins burst onto the Christian music scene in the late s and early s and delivered a number of memorable songs that were both theologically rich and experientially compelling. His success paved the way for singer/songwriters like Chris Rice, Andrew Peterson, and the band Caedmon’s Call.

Ragamuffin, recently released on DVD and Blu-ray, is an independent film that chronicles Mullins’ rise in the Christian music industry and the personal and spiritual struggles he faced until a car accident claimed his life in . Director and actor David Leo Schultz makes Mullins’ complicated relationship with a disapproving father the centerpiece of the film. The need for fatherly affection, both human and heavenly, carries the story of Rich’s life along, with his most popular songs providing the soundtrack of his journey.

Like all believers in Jesus, Mullins was a sinner and a saint, and Ragamuffin (rated PG-) shows both aspects of his life. Here we see a chain-smoking man with salty language and a propensity toward alcohol abuse, who nevertheless gives away almost all of the money he earns, ministers to the broken residents of a Native American reservation, and consistently points people away from himself and toward the church for spiritual nourishment. Throughout the film, it’s the rawness of Mullins’ admission of sin and his provocative words about grace that disarm the viewer, just as his lyrics startle the listeners of his music.

Ragamuffin meanders at times (it clocks in at  hours and  minutes), but its flaws are overcome by spirited performances and the inclusion of several close friends and family members playing different roles. Mullins’ life isn’t a paragon of virtue or a sterling example of “the victorious Christian life.” But this movie gets at the heart of his story and music: grace—unmerited favor from an unobligated Giver—good news for the sinner, the “beggar at the door of God’s mercy.” —Trevin Wax is managing editor

of The Gospel Project, and an author

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18 MOVIES & TV.indd 29

C   the independent romantic comedy What If (rated PG- for crude talk, partial nudity, and sexual innuendo) as the modern When Harry Met Sally. The movie is modern in the sense that it doesn’t ask the question, “Can men and women be friends?” but rather “Is romance possible without sex?” For most - and -somethings who are out of college and thinking about settling down, romance has become the same thing as sex, the two inextricable.

Wallace (Daniel Radcliffe) meets Chantry (Zoe Kazan) at a party where he learns that she has a live-in boyfriend. He reluctantly agrees to be her friend, and they go on to spend time getting to know each other. Wallace’s friend Allan, one of a panoply of immature characters, regularly pesters him about whether he secretly wants to sleep with Chantry.

“You can’t interact with a woman without sex screwing it up,” Wallace retorts.

Wallace is no preacher of abstinence; he admits his thoughts about Chantry aren’t pure, but he wants to believe that love is not an “all-purpose excuse for selfish behavior.”

Wallace is in the cultural downstream of both ubiquitous hook-ups and old fashioned Hollywood romances. He goes to see The Princess Bride by himself. He’s still torn apart about his parents’ unfaithfulness to each other that led to their divorce.

Throughout the movie, Wallace and Chantry wearily listen to friends and co-workers discuss their latest sexual exploits—a familiar experience to many -somethings in the workplace. At one point, Wallace and Chantry’s friends abandon them on a beach without their clothes in the hopes that they will hook up; the setup backfires and the two are so embarrassed they can hardly speak to each other after.

The film’s tone is uneven, the comedy is mostly unfunny, and the excessive sarcastic banter almost drowns the romance. But Radcliffe’s magnetic performance redeems some of the flaws. The ending, without revealing too much, sides with an idea of romance that goes against the current trends.

SEPTEMBER 6, 2014 • WORLD

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8/20/14 12:00 PM

Reviews > Books

A novel recommendation A dark, but not hopeless, book for students

BY MARVIN OLASKY

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O A.  , “Hello, darkness,” reported that some highschool students face harm when reading dark-themed books in which characters commit suicide. A classmate of one high-school senior who killed himself said, “Every book we read told us that life was meaningless and in the end nothing matters. …

These books all together made life seem hopeless.”

Some Christian schools will have no dark books on their required readings lists, but that’s not the solution: Many - to -year-olds have learned that the world is a tough place, so feeding them novels set in happy towns beset only by little tiffs will lead some to rebel against infantilization. The better way is to have them read books that show real evil but also the opportunity to fight it, both through Christian means and through some necessary worldly ones.

Here’s my unconventional reading recommendation for high-school

seniors: Daniel Silva’s The Heist (HarperCollins, ).

It’s real: starts with the murder of a fallen British spy involved in the theft of great paintings. It’s a pageSilva turner: continues with the efforts of Silva’s great hero, Israeli spy (and art restorer) Gabriel Allon, and a brave young woman who survived a Syrian massacre. It’s a proven reader-pleaser: This is the th novel in a series that repeatedly hits No.  on bestseller lists. And The Heist is / satisfactory regarding the “bad stuff”: no bad language or sex. Some violence— remember, it has spies and Syrian bad guys—but nothing grossly graphic.

And did you twice read the word “Syrian” in my last paragraph—a tipoff that The Heist will also teach students some current events and recent history? They’ll learn about  years of mass murder and mega-theft by the upwardly mobile Assad family that has ascended from peasantry to a  billion fortune, according to some estimates.

Students will learn about bank secrecy in Austria. They’ll gain sympathy for Israel, a nation still largely aloof from

God (sigh) but one deserving support because its citizens built and maintain a tidy small house—although one with broken windows—on a rough street of big mansions with loaded howitzers and unchained pit bulls.

Beyond all that, Silva is an excellent writer who regularly crafts apt characterizations: “She had decorated the rooms of the house as she had decorated her husband: gray, sleek, modern.” He can turn on high-school seniors to read more than text messages and tweets. He doesn’t duck evil: “Despite all the books, the documentaries, the memorials, and the declarations regarding universal human rights, a dictator was once again killing his people with poison gas and turning them into human skeletons in camps and prisons.” But he implores us to fight and never give up.

WORLD • SEPTEMBER 6, 2014

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JOHNNY LOUIS/JL/SIPA USA/NEWSCOM



Email: molasky@wng.org

8/15/14 4:51 PM

SERGIGN/SHUTTERSTOCK

FORGOTTEN AMERICANS

We’ve run in previous years interviews with Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man, a great history of the Depression that’s relevant to our own economic stagnation of the past seven years. (See “The hallowed New Deal,” March , , and “Slumps that go on and on,” Nov. , .) But what to do about kids in high-school history or social studies classes who won’t read big books? Assign them The Forgotten Man Graphic Edition (Harper, ). Shlaes’ colorful cast of characters—among them, businessman Wendell Wilkie, radical Rex Tugwell, and African-American preacher Father Divine—lends itself well to comic book depiction.

Students will learn that the real problem was not the stock market collapse in  but that in April  unemployment was still almost at  percent—and millions of Americans had been jobless for an entire decade. (If we included in our current unemployment figures those who have given up, plus the semi-employed who would like full-time jobs but haven’t found them—our forgotten men and women—the current U.S. stat would look like that.) A major cause of continued unemployment then and now: Washington’s war on business. —M.O.

NOTABLE BOOKS

Four war-themed graphic novels > reviewed by  . 

The Lamb and the Führer Ravi Zacharias What happened to Adolf Hitler after he shot himself in his underground bunker? Zacharias imagines the Führer, bereft of his uniform and with a small hole in his right temple, meeting Jesus and demanding the right to explain himself. Hitler is on trial, and “the Lamb” calls witnesses including Dietrich Bonhoeffer to testify against him. The story serves to illustrate some of the author’s principal lecture themes, including the basis for morality and the problem of unity-indiversity. An introduction featuring two present-day college students establishes the background as well as its relevance for today. Some of the material is intense: best suited for ages  and up.

Since “gender variance” is getting

Boxers & Saints Gene Luen Yang

a lot of play this year, and since

The Boxer Rebellion, a bloody th-century outbreak of Chinese nationalists against Western influence and religion, is the setting for these overlapping novels. Though the characters are fictional, the events and background are not. Yang contrasts two worldviews in the characters of Little Bao, a young man empowered by traditional mythology to revenge missionary wrongs, and FourGirl, a Catholic convert who takes her name from St. Vibiana and her inspiration from Joan of Arc. Both sides have their bad actors, but Christianity is seen to have resources traditional mythology does not. Due to graphically depicted violence, these books are best suited to teens and up.

cultural agendas find their way into

Treaties, Trenches, Mud, and Blood Nathan Hale “Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales,” of which this is the fourth, employ the author’s namesake (the heroic Revolutionary War spy) as narrator for some dark, dramatic chapters in history. Here Hale tackles “The Great War” with the help of two sidekicks, the Hangman and the British Provost. In the style of Art Spiegelman’s classic Maus, the warring sides are shown as animals: British bulldogs, German eagles, Russian bears, and American bunnies (because eagles already were taken). Though it veers into silliness in places, the narrative tells the overall history of the conflict accurately and imaginatively, with a strong (and mostly serious) conclusion.

Middle-graders and older kids can learn a lot.

Dogs of War Sheila Keenan and Nathan Fox

JOHNNY LOUIS/JL/SIPA USA/NEWSCOM

SERGIGN/SHUTTERSTOCK

SPOTLIGHT

“Whenever people go to war, so do their best friends.” These three stories of the Great War, World War II, and Vietnam feature a Border Collie (Boots), a Siberian Husky (Loki), and a German Shepherd (Sheba) serving their masters in trenches, tundra, and jungle, respectively. Dog lovers and war buffs alike will enjoy learning about the many critical functions dogs have supplied under fire. The first two stories are straightforward adventure, but the third delves into human psychology through the eyes of a young boy who befriends a reclusive Vietnam vet struggling to fit into society again. Though intended for middle-grade readers, the dialogue includes two instances of mild profanity.

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

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children’s picture books, it’s no surprise that two books this year, Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress and Jacob’s New Dress, have joined , Dresses () in depicting boys who include dolls, tiaras, and dresses in their repertoire of playacting.

Bailey, of , Dresses, calls himself a girl even though his anatomy and his unsympathetic family say otherwise. Morris and Jacob don’t go that far, but these boys struggle with their own nature (and other kids’ teasing) until understanding adults help them make a breakthrough and feel comfortable with themselves. It’s also no surprise that reviewers and educators enthusiastically recommend these titles for any school library’s “diversity” shelf, but picture books can’t begin to address the complexity of cross-gender identity. —J.B.C.

SEPTEMBER 6, 2014 • WORLD

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8/15/14 4:53 PM

Reviews > Q&A

Philosophical inoculation

The best defense for children against bad ideas, says JAY RICHARDS, is measured exposure BY MARVIN OLASKY

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then answering that question is probably the most important economic and intellectual discipline.

Consequences trump intentions? God cares both why we do something and what we do. If I give my wife two dozen roses and it’s not our anniversary or her birthday, that’s an intrinsically nice thing to do. But what if I want to go on my fourth golfing outing weekend of the year, and I want to grease the skids? The internal matters to the moral act. That’s not true in economics. The motives of the members of Congress who vote on a bill do not matter. They could have  different motives, but that policy is going to have the same effect either way.

As Adam Smith said, the bread maker is not making the bread that day because he feels nice or wants to be nice to us. He wants to make money.

He wants to feed his own family by helping us feed our own families.

And Smith was not saying what Ayn Rand said, that selfishness is a virtue. His point is that in a market economy with the rule of law, people’s actions—even if they’re self-interested— will be directed toward socially beneficial outcomes.

It’s a hugely important insight.

The human race is fallen and so the best we can do is say, What are the economic systems that will fit human beings as we actually exist in the world, prior to the consummation in the kingdom of God? So we have to learn to distinguish economic ideology from empirical reality? That’s

CREDIT

J R, a distinguished fellow at the Institute of Faith, Work, & Economics, and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, has written numerous books and articles since receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary, on subjects ranging from theology to Intelligent Design to economics.

Richards and his wife Jenny have - and -year-old daughters whom they teach at their home in Potomac Falls, Va. I like your book Money, Greed, and God. Have you given it to your -year-old?

I have just started her on it, although I’ll reserve their junior and senior years for heavy economics. But it is books like that or Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, more than standard college macroeconomics classes, that can teach students to think in terms of costs and benefits or trade-offs.

What’s the most important economic discovery made in the th century that students don’t learn about? Probably the disconnect between intentions and consequences. Once you understand that, and you hear, “Congress wants to raise the federal minimum wage to  an hour,” you say, “That sounds nice, and then what will happen?” Ironically asking and

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especially difficult in economics because a lot of people don’t think you discover things about economics.

People often just think economics is just ethics, so I can get my way to a conclusion intuitively. I would maintain that part of reality is scarcity.

There is a known relationship between supply and demand.

We know what the function of prices are in a market; and so you can either know those or not know those, accept them or ignore them, but you can’t legislate them away—and if you ignore them you’re likely to get into trouble.

Scarcity does not exist outside of God’s sovereignty? Exactly.

So people who can

CREDIT

Email: molasky@wng.org

18 Q&A.indd 33

make use of stuff that would otherwise be wasted are heroes. Tell us about Brad Morgan.

Morgan is a Michigan dairy farmer who was paying , a year just to have the manure hauled off his farm. He figured out a way to turn manure into compost in a month, rather than the many months it used to take. Entrepreneurs inevitably have intimate knowledge of things that other people might consider boring: Practical wisdom allows them to use their skills and their creativity in a way that other people can’t, and now Morgan sells his stuff, called Dairy Doo. He has about  different varieties, right?

Different grades or different roasts. It’s the perfect metaphor for entrepreneurship because he literally takes waste and creates wealth with it. It’s a prefect parable to explain the reality that human beings are a unique hybrid of the spiritual and the material, able to take the material world that God has created and transform it into wealth that wasn’t there before.

And journalistically specific rather than ideologically abstract. We need to ask: What are the real discoveries about the economic realm that we need to take on board, when we are thinking about these subjects?

When conservative Christian parents are concerned about what their kids are learning about economics, what do they typically do? Parents try one or two things. Some think, I’ll quarantine my children. That is

Kids should learn to ask professors, ‘What would be the best argument I could go read against what you’ve just told me?’

a temptation among some homeschoolers: Protect them from the world. But if the virus is still out there in the world: Unless you keep them locked up, they are getting exposed at some point, and they will not have built up their resistance. I saw this in seminary. I went to a couple of liberal theological seminaries, and kids would come from Bible colleges where they just hadn’t been exposed to the arguments that are out there.

They lost their faith in a semester or two semesters.

So quarantining is a bad idea, I think, for preparing our kids.

What’s the other common tendency? Overexposure.

That’s the other extreme where you cast them as sheep among wolves and hope they’ll toughen up.

Can we fi nd a golden mean? Inoculation: measured

RICHARDS: MARK FINKENSTAEDT • STUDENTS: RALF HIRSCHBERGER/PICTURE-ALLIANCE/DPA/AP IMAGES

exposure to a pathogen. We can be inoculated against smallpox by getting an injection of cowpox to which your body reacts. It develops antibodies and then protects itself from the more harmful pathogens.

We need to think about ideas in the same way. You don’t want your kids to get off to college and just then hear the best arguments for Darwinism.

That’s the wrong time to have that happen. They need to have been taken through those things beforehand and not in a cranky, one-sided fashion.

How should parents inoculate their children against wrong ideas without setting up straw men or caricatures? Always look for the very best arguments on the other side. That also works in college: Kids should learn to ask professors, “What would be the best argument I could go read against what you’ve just told me?”

They never know the answer to this question—but that’s what intellectual honesty requires. Imagine a jury in a trial that only heard the prosecution but didn’t hear the defense.

Th at’s often how we are intellectually. We might know the defense or the prosecution, but we don’t know both. So we want to know the best arguments on both sides, and then frame our own arguments in light of the best objections on the other side. A

SEPTEMBER 6, 2014 • WORLD



8/14/14 3:22 PM

Soaring sounds Three recent albums highlight the aesthetic and emotional range of the flute By arsenio orteza

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flute: Alenavlad/shutterstock • musicians: handout

The oldest precursors of the Western concert flute were fashioned from bone and ivory. “Aside from the voice,” quoth Wikipedia, they’re “the earliest known musical instruments.” And why not? The most musical nonhuman sound in ancient cultures was birdsong, and no instruments sound as much like birds as flutes do.

Nowadays, flutes are more likely to be made of silver or gold, but their uniquely avian expressiveness remains. Three recent releases on the MSR Classics label call attention to this very quality. They also demonstrate the instrument’s aesthetic and emotional range.

The most birdlike is Francesca Arnone’s Games of Light: Discovering Treasure for Solo Flute. Arnone begins with 15 selections—over half-an-hour’s worth—from Charles Koechlin’s Les Chants de Nectaire, Op. 198 (1944), and continues with works by Arthur Willner (Sonate für Flöte Allein, Op. 34 [1926]) and the film composers William Alwyn (Divertimento for Solo Flute Molumby [1939]) and Miklos Rozsa (Sonata per Flauto Solo, Op. 39 [1983]).

So lyrical are the melodies and so sensitive does Arnone render them that, although they span nearly six decades and represent French (Koechlin), Czechoslovakian (Willner), British (Alwyn), and Hungarian (Rozsa) sensibilities, they feel like birds of a feather. Oblivious to the terrestrial turmoil preoccupying their two-legged unfeathered friends, they soar, dip, plunge, and glide with improvisational freedom and grace. Neil Diamond’s Jonathan

Livingston Seagull soundtrack is heavy metal by comparison.

On Awakening: 21st Century Slovenian Flute Music, Nicole Molumby surrounds the flute with string bass, bassoon, clarinet, piano, and oboe. Rather than weighing her down or clipping her wings, however, they feather her nest.

Blaž Pucihar, three of whose pieces Molumby performs, is her pianist, so inter-ensemble sympathy abounds. “His compositions are fresh, innovative, and heart warming,” writes Molumby in the liner notes, and she’s right.

She was also right to have Pucihar arrange Peter Kopač’s restlessly somber “Romanca” for flute, piano, and string bass. Chaucer’s “smale fowles” that “maken melody” and “slepen al the night with open ye” come to mind. The same goes for her rendition of Črt Sojar Voglar’s exhilarating solo-flute “Prebujanje Narave”— that is, when it’s not evoking mating calls.

The most challenging of MSR’s flute trilogy is the New York City flautist Andrew Bolotowsky’s The Praying Mantis and the Bluebird, mainly because it’s subtitled “The Flute Music of Beth Anderson,” and Beth Anderson is a most challenging composer.

Consider “Preparation for the Dominant: Outrunning the Inevitable.” Despite lasting only five minutes and being sandwiched by the comparatively simple flute-andpiano “Lullaby for the Eighth Ancestor” and “Dr. Blood’s Mermaid Lullaby,” it will test listeners’ patience. Anderson’s liner explanation of the composition’s goals and the reasons behind them are illuminating, but the piece still feels like an experimental exercise in minimalism that only partly justifies its grating repetition.

Anderson has her easy moments. The title piece, on which she accompanies Bolotowsky on piano, evokes its subjects’ Arnone delicacy and beauty. And while many of the selections reflect her fascination with John Cage-ian indeterminacy, they’re engagingly playful. The 20-minute “Skate Suite” (for baroque flute, alto recorder, baroque cello, and harpsichord) delights even at its strangest.

For the less-ambitious flute fan, there’s the new release by the Alabama-born, church-reared, smooth-jazz flautist Sherry Reeves. Simply titled Sherry Reeves (CD Baby), the album finds her capably wafting throughout and atop gently sparkling electronic accompaniment.

Her challenge: to disperse the dentistoffice atmosphere that hovers above all but her liveliest rhythms. The highlight: the Latin-tinged, rhythmically lively Reeves “Aqua Verde,” which could qualify her as Tim Weisberg’s (musical) twin sister. A

Email: aorteza@wng.org

8/20/14 11:32 AM

Simon Powis

Reviews > Music

NOTABLE CDs

New or recent classical albums > reviewed by  

A Thousand Thoughts Kronos Quartet Ten of the  tracks on this “compilation” are previously unreleased, so even Kronos completists have surprises in store. Not the eclecticism—“eclectic” would be the quartet’s middle name if it had one.

The jarring nature of the juxtapositions, however, is another matter. The first four tracks alone allege common ground among Swedish folk, American black gospel, Syrian folk-pop, and Vietnamese folk. Go macro and the panorama will astound. Go micro and the Don Walser-sung-yodeled “Danny Boy” will have you grousing, “We get the point.”

Barber’s Adagio for Strings Paul Oakenfold Does the fact that Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings is as over-recorded as Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and therefore ripe for deconstruction justify this techno DJ’s transformation of it into a rave-club fantasia, replete with woofer-rattling sonic devices at glaring odds with the original’s patient subtlety? Well, kind of. Given Walter/Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach, one must remain open-minded. Still,  batteringram mixes feels over-subversive. If they turn benighted ravers on to the original, fine. But nonravers can take a rain check.

Tickle the Minikin: 17th-Century Lyra Viol Music Robert Smith This album’s complete subtitle, as revealed in the liner notes, is “Mysterious lyra-viol music from seventeeth-century Holland & England,” and the key word is “mysterious.” Smith’s recounting (also in the notes) of his investigations into the Manuscript for the Lyra-Viol c., from which most of these  brief pieces come, reads like a musical detective story. More importantly, Smith’s playing, besides emphasizing the richness that a viol with its seventh string removed can express, captures the haunting ineffability of a long-forgotten past.

SPOTLIGHT The Juilliard String Quartet’s Elliott Carter: The Five String Quartets (Sony Classical) stands as the definitive recording of thcentury American (and maybe Western) music’s most rewardingly difficult compositions. One reason is that the quartet worked intimately with Carter to prepare the most faithful reproductions of what he had imagined. Another is that the staggering complexity of what he had imagined is every bit a match for the quartet’s brand-name virtuosity.

Slashing, emotionally taut, driven as much by tempi as by tonality and maybe more, the compositions can be listened to for years with delight by open-minded, untrained listeners without providing or even suggesting vocabulary with which those listeners can explain their delight to colleagues at the water cooler. Similes might help—specifically, the plays of Samuel Beckett, to which the liner notes instructively liken the pieces, and the Jean Cocteau film Le Sang d’un Poète, which got Carter’s wheels spinning on these pieces in the first place. —A.O.

Trio Quelque Chose The two “premiere” recordings, Johann Martin Friedrich Nisle’s Sonata in F Minor, Op.  and Harry Bulow’s “Indiana Dunes,” couldn’t be more different.

The former, composed in the early th century by a relatively obscure German, ripples with early Romantic impulses. The latter, composed three years ago by an Iowan, evokes a striking piece of Midwestern geography with a shifting series of thand st-century styles. What they share is the Trio Quelque Chose’s vigorous sensitivity of execution.

The Koechlin, Piazzolla, and Brahms pieces do too.

SIMON POWIS

FLUTE: ALENAVLAD/SHUTTERSTOCK • MUSICIANS: HANDOUT

Works for Horn, Piano and Violin

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

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8/20/14 11:18 AM

Mindy Belz

Numbers matter

Understaffing the U.S. effort in Iraq from the beginning has cost American lives, created conditions for Iraqi genocide, and threatened global security

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A U.S. soldier in Basra, Iraq, in 

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require ,. It’s been a losing proposition—a war without sufficient soldiers to fight it—ever since.

U.S. deployments to Iraq averaged around , then peaked at , during the troop “surge” of -. By August , less than , U.S. troops remained there—and their mission was focused on training Iraqi forces, not on combat. When President Barack Obama announced the U.S. pullout in , it was near total: The Pentagon counseled keeping , troops on guard, but by Dec.  only  military personnel remained in Iraq, all stationed at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. That’s fewer U.S. troops than are currently stationed in Puerto Rico.

With an expected withdrawal next year in Afghanistan, the sum of postwar U.S. patrol for this century’s conflicts may be whittled to the lowest hundreds—while the deadly results of full-scale retreat escalate by the hour.

We see the results in a terrorist group so sadistic even elements of al-Qaeda have disavowed it, a terrorist group for the first time since / controlling actual territory, now equivalent to the area stretching from Philadelphia to Quebec.

Far from exhausting itself in its six-week offensive in northern Iraq, the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) has picked up newer, more sophisticated weaponry; it is by the estimate of experts better financed than alQaeda before it carried out /; it threatens oilfields; and it proved stealthy enough to heist  pounds of uranium from Mosul University in June. ISIS commander Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been direct about his plans: to establish a base in Iraq (using the beefedup facilities left by U.S. forces) to launch attacks on the West.

In faraway Nigeria, human rights activist Mark Lipdo, eyeing that country’s expanding problem with Islamic terrorists, summed up the gathering storm: “The world’s reluctance in confronting ISIS in northern Syria and Iraq gave minority ethnic and religious people to a monstrous holocaust.”

Two American presidents, dozens of U.S. military commanders, hundreds of members of Congress, and thousands upon thousands of Americans have stood back from the obvious lessons of recent history and the best military science, declaring themselves from the start in favor of doing war on the cheap. Every day the price of that choice rises and the time required to pay it stretches further into the distance. A

NABIL AL-JURANI/AP



W W W II , U.S. troops stayed on to patrol the peace. Ten years after V-E Day in , the U.S. troop deployment level in Germany was ,. Nearly  years after that, , American troops are stationed in Germany today. In Japan the number of U.S. troops on duty stood at , in . Today there are , U.S. military personnel stationed there.

The Korean War armistice was signed in , ending combat if not technically ending the war. U.S. troop deployments  years later: ,. Today the United States has , troops stationed in South Korea, adding another  just this year.

War has changed over those decades, and so has technology, especially when it comes to U.S. air superiority. But ask any military commander, and he or she will argue it still takes manpower to win wars and to keep peace.

If that were not the case, we would not have deployed a half million U.S. military personnel to patrol the th century’s worst armed conflicts a decade on.

Or , over half a century later. I don’t hear Americans complaining about that number.

And it’s hard to argue how much better off Germany, Japan, and South Korea are for the attention—much less how much better off the United States is for decades of postwar security in what once were seedbeds of the world’s bloodiest conflicts, sites of its worst atrocities.

And that brings us to Iraq. In  Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld overruled the military commanders, sending a force of , to carry out a U.S. invasion the Pentagon brass said could

Email: mbelz@wng.org

8/20/14 9:09 AM

Reformed Expository C o m m e n ta ry

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ohn’s Gospel distinguishes itself among the four Gospels by its thorough discussions of single topics and by embedding its teaching material in conversations. Its approach allows for detailed exposition of doctrines and concepts, and also for practical application to the reader’s life.

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His scholarly, sequential study of each passage is ideal help for preparing sermons, while the nontechnical language makes the book suitable for Bible teachers and devotional reading.

AUTHORS Bryan Chapell Daniel M. Doriani Iain M. Duguid Dennis E. Johnson Douglas Sean O’Donnell Richard D. Phillips Philip Graham Ryken Derek W. H. Thomas

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8/11/14 12:05 PM

riskinggenocide

S

As the Islamic State rages from Syria to Iraq, it threatens to wipe out Christians and other religious groups with singular roots in ancient Mesopotamia B by mindy belz

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relief from the heat, said Dagher: “Yes we are getting supplies, but our city is overwhelmed.”

Much of Iraq’s Christian population— halved and halved and halved again since the  U.S. invasion—now finds itself shoved into the Kurdish corner of Iraq with nowhere else to go but cities like Erbil and Duhok, cities isolated from the rest of the country and surrounded by mountains with limited transit routes. War in Syria, hostility in Iran, and a closed border to Turkey all leave the Christians forced from Mosul and Nineveh Plain this summer with next to no options—and so they have crowded into church courtyards, sleeping in streets and parks, living out of tents or on open ground.

Over . million Iraqis have been displaced in three waves of ISIS onslaught starting in January in Anbar Province.

Most brutal was the third wave Aug. - across Nineveh Province: It forced out up to , families, according to the UN, and killed thousands, leading to genocide for Yazidis and other minority populations in Iraq. On

Aug.  the UN declared Iraq a “Level  Emergency,” its highest category for humanitarian crisis.

Despite more recent gains on the ground—made possible by U.S. air strikes in the area starting Aug. —ISIS retains a hold on one-third of Iraq.

Homeless Christians and others have no idea what will happen to them next, where they might go, or how to make a home that’s secure again.

Aid coordinators like Dagher, who is working with Samaritan’s Purse, emphasize the extreme level of relief needed: water, food, milk and diapers for babies, mattresses, pillows, and blankets. Most families who escaped FEW OPTIONS: Displaced Iraqis from the Yazidi community (right) at a camp in Syria; Dagher tends to displaced in Erbil (below).

DAGHER: MO SADJADPOUR • YAZIDIS: KHALID MOHAMMED/AP

S D   in the hot sun for a truck delivering air coolers. It’s  p.m. in Erbil on Saturday, Aug. , and the temperature hangs stubbornly at °F. He needs  air coolers—evaporative cooling units that use fans with water and consume less electricity than air conditioners. He can locate only  but hopes to have a few hundred more trucked in from Iran tomorrow.

“Here in Ainkawa area of Erbil alone we have , displaced—all Christians—and the heat is terrible,” said Dagher, pastor of a Christian and Missionary Alliance Church in Beirut and a church planter who has helped start churches across the Middle East.

The Alliance church in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan region, is working with aid groups to coordinate relief to many made homeless by waves of onslaught across Iraq by ISIS (or ISIL), the Islamic militant group now calling itself the Islamic State. At least one church in Erbil has  people sleeping in its halls. Once mattresses arrived, more spilled out to sleep on dirt or grass outside the church buildings.

Along with air coolers, food, clothing, diapers, mattresses, pillows, and blankets—not to mention housing—are all in short supply. Many of the displaced Christians in Erbil are living in tents outdoors and in buildings under construction. They are surviving with no bathrooms, no running water, no finished windows or doorways, and no

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de

dagher: mo sadjadpour • yazidis: Khalid Mohammed/ap

8/20/14 11:56 AM

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running away and saving lives

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“WE HAVE TO TAKE CARE OF THEM”: Displaced Iraqi Christians settle at St. Joseph Church in Erbil.

ing on the street, he told me by telephone: “There are babies without milk, boys and girls without food, and a whole family here with only one blanket among them.”

Dagher said the hardest part of the unfolding crisis is the number of young people affected. A third of those living outdoors, he estimates, are young children. “You will see newborns, even 3 days old, who have to be put on the ground.

They are crying in the heat, the ants will come and eat on them, and there is really nothing we can do about it.”

B

rutality against Christians heated up in June with the ISIS takeover of Mosul, forcing tens of thousands to flee. June 15 marked the first worship day in 1,600 years when no Mass was said in Mosul, according to Chaldean church leaders. ISIS turned churches into mosques, and on July 24 blew up the tombs long ascribed to the

Old Testament prophets Jonah and Daniel.

Already ISIS held Syria’s northern province of Raqqa. With gains south of Mosul near Baghdad, it declared an Islamic caliphate stretching from northern Syria to eastern Iraq, and declared itself the Islamic State in late July.

Khalid Mohammed/AP

the ISIS grip in Mosul and surrounding areas lost everything, including their homes and any money they had in the bank. Reports have circled the internet of women whose wedding rings ISIS confiscated, babies whose gold earrings the militants removed.

“We have to take care of them or they will not survive at all,” said Yousif Fahmi, a monk who oversees Mar Mattai, a Syriac Orthodox monastery in Nineveh Province.

A fourth-century enclave set in mountains 12 miles east of Mosul, Mar Mattai is under protection of Kurdish forces now, after for a time this summer becoming a safe haven to dozens of families from Mosul and the villages of Nineveh Plain fleeing the ISIS ultimatum to convert or be killed.

Fahmi left the monastery in the care of Kurdish peshmerga to escort many of the families to the city of Duhok further north—where an additional 20,00030,000 Christians are estimated to have taken refuge. But necessities are in short supply and some of those families are liv-

“We slept on the roof as ISIS had cut off the electricity, so it was too hot to sleep inside,” said a mother in her 30s from Mosul. “At 1:30 a.m. shelling started and bombs were flying near our house,” she said.

She and her family went downstairs to get whatever they could take from their house to leave Mosul.

“It was dark, so we used some small lights. We just wanted to run away to save our lives.”

At the ISIS checkpoint, militants took everything from them. The only thing the mother could hide was her wedding ring. She put it in the diaper of her 10-month-old baby.

“We were all crying and upset, especially the girls and the baby,” recalls the mother. “My daughter cried saying, ‘mom, we want our clothes.’” —Open Doors

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8/20/14 11:57 AM

KHALID MOHAMMED/AP

Attacks escalated as ISIS drove out Christians and other minorities from most remaining towns of Nineveh, including Qaraqosh, a city of ,, on Aug. . The same day Islamic State fighters attacked Sinjar, an area of mostly Yazidis, but also home to Christians, Shabaks, and Turkmen.

About , residents took refuge along the Sinjar Mountains, where they became cut off from Kurdish protection.

Many perished there in the first  hours for lack of water. With genocide of the Yazidis a threatening possibility, President Barack Obama authorized air strikes (citing concern for U.S. citizens in the area) and humanitarian aid drops Aug. , and they began the next day. Since that time the United States and the European Union reluctantly have taken a larger role in trying to hold together a tattered Iraq.

On Aug.  Iraq’s president selected Haider al-Abadi to take over as Iraqi prime minister from the long-embattled Nouri al-Malaki, who resigned three days later—a move widely seen abroad as crucial to bringing peace again in Iraq and ending atrocities. On Aug.  Kurdish ground forces assisted by U.S. air strikes retook parts of Nineveh Province, including Mosul Dam, a key facility.

But atrocities continue. Dozens of Christian families remain unaccounted for who lived in the mostly Yazidi area of Sinjar. More than  girls and women from the area “were taken, raped, captured and sold,” reported the Assyrian Aid Society. ISIS executed at least , mostly Yazidi men who refused to convert to Islam and abducted  women, reportedly to Mosul where they could be sold into forced marriages or sex slavery.

Although many Yazidis were escorted

by Kurdish militias to safety in Kurdish territory, ISIS militants executed  men from the Yazidi village of Kocho Aug.  and detained hundreds of women, Kurdish peshmerga commander Ziad Sinjar told The Washington Post.

Yazidis claim to have the world’s oldest religion, one that predates Christianity and Islam. They worship angels, believe in reincarnation, and stick together: Yazidis only marry among themselves and are forbidden to convert others. Experts say about

Email: mbelz@wng.org

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, live in Iraq—and ISIS put to flight perhaps ,. Yazidis also suffered the worst terrorist attack of the Iraq War, when a triple suicide bombing in  killed  of them near the town of Shekhan.

With the latest terrorism, experts agree genocide is a real possibility. “We’re talking about a very real, immediate threat that an entire, ethno-national religious group is wiped off the face of the

Nineveh the Assyrians and Chaldeans for the most part did not. Waves of persecution followed. At the end of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, hundreds of thousands of Assyrian Christians in what’s now northern Iraq perished along with Armenians.

With the Iraq War, Sunni militants under al-Qaeda again targeted Christians—and an exodus from Baghdad, Mosul, and elsewhere sent between , to , north  to Nineveh Plain, 3 Area controlled Dohuk

by ISIS Mosul Dam where they  Cities controlled resettled ancient Tal Afar

by ISIS Qaraqosh Christian vil3 Kurdistan regional Erbil Mosul Sinjar government lages. Around Mountains Area controlled Sulaymaniyah Kirkuk  the

by Kurdish forces Kurdish regional government Baiji  Rawah financed the Tikrit rebuilding of Anah Qaim dozens of Baqubah Euphrates churches (along Ramadi River Walid with schools and Baghdad Rutba Fallujah houses) in those Tigris River Tarbil villages.

Now many of  SOURCES: WALL STREET JOURNAL AND CAPNI those resurrected villages earth,” said David Romano, professor of are empty again. Even with U.S. air Middle East politics at Missouri State power, ISIS believes it can hold the University. “And we’ve already seen once-Christian heart of Iraq. what’s happened to the Christians of “This is a force that is ideologically Mosul. They’ve been there about , motivated, battle hardened and incredyears, since long before Iraq existed, and ibly well equipped,” said Douglas since long before Islam came onto the Ollivant of the New America Foundation, scene. And there’s none left in Mosul.” who served the Obama and Bush administrations on Iraq. “It also runs the equivalent of a state. It has all the  J  C, exile trappings of a state, just not an internaand mass bloodletting on the hot, tionally recognized one.” brittle plains of Nineveh are a Iraq’s Christians have a long history common thread of history. Ancient of learning what to do under an oppresbas-reliefs depict the Assyrian conquest sive state: They continue to worship, to of Mesopotamia with men in skullcaps, help one another, and to pray. Many long assumed by archaeologists to be have told me they have new appreciation captive Jews. In the sculptures the Jews for Kurdish protection, despite tensions carry their children with them, along in managing the crisis. Dagher told me with bowls and skins of water. The worship services are overflowing in women are tearing their hair, throwing Erbil, and he preached on Aug.  for the dust on their heads, and wailing. Some fifth time since his arrival. “The Holy are bound with iron manacles.

Spirit is doing wonderful work among With the arrival of Arab Muslims in the people here,” he said. “Refugees are , pressure to convert to Islam began standing in church and repenting of (similar to Islamic State threat to contheir sins and confessing. Even when vert, pay tax under Muslim law, or they have lost everything, they are “have nothing but the sword”). Many joyful in finding and trusting Christ.” A Arab Christian tribes did convert, but in

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Back to school 2014 finds American education in the midst of yet another expensive revolution

by Marvin Olasky

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Nation at Risk. Goals 2000. No Child Left Behind. Common Core.

Another decade, another trillion

­dollars, another bold approach. Twenty-five years ago our cover story, “Straightening Out American Education,” graphically and graphite-ly showed the crooked path our nation’s schools were on, and ­little has changed since then but the nomenclature and the number of zeroes on budget lines.

The last five years alone of back-to-school issues show the continuing decline. In 2009 we showed how Christian urban schools faced financial hard times. In 2010 we described failing schools and a moving documentary, The Lottery, that showed student and parent frustration. In 2011 a “Money for nothing” story pinched educational fat and a “Looking for integrity” article showed how ­educational administrators cheated on tests.

The continuing stream of bad news got to us, so in 2012 and 2013 we looked harder for the good: Christians joining Teach for America, the continued growth of homeschooling, and the survival of Christian schools. We’ve also, of course, covered the continuing leftward tilt of the National Education Association, the new science curricula that promote Darwinism and diminish local control, and the movement at some colleges to ban Christian groups.

This issue reflects the mixed bag of education news. We start with the latest “new and improved” public-school panaceas—Common Core, online classes—and then look at how Christians in one big city are trying to be a blessing to students in a poor public school. We report on hopes for school choice and Christian schools in Texas and China and compare new attacks on homeschooling with reality.

We conclude with a story on new alternatives to massive student loans.

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Uncommon pushback

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     C C, a national education standard designed to replace state standards. Game, set, match? Not exactly. An odd coalition of opponents, including conservative Republican governors and liberal teachers unions, is pushing back.

Governors like Mike Pence (Indiana), Nikki Haley (South Carolina), and Mary Fallin (Oklahoma) have successfully urged their legislatures to pull their states out of earlier Common Core commitments made by state education boards.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal wants to take his state out of the national standards as well, provoking a conflict with Education Superintendent John White. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker wants his state legislature to pull out.

Other states are calling for delays and second looks, or are abandoning national testing consortiums. Opponents object to the nationalization of education through Common Core.

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Ohio Gov. John Kasich says, “I share the concern about loss of local control.” Teachers unions, for different reasons, don’t like their salaries tied to likely poor student performance on Common Core tests.

Many are skeptical about the latest educational “revolution,” since every other one over the past several decades has failed.

But the heat on this one is unusual—especially since the consensus for Common Core is deeply woven into the educational establishment, from the Obama administration down to curriculum textbook publishers. In Indiana some Common Core critics think the state’s new standards are too close to Common Core, despite a new name.

Behind the scenes, as state after state was considering Common Core, the Gates Foundation (funded by Microsoft’s Bill Gates) was spending well more than  million to promote the Common Core idea. Gates gave grants to liberal and conservative education groups, teachers unions, and the

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LEFT: ASSOCIATED PRESS • RIGHT: KELLY WILKINSON/THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR/AP

With a rebellion growing, Common Core no longer looks inevitable by RUSS PULLIAM

left: associated press • right: Kelly Wilkinson/The Indianapolis Star/ap

U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Then the Obama administration tied the standards to massive federal aid. The result has been an overwhelming financial push for Common Core.

The Gates money also gave Common Core a smooth sail through the checks and balances that usually apply to educational innovation. Sarah Reckhow, an education policy researcher at Michigan State, said, “Usually there’s a pilot test—something is tried on a small scale, outside researchers see if it works, and then it’s promoted on a broader scale. That didn’t happen with Common Core.”

The actual standards also are not written with the eloquence or simplicity of the Declaration of Independence or Gettysburg Address. They are filled with educational jargon, as in this elementary-school example: “They must also be able to determine or clarify the meaning of grade-appropriate words encountered through listening, reading, and media use; come to appreciate that words have skeptical: Stacey nonliteral meanings, shadings Jacobson-Francis works of meaning, and relationships on math homework with to other words; and expand her 6-year-old daughter Luci (left). Stacey said their vocabulary in the her daughter’s course of studying content.” homework requires her The core standards also to know four different have provoked controversy ways to add. “That is way too much to ask of over whether they really raise a first-grader. She can’t the bar for students. Some remember them all, and states like Indiana already I don’t know them all, so had stronger standards. we just do the best that we can,” she said. Below, Sandra Stotsky, a retired signs are raised during a and respected University of rally against Common Arkansas professor, has Core at the Indiana objected to the emphasis on Statehouse.

informational reading in place of classic literature. Other critics think the standards emphasize an abstract approach to math theory in early grades, when students need to be learning multiplication tables. Frustrated parents call it “fuzzy math.”

Homeschoolers worry that Common Core ideas will creep into college entrance exams such as the SAT or ACT. Others express concern about national and state databases of student records.

More controversy emerges once students actually take a test. In New York last spring parents and teachers protested new tests. “I’m not against tough standards,” said teacher Ralph Ratto, a union official. “I’m against these standards.

They have not been tested and have not been researched.”

New York had a grassroots revolt against an untested set of tests. Some critics wanted New York to pull out of Common Core; but instead the state legislature compromised, staying in Common Core but not tying teacher salaries to test results.

In other states, though, conservative governors are listening to activist opponents and pulling out even before students start the tests.

For parents seeking a way out of this controversy, classical schools offer one alternative. These schools don’t worry about new tests or new theories of teaching math or English. They offer Latin in elementary school. They read classics such as The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe in early elementary years, and The Pilgrim’s Progress in junior high.

“Classical education has worked well for thousands of years,” says Andrew Hart, who heads The Oaks Academy in Indianapolis. The school has a 50-50 black-white racial balance and a mix of wealthy and low-income families. Students score well above average on state tests, but standardized tests don’t drive the curriculum or classroom instruction.

One of the leading critics of Common Core has been Terrence Moore, who starts classical schools and has taught history at Hillsdale College. Moore was pulled into the Common Core debate by Indiana opponents and wrote a 263page book, The Story-Killers.

“The Common Core and the textbook editors are replacing the classic stories with postmodern tales of cynicism and ennui,” he writes. “Both the human mind and soul long for greatness, for stories that are good and beautiful and true. If we allow our stories to die, our love of the good and the ­beautiful and the true will die with them.”

For other parents homeschooling offers another way out of the Common Core confusion, and some homeschoolers adopt aspects of classical education. Some parents have another concern, that Common Core is not a neutral attempt to assess academic skills but will open the door to tests that demand conformity to a left-wing or politically correct political agenda.

A couple of years ago Common Core looked inevitable, like the sunrise. Now grassroots opponents are stopping it right and left. The small libertarian-leaning Pioneer Institute in Boston has offered a constant stream of opposition research. Other states are pulling out of testing consortiums. If states go their own way on testing, the common will drop out of any core.

A practical result might be state-controlled education after all. Some states could still try Common Core and its tests, and other states may discover something better. The competition between the states should prove better than a Common Core monopoly on standards and testing. A

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Public school @ home Online charter schools are growing, with growing pains by DANIEL JAMES DEVINE                /      

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   Tristan and Grace Benson live in Hobart, Ind., and are both enrolled in public school. Grace wakes by  a.m., gets dressed, and rides with her mom to be dropped off at her elementary school, where she’s attending third grade this year. Tristan, in th grade, wakes up an hour or so later, eats breakfast, and takes his laptop to his family’s basement rec room, where he dons a headset and logs in to a virtual classroom. He sometimes gets to stay in pajamas.

Tristan, , is one of more than approximately , K- public-school students— less than  percent of the U.S. total—enrolled at a full-time cyberschool. They study subjects like math, biology, Spanish, and U.S. history, watch teachers on webcams, and interact with fellow students, but all from home, using a computer. Since the first online charter school opened in , the number of schools and students has grown steadily, with full-time cyberschool enrollees increasing around  percent in the past five years.

But the speedy growth of online education is meeting some resistance: Full-time public cyberschools, especially, face criticism for low scores and high turnover rates. Internet-based learning is here to stay, but its ultimate role in public education may depend on whether it can overcome performance hurdles.

Tristan’s parents pulled him out of a brickand-mortar public high school after his first freshman semester, when his grades were struggling. “Going from middle school to high school was just hard for him,” largely due to distractions from other students, said Amy Benson, his mother. “He always asked to be homeschooled, but because I worked I thought I’d never have the time.”

The Bensons found a solution in Indiana Connections Academy, an accredited statewide cyberschool based in Indianapolis. It’s technically a public school, so tuition is free to families—along with books and computer headsets. State education funds reimburse Connections Academy for each student. On his laptop, Tristan joins a live virtual class once or

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twice a day, communicating with teachers and other online students through his headset or a chat window. He watches science experiments by video or does them at home (he once made a cardboard roller coaster for a physics lesson).

Amy, currently laid off from a home health job, supervises Tristan when he takes tests, marks lessons as completed, and follows academic progress reports.

Students like Tristan take all their classes online, while other schools have begun offering “blended learning,” where students get instruction partially online and partially in traditional classrooms. Some states allow “course choice,” where public-school students take online classes from outside providers.

Florida, Alabama, and a few other states now require students to take at least one online class in order to graduate.

During the last school year,  states and the District of Columbia permitted fully online, multidistrict public schools. In many cases, for-profit companies, often legally recognized as charter schools, provide the software and curriculum, contracting their services to school @SKL: Amy districts. Connections watches as Tristan participates in a Academy, which runs cyberschool class.

Tristan’s Indiana cyberschool, is the secondlargest such provider after K Inc., an online education company former education secretary William Bennett co-founded in .

K Inc. has enjoyed rapid growth: Its revenue expanded from  million to  million between  and . Last year it operated  schools and enrolled around , students (up from , in ), according to a report from the National Education Policy Center in Boulder, Colo.

“I think we’ve only begun to see the potential of course choice and of online learning,” said Michael Brickman, the national policy director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which advocates for school choice. “You’ve seen technology transform almost every other industry except education.” Brickman wrote a

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report for Fordham suggesting states allow students at traditional brick-and-mortar schools to take online classes from a variety of outside providers, such as the National Geographic Society and Microsoft, where students could learn how to make maps and apps.

Some online public schools are in danger of suspension, though. At Tennessee Virtual Academy, a statewide cyberschool overseen by school district officials in Union County, Tenn., 626 students barely kept their virtual classroom seats this August after the state’s education commissioner, Kevin

Huffman, recommended the school bar the enrollment of any new students. The academy, operated by K12 and enrolling nearly 1,900 students through eighth grade this fall, launched three years ago. But the school’s students have made poor academic marks, achieving a Level 1, the worst rank in the state’s 1-5 rating scale to measure student progress. The Union County school board ultimately voted to let the 626 new enrollees stay, but Huffman said the cyberschool must shut down at the end of the school year unless the students improve their scores dramatically, to a Level 3.

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The National Education Policy Center published a review of online public schools in March and reported (based on available data) only 44 percent of full-time high-school students at public cyberschools graduate on time, compared with the nationwide average of 79 percent. Other reports note turnover rates at some cyberschools have reached 50 percent or more (perhaps involving students who, out from beneath a teacher’s eye, felt unmotivated to log in for class).

The NEPC is calling for policymakers to “slow or stop growth in the number of virtual schools and the size of their enrollment until the reasons for their relatively poor performance have been identified and addressed.”

The scrutiny seems to have made cyberschools media shy: None of the five online education providers I contacted for this story returned phone calls or emails except for Connections Academy, where a media representative failed to arrange an interview with a spokesperson, even after WORLD extended the deadline.

K12 Inc. did not return interview —Amy requests, but the company posts an annual progress report on its website: The 2014 report says state assessment scores for K12 students have dropped during the past three years as the company has grown in size, with only 69 percent of 2012/2013 students performing at or above proficiency levels in reading. Just 47 percent were proficient in math.

K12 says the scores are misleading because many students who enroll in online classes are already struggling academically: “In most states, K12 schools are generally below state performance percentages, which is to be expected given the large number of students entering K12 schools below grade

level,” the report said. The company notes its students’ ­proficiency scores typically improve after three years of enrollment.

Brickman admitted some cyberschools were seeing poor results, but said the solution was for policymakers to hold them to high standards: “Whether you’re talking about a ­virtual school or a traditional school, some get the job done better than others.” Online education is essentially about ­providing all students access to quality courses that may be unavailable at their brick-and-mortar school, he said.

Moms and dads, at least, seem happy.

Among parents of students enrolled at Connections Academy schools, nine out of 10 gave their online school a grade of A or B, and would recommend it to others, according to a survey the company conducted.

Amy Benson described herself as “pretty satisfied” with Tristan’s online program: “You definitely have to be a self-learner to do it. It’s not for everybody.”

Benson During his freshman semester at his brick-and-mortar school, Tristan had received failing grades in four classes. But during his first two semesters at Indiana Connections Academy, he failed only two difficult classes, algebra and Spanish. In his third semester last spring, Tristan passed every subject.

Whether by full-time enrollment or individual courses, online public schooling for parents not seeking Christian ­education seems here to stay. Well, for the most part: The 1,900 students at Tennessee Virtual Academy began cyberschool Aug. 4. If they hope to log in again next August, they’d better pay close, close attention to their webcam teacher this year. A

‘You definitely have to be a self-learner to do it.

It’s not for everybody.’

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Justin Jackson/The Times-News/ap

VIRAL: A teacher with Idaho Virtual Academy at an information event in Twin Falls, Idaho.

Educational software and online private schools, like The Potter’s School, have long been popular learning options for homeschoolers. Families must pay for such services, however, making online public schools—with their taxpayer-paid tuition—an attractive alternative. Anecdotal evidence suggests some families who either homeschooled previously or planned to do so have signed up for the free option.

Cyberschools like K12 haven’t been shy about recruiting them. When the K12-operated Idaho Virtual Academy opened, homeschoolers in the state received glossy, full-color mailings inviting them to join. K12 advertises to homeschoolers on its website as well. They must pay for subject courses unless they enroll as public-school students.

Therein lies the catch: As government schools, public cyberschools use state-approved curriculum. If parents want to teach, for example, accounts of history and science that point to God’s sovereignty and creativity, they must do so on their own time—on top of mandatory cyberschool coursework.

The specter of government intrusion into home-based education has led some advocates of traditional homeschooling to join the public cyberschool critics. The Home School Legal Defense Association on its ­website “strongly cautions homeschoolers against enrolling in virtual charter schools,” and adds it will “not represent students enrolled in full-time charter school programs.” —D.J.D.

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Amy McCullough

Homeschool competition

Lone Star laboratory Texas is likely the next school choice frontier

by AMY McCULLOUGH

JUSTIN JACKSON/THE TIMES-NEWS/AP

AMY McCULLOUGH

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       for students with specific learning disabilities or special needs, but the red state of Texas, oddly, has no laws that give poor parents and children options other than public schools. That seems likely to change in , for three reasons.

First, the state’s lieutenant governor has a lot of power in shaping legislation, and the next lieutenant governor likely will be Republican Dan Patrick, an outspoken school choice advocate who has chaired the state’s Senate Education Committee. The new governor likely will be Attorney General Greg Abbott, who advocates parental choice in education while avoiding using the word jumped on by the educational left, vouchers. (See “Wheeling onto the national stage,” May .)

Second, budget-friendly proposals are now ready.

The influential Texas Public Policy Foundation, for example, advocates “taxpayer savings grants” legislation, essentially a voucher program by a different name. In this program parents who opt in would receive up to , to spend at the public or private school of their choice. (That’s  percent of the annual state spending on operation and maintenance for each public-school pupil.) The estimated savings to the state:  billion in the first two years.

Third, Texas for  years had a large-scale,  million school choice experiment, the Horizon program, in San Antonio’s poor Edgewood school district—and the program worked. The Children’s Educational Opportunity Foundation sponsored the program with money donated by the Walton Family and Covenant foundations. The Horizon experiment was and is nationally significant because it was the first program to be “universal,” offering vouchers to all public-school students residing within a particular school district. Edgewood district families were eligible for vouchers they could use at any secular or religious private school, or at a public school outside the district.

At the height of the program (that tapered in its last years due to funding limitations) more than , students— percent of district enrollment—used vouchers, and almost all did so at private schools. The state spent , for each Edgewood public-school student, but Horizon elementaryschool participants received vouchers of , for private schools located within the district, and high-school students received vouchers of ,. (Voucher amounts for out-ofdistrict public schools were lower.)

The academic effects were notable: The college attendance rate of Horizon graduates was  percent in  and 

percent in . One hundred percent of Horizon parents said the program had “positively impacted the development of their voucher-using children a lot”(emphasis added because if they were only mildly impressed they could have checked off “a little”). In addition, the community gained economically: People moved into the school district, property values went up, and new businesses opened.

Horizon also led to the opening of new schools, including the voucher-using Christian Academy of San Antonio, which opened in August . Reclaimed from an old grocery store and strip mall, CASA still operates on the edge of Edgewood

and is easily one of the nicest-looking facilities for blocks.

When Horizon ended, the Covenant Foundation stepped in to keep CASA alive, and about  percent of its current student population receives scholarships: Cost is , per year for elementary and middle-school students and , per year for high-school students.

Horizon showed that a voucher program could improve educational achievement, save the state money, improve test scores of the local public-school district, and have a positive economic impact on the area. But those concerned with maintaining the same amount of state funding at individual schools view Horizon negatively: Individual Edgewood public schools ended up with less money overall, because they experienced a net loss of students.

Those with a financial interest in maintaining the status quo typically fund opposition to school choice. A —Amy McCullough is a Texas journalist

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Portland public Seeking the peace of a very liberal city by helping to rejuvenate a deteriorating school

by RACHEL LYNN ALDRICH in Portland, Ore.    /   /

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 H S      of Portland, but the beautiful brick building, surrounded by trees and a well-maintained lawn, projects a safe and well-ordered atmosphere. That hasn’t always been

the case.

Seven years ago, a lawn overgrown by weeds and a derelict track suggested deeper struggles, and Roosevelt was on a list of potential closures. It was the school where parents did not want their children.

Seven years ago SouthLake Church, located in West Linn, an affluent Portland suburb, also had a problem. Many members wanted to help the poor not in the abstract, not just by sending checks, but through personal commitment. Many were tired of seeing Christians depicted as the people who were always against something.

Luis Palau was already a well-known name in Portland: His evangelism-oriented festivals, featuring speakers and music, had been drawing large crowds to the city’s waterfront since . But Luis and his son Kevin, who is now president of the Luis Palau Association, wanted to serve too, and not only preach. (See “Pioneering Palaus,” June , .)

Roosevelt seemed a perfect place to start.

When SouthLake Pastor Kip Jacobs received Kevin Palau’s call to help Roosevelt, he did more than say yes. He requested that his church take over the project. Palau said that was fine, as long as the church could start by fielding a few hundred people for a cleanup day. When the day came, around , church members showed up to landscape, clean, and wash windows.

But that would have been just a gesture, apart from what followed. Church member Kristine Sommers began working with the Roosevelt staff to see whether SouthLake could help in other ways. Some were material: Clothing donations to expand Roosevelt’s clothes closet. Restarting the school’s food pantry. Then came tutoring and mentoring. Sommers soon occupied full-time office space at Roosevelt to help coordinate the influx of volunteers from the church.

Some programs have flopped. Three years ago SouthLake planned to launch a mentorship program with the entire freshman class. The church had plenty of enthusiastic volunteers, but a lack of preparation, communication, and training sunk the big idea. But other projects—a barbecue at the football

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team’s homecoming game, a renovation of the school’s track, tutoring—worked.

Support in noneducational areas allow teachers and students to focus on studies.

Seven years ago, it was difficult to interest Roosevelt girls in the biggest city event of the year, the Rose Festival.

They saw Rose Festival princesses as blond, blue-eyed, and rich. But SouthLake mentors talked with Roosevelt girls about etiquette, true value, and self-esteem. They helped the girls with their hair, makeup, and dresses.

Today, Roosevelt is the place to be to see the princess crowned.

For the past few summers, SouthLake has had barbecues for the community on the Roosevelt lawn. The church provides food, live music, and face painting for the community. This summer, other local churches from Roosevelt’s neighborhood have stepped in to take turns hosting the barbecue.

A new, smaller pilot mentorship program with the football team is beginning this semester. The new mentorship program divides the students into small groups, with about six students per mentor, to focus on the church’s strongpoint—building relationships. While they hope to expand the program in the future, focusing in on the football team allows the church to focus on training and matching the mentors carefully.

The results of the combined effort are evident. Between  and  reading scores went up by  percent and math scores by . percent. Four-year graduation rates have jumped  percent over the last three years. Enrollment is up  percent, setting the school up for sustained growth.

The success at Roosevelt has led to similar church-school partnerships in other parts of the state:  schools in  school districts are now involved. Local governments are

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accepting help from churches in other ways as well. About 75 evangelical churches in the Portland metropolitan area serve in the foster system through a program called Embrace Oregon.

Churches partner with the state Department of Human Services to clean up the often run-down offices where ­foster kids come, and to make welcome packets for them.

Kevin Palau recalls how he went into a DHS office and explained that the churches were grateful for the work DHS staffers are doing. He asked how church members could help make the staffers’ jobs easier. The woman at the desk burst into tears: No one had ever expressed gratitude or asked that question before.

Palau says that if the evangelical community can work with city leaders in one of America’s most liberal cities, they can do it anywhere. He’s worked with Sam Adams, the openly gay former mayor of Portland. Both were nervous at their first meeting, and personal commitment: SouthLake Church members gardening and cleaning at Roosevelt High School in Portland.

Adams says he received pushback from the LGBT community in Portland at first, but it died as people realized evangelicals were willing to serve alongside them, not just preach at them.

Both men are quick to acknowledge the unlikely nature of their cooperation. They’ve had conversations about topics where they strongly disagree, including homosexuality. Adams describes Palau’s views as “thoughtful and deeply held.” Palau recognizes some evangelicals believe they should concentrate only on strengthening Christian schools and homeschools, but with 90 percent of children in public schools, those are places to demonstrate the love of Christ.

He says, “With our city leaders in Portland we’ve always been clear: We genuinely ask, ‘How can we serve?’ No strings attached. At the same time we always say, ‘As evangelicals, our joy is to share the Good News, and we’re looking for chances to do that.’ In public schools during school hours it’s not the time to hand out tracts and preach, but we build relationships and open doors.” A —Rachel Lynn Aldrich is a WORLD intern

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Risks and rewards

Amid limited resources and a hostile government, a Chinese Christian school movement is growing

by JUNE CHENG in China



   /

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A

fter service on Sunday at a large house church in China, congregants gathered in the sanctuary to share their thoughts about the sermon they had heard. One woman stood up and expressed her gratitude to American missionaries John and Betty Stam, who were murdered by Communist Chinese soldiers in 1934 while bringing the gospel to the Chinese people. “We used to see [Communist General] Fang Zhimin as a hero, but now I ­realize that he killed so many people,” she said. “It makes me wonder how much of what we learned in school was incorrect.”

It’s this distrust of the government-controlled public-school system, along with general critiques of Chinese education’s grueling test-driven instruction and cut-throat competition, that has brought a quandary to the growing number of new Christian parents: How can we obey God’s Word to raise up our children in the way of the Lord in an education system hostile to that message?

Unlike American Christians who may send their children to public school, Christian or other private school, or teach them at home, Chinese Christians have only one legal option: state-run public school. Classes often span six days a week, stretching from the early morning to 7 or 9 at night, then compounded with tutoring, homework, and studying. The pinnacle of education is to score well on the gaokao, an annual college entrance exam that dictates a student’s college prospects, thus his or her future career. As most Chinese parents only have one child, it becomes all the more important to ensure their children do well and get high-paying jobs, so they can one day take care of their aging parents.

But a batch of brave souls are bucking the status quo by creating their own education options, in some cases homeschooling their children, opening Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) schools that use a self-paced English Christian curriculum, or starting Christian schools within their house church. The risks are high, as alternative schools could be shut down at any time, and the results are uncertain, as Christian schools lack accreditation. Yet for many Christian parents, it’s a risk worth taking.

“We felt we had no other choice,” said Matthew Su, who started a classical Christian school at Early Rain Reformed Church in Chengdu. “We couldn’t bear to send our kids to any other type of school.” (The relatively few parents who defy China’s one-child policy also have little choice: Second and third children often don’t have household registration and aren’t allowed to attend public schools.)

The exact number of unregistered Christian schools is unknown, although one person in China familiar with the issue said a conservative estimate puts the number in the 200 to 300 range. Some of these schools consist of a handful of students meeting in an apartment, while more established schools have more than 100 students gathering together. Yet the movement is in its infancy, with most schools open for less than 10 years, and it faces numerous roadblocks ahead.

Two big challenges arise even before BIG CHALLENGES: A young girl learns to children step into the building: Finding read the Bible at a teachers and finding curriculum to registered church in teach. As many in the Chinese church the Zhejiang province. are first-generation believers, most Unregistered Christian schools did not allow have only experienced public-school photographs. education and few understand how to incorporate a Christian worldview into the classroom. Public-school teachers are often well-paid and must take a significant pay cut to join church schools, which often run on donations and meager tuition dollars. To combat the lack of experience, a couple of organizations have developed Christian teacher trainings, borrowing from the experience of veteran overseas educators. Trainings vary from weekend workshops to year-long programs, with one group providing instruction at a master’s degree level.

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During the bilingual school’s first year, neighbors reported the school to authorities, who sent over officers to threaten the school. But by the grace of God, co-founder Jerry Wolfe* said, the school was able to stay open and eventually moved to a new location where it continued unmolested. Other schools report similar stories: One school closed down, moved, and reopened eight times in five years.

Even as schools survive government harassment, an ­ominous question looms over parents and teachers alike: What happens when students graduate?

While graduates may have better language and critical thinking skills than their public-school peers, the schools are not recognized by the government, so students are barred from taking the gaokao or getting into college. Without a college degree, students are relegated to a life of low-paying jobs.

Students from well-to-do families can take the SAT to test into Christian colleges in America. But leaving the country has a hefty price tag, and a growing number of students clamor for spots at these Christian schools each fall. Su’s school is putting together its own college, and the church already has a ­seminary that students could attend. Another group of Christian educators is working to start a Christian university, noting that this could also be a way to train the next batch of Christian schoolteachers.

Some are touting vocational schools that will help students start their own businesses when they graduate.

Others hope and pray that the government will have a change of heart and legitimize religious SU: “If what the Bible says is true, schools by the time their children gradthen the only way uate, as Confucian and Buddhist schools to change and are also gaining steam. And it’s not only grow and find truth Christians frustrated with the lack of is through Christ.

Then Christian school choice: A 2013 McKinsey report education is the found a “growing concern, among parreal education.” ents, employers, and policymakers alike, that the emphasis on rote learning and high-stakes exam taking does not foster the mental agility and innovative flair that the 21st century economy will need.”

Yet until things change, Wolfe is preparing his students for all their future options by partnering with Veritas’ accredited online program to provide students with diplomas. It’ll be at least five years before the school graduates its first class, and he realizes there’ll be plenty of other unexpected hurdles before then.

“One thing that is known is that God is going to work in the lives of the parents who have stepped out in faith into that [educational] void,” Wolfe said. “He’s equipping them to make more risky steps in terms of bringing faith into the public square. … Those kids are going to have a huge role in what God does in China.” *name changed to protect security

June Cheng

Yet for Peter Johnson*, who works at one of these training centers, the bigger deficit is the lack of Chinese curriculum.

Some schools translate material from English sources, such as Veritas Press, a producer of classical Christian curriculum.

Others use public-school curriculum for subjects like math, then create their own curriculum for other subjects. Many schools start with only kindergarten or first grade, and write curriculum as they add on new grades. “What’s needed,” Johnson says, “is an indigenous curriculum in China, by the Chinese, for the Chinese.”

At Su’s school, teachers use material from Veritas Press in the three grades they’ve started last year. The school follows the classical Christian education model—based on grammar, logic, and rhetoric—because Su believes “if what the Bible says is true, then the only way to change and grow and find truth is through Christ. Then Christian education is the real education.” From a young age, students learn not only Chinese and English, but also biblical Hebrew and Greek so they can better understand the Bible and one day become leaders in seminaries and house churches.

Yet there’s material Su wants to teach that just doesn’t exist yet. “One thing that has not yet been done is [a ­curriculum] looking at Chinese history through a Christian lens,” Su said. “This is something that we hope to do down the line, to see Christianity’s influence on our culture.” He plans to write textbooks that can be used among schools around the country.

Teachers at Su’s school all have advanced degrees in their fields and spent time in the church’s seminary, an anomaly in the burgeoning Christian school movement. Yet still they’ve faced difficulties starting a brand-new school with few existing resources. None of the founders have experience running a school, and once the school year started, the middle-school teachers found that their own education was lacking. Taking the issues in stride, they’ve had to teach themselves the ­material before turning to teach the students. Also parents unfamiliar with any type of Christian education constantly approach Su and the faculty with questions and concerns about their children.

One bilingual Christian school in eastern China ensures that its students receive an education academically on par with local public schools by using the same curriculum to teach math and Chinese, as well as preparing their students to pass tests like the gaokao, even if they aren’t allowed to take it in the future. For other subjects, the school uses Veritas material, along with science and fine arts curricula written by a group of Christian educators in China. The school, which is not affiliated with any specific house church, started with about a dozen students three years ago and has now grown to 120 students.

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Homeschool debate How to keep a few bad apples from spoiling the bushel by DANIEL JAMES DEVINE

S

JUNE CHENG

    are speaking out against what they consider an abusive or neglectful upbringing. Last year they began posting their stories on a website called Homeschoolers Anonymous, alleging mistreatment from parents ranging from sexual molestation to what they describe as “spiritual abuse.” The stories vary widely, but echo a common charge: Homeschooling, they claim, gave their parents opportunity to abuse, “brainwash,” or neglect them.

One of those former students, Heather Doney, , co-founded the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE) to advocate increased state regulation of homeschoolers. Doney worries her home state of Louisiana, for example, allows homeschooling households to operate with little accountability. “My parents registered as a private school, and no one ever checked on us again,” she said.

She has reason for concern. She still counts on her fingers and double-checks the tip she leaves on restaurant tables. As the oldest of nine children, she remembers growing up homeschooled and being the only child who could read: Her sister next in age didn’t become proficient until she turned .

Doney had all she could stand at  years old when a neighborhood boy ridiculed her inability to multiply or divide. “Ha, ha!” he laughed. “You’re going to spend your life flipping burgers!” She pleaded to her grandparents for help, and they began tutoring Doney.

Her mother, Sandra Doney, agrees their home environment was neglectful and abusive in some ways, and said Heather “got the brunt of it, being the oldest one. … In trying to do the right thing, I probably overdid some of the discipline. … There was just a lot of emotional turmoil.” Heather Doney’s parents are now divorced, and she admits that “the average homeschooling family is fine. … I’m looking at [families] who are doing terrible things in the name of homeschooling, hiding behind homeschooling to do it.” That’s what her Homeschooling’s Invisible Children’s website documents: criminal cases of neglect and abuse.

The existence of such cases, and the growing reach of the anti-homeschooling websites, raises questions that homeschooling defenders are primed to answer. Educational neglect? Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute in Salem, Ore., said most studies by dozens of researchers since  show the average homeschooler scoring in the th to th percentile on standardized tests.

(The national school average is the th percentile.)

What about abuse? The Health and Human Services “Child Maltreatment ” report noted that . percent of U.S. children were involved in abuse investigations in . A 

study from the U.S. Department of Education found about  percent of eighth- to th-grade public-school students claiming a fellow student, teacher, or school employee had touched or contacted them in a sexual manner, without their consent.

Yet only . percent of Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) members called for help in dealing with child protective services investigations—sometimes for issues as trivial as a messy house or a missed paperwork filing deadline. That figure isn’t scientific, but it suggests abuse and neglect is far less common among homeschoolers.

Nevertheless, stories on the Homeschoolers Anonymous website brim with pain, anger, and bitterness. Many posts are anonymous, making the accounts hard to verify, but organization co-founder Ryan Stollar told me by email, “We are creating a growing community of misfits, survivors, and allies.” One series of posts titled “Homeschoolers Are Out” spotlights homeschool graduates who have declared themselves to be gay or transsexual. He said his organization “enthusiastically supports” homeschooling as long as it is “used responsibly.”

One of Homeschoolers Anonymous’ biggest targets is the Virginia-based HSLDA—homeschooling’s top ally since .

Last year Homeschoolers Anonymous launched an online campaign that claimed the organization’s defense of homeschool parents had weakened child abuse investigations. It called on HSLDA to tell its , member families how to recognize and report abuse, and HSLDA did add a section to its website defining child abuse and outlining how to address it.

HSLDA has long seen less government regulation of homeschoolers as best for parents and students—but in January Stollar and  other homeschool alumni traveled to Richmond, Va., to vocalize their support for House Joint Resolution No. , a measure to re-evaluate the state’s religious exemption from compulsory education. HSLDA leaders were also in Richmond to lobby—against the resolution.

“It’s obvious to me that homeschool parents love their kids and don’t want to abuse them,” said J. Michael Smith, president of HSLDA. “The reason they’re homeschooling is because they don’t want to neglect their child’s education.”

Both Smith and Darren Jones, a staff attorney at the organization, agreed that abuse and neglect cases do exist within some homeschooling families, but argue their number is small. HSLDA staffers call them “fake homeschoolers.”

CRHE’s homeschool policy guidelines are aimed at tightening overall regulation of homeschoolers so as to catch families that might go awry. Among the recommendations: Homeschool students should be academically tested or assessed each year by mandatory reporters; homeschool parents should have GED or high-school diplomas; and parents

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convicted of child abuse or sexual offenses should be barred from homeschooling.

HSLDA agreed with some recommendations but strongly opposes expanding ­mandatory reporting or mandatory annual testing. Attorney Jones acknowledged that some families have used homeschooling as a shield, but stressed, “We have always taken the position that the homeschool community should deal with that.”

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homeschooling: Charlie Neibergall/ap • Doney: Krista Guenin/Genesis

HOME RUN: The Romeike family fought the German government for the right to homeschool (see “Schools of thought,” May 4, 2013). Heather Doney of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (left) says “the average homeschooling family is fine,” but hers was not.

at Risk in Idaho: “You don’t need regulations, I think you need more informed investigations.” He said ICHE helped improve those investigations in 2008 by drafting, in cooperation with the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, investigation guidelines for child protective services workers dealing with homeschool families.

The Idaho experience suggests the homeschool community could find ways to help identify ­problem cases, however rare, while minimizing government interference. For Doney, it’s an important first step for people to simply acknowledge that stories like hers exist: “There’s been a culture of child abuse denialism within homeschooling.” Jones, the HSLDA attorney, said he recognizes some in the Homeschoolers Anonymous community didn’t have a great experience growing up. “I feel ­terrible for them. I don’t think that’s a reason to crack down on all 2 million kids who are being homeschooled across the U.S.” A

homeschooling: Charlie Neibergall/ap • Doney: Krista Guenin/Genesis

The role of churches

Recent events in Idaho suggest homeschoolers might be able to police their own. Barry Peters, the president of the Idaho Coalition of Home Educators, said his organization had established a cooperative relationship with child welfare ­officials: Under a protocol initiated 14 years ago, whenever officials from the state e ­ ducation department received a report of e ­ ducational neglect involving a homeschool family, they forwarded the tip to ICHE, which investigated each case and reported back to state officials. But from 2000 to 2004 in Idaho, state officials logged only 15 such tips, and further investigation revealed the claims were groundless, mistaken, or didn’t satisfy legal definitions of neglect.

The education department canceled the protocol arrangement with ICHE in 2006, apparently because of the lack of legitimate reports. “There are very few cases of educational neglect that come out,” said Kirt Naylor, a child advocate attorney and chair of the Governor’s Task Force on Children

Bill Roach, the president of Christian Home Educators of Colorado (CHEC), has served on the organization’s board for the past eight years. He hasn’t spent all that time attending a traditional church: A few years after he started homeschooling the first of his five children in 1991, Roach left his Baptist church and began meeting on Sundays with several other families committed to home education and family discipleship.

They met in homes, sang hymns and contemporary ­worship songs (often a cappella), and set up a lectern for the dads, who preached on a rotating basis. They had no formal leadership: When the men set out to appoint elders, they broke up over various disagreements, including whether debt was permissible. Roach left the group in 2007 and has since returned to a formal church setting—an Orthodox Presbyterian church in Elizabeth, Colo., where he serves as an elder.

Roach now regrets the autonomous nature of his former house fellowship: “It got a little bit too independent. … In some ways it was just family first,” without respect for the authority of the church, he said. Israel Wayne, an apologetics speaker who meets thousands of homeschool families ­annually at conferences, often hears from students and graduates asking his advice about family battles concerning teenage dating and video games. He often asks disaffected youths if they’ve talked to the elders in their church: “Almost inevitably, they tell me no,” either because they don’t feel safe discussing family issues at their church, or because they aren’t attending one.

Thankfully, in recent years homeschool leaders have ­recognized the problem of church disconnectedness and are working to correct it. At CHEC’s state conference in June, Voddie Baucham, a homeschooling pastor and Gospel Coalition council member, gave a keynote address titled “Why Your Family Needs the Church.” —D.J.D.

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Good credit Competency-based programs offer college credentials without the debilitating cost

by EMILY SCHEIE

J

               /      

 B   . He was director of admissions at a private, liberal arts college and was watching students take on unsustainable debt to attend college. “I would be making a living off of asking people to make what I would consider a bad financial decision,” he explained.

Brush was right about the debt problem. The Institute for College Access and Success reports that seven of   college graduates borrowed money to complete their degrees, owing on average ,.

Student loan debt is now more than . trillion, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Students, parents, college officials, and policymakers are now examining economical alternatives to the traditional four-year diploma.

Competency-based programs are one alternative. They award college credit for learning done outside of traditional college classes that meet for a set number of weeks. In competency-based programs, students can work as quickly as they want and receive credit for a course whenever they pass an assessment test or project. Although programs differ in particulars, they all measure learning rather than time, says Robert Mendenhall, president of Western Governors University, an online, competency-based school. WGU awarded its first degree in  and now has about , students who pay a flat rate—about , for most degree programs—every six months.

For Nicholas Lotts, , WGU has been a time- and cost-effective way to work toward a bachelor’s degree in information technology while keeping his full-time job. He earned a traditional associate’s degree right out of high school, but some classes were so tedious he would “literally fall asleep in class” because he knew the material from tinkering with computers on his own. With WGU’s model, he said, “I’m not going over or rehashing stuff that I’m already familiar with.” For example, Lotts discovered his job training in retail management had taught him much of the material in his organizational behavior class, so he only studied for about  days before taking the test.

For harder classes, he has learned from WGU course mentors, his own outside sources, and even his colleagues in the University of Cincinnati’s IT department: “I work with other experts.”

The average age of WGU’s student body is , but many recent high-school graduates are also foregoing the classroom. Jonathan Brush left his position in college admissions and took a job with CollegePlus, which uses one-on-one coaching to help students create



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their own paths to college degrees. For an average of $24,000, ­students earn their degrees through accredited universities—Thomas Edison State College, Liberty University, Moody Bible Institute—­ collecting credits primarily through a combination of tests and online classes.

Christos Dimoulis, 21, used CollegePlus to earn his history degree from Thomas Edison. He paid about $15,000 total and is beginning law school at Loyola University debt free.

Dimoulis earned the majority of his college credits through College Level Examination Program (CLEP) tests, developed by the College Board, and DANTES Subject Standardized Tests (DSST), ­originally offered to military service members. The tests cost as little as $80 each and Dimoulis used internet resources and college textbooks from the library to prepare. Every two to three weeks he’d take another exam and “just keep racking up the credits.”

Dimoulis said no one at the law firm where he interned or the county circuit courthouse where he aided and shadowed a judge ever looked down on his method of education. In fact, he believes his way of earning a degree gave him an edge when applying for law school: “They’re looking for unique people who have unique experiences.”

Still, convincing people to embrace this new educational path may be difficult. A 2013 Gallup-Lumina poll showed that almost a third of Americans believe a job candidate’s alma mater is very important.

Contrast that with the views of business leaders: Only 9 percent of them agreed. That seems to support CollegePlus co-founder Woody Robertson’s view that businesses don’t care where you’ve learned: “They will want proof that you Dimoulis: actually have learned it.” “[Law schools Dimoulis said earning a degree the unconvenare] looking for unique people tional way “requires an incredibly regimented who have unique and organized student,” traits also important in experiences.” law school and the workforce. Brush agrees. He says the ability to find, evaluate, and master information quickly in order to pass tests translates into the problemsolving skills required by a rapidly shifting workplace.

Competency-based programs may not offer much help to students who need specialized training. Kaitlyn Rawlings used CollegePlus to earn an English degree, but at 22 she is studying acting at Northern Kentucky University. She says she needs more training than she can get in community theater if she wants to pursue her interest in Christian theater and film. By living at home and working multiple jobs, including dressing up as Disney princesses for birthday parties, she is trying to graduate with no loans.

Traditional colleges will continue to offer four years of living with others and interacting in classrooms, and those that distinguish themselves from the crowd will survive. Traditionalists might not think much of Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tenn., which last December became the first university to award credit for badges based on the Polaris Competency Model, which assesses skills like active listening, organization and planning, and conflict management.

Students can earn up to 30 credit hours from the initial, eight-hour assessment.

“Thirty credits?” Some professors will wax sarcastic, but others will remind them about 30 credit hours gained from half-listening to lectures while text-messaging, passing multiple choice tests, and making sports events and parties the centerpieces of the semester.

With employers increasingly skeptical about the results of generic education, many colleges will change or die. A —Emil Scheie is a teacher and WORLD intern

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8/15/14 10:37 AM

Notebook Lifestyle > Technology > Science > Houses of God > Sports

Game changer Gamechurch is seizing opportunities to reach the gaming community Angela Lu

by Angela Lu

>>

On a hot July afternoon, young people in bright wigs and elaborately hand-sewn costumes filled the Los Angeles Convention Center. For one weekend, Japanese anime characters came to life as 60,000 participants at the annual Anime Expo primped and posed as characters they had painstakingly recreated.

Outside the center, bright yellow signs bobbed with the messages “The Wages of Sin Is Death” and “Eternal Life in Jesus” as a

Download WORLD’s iPad app today; details at wng.org/iPad

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Hispanic man shouted into a loudspeaker.

Most people passed by without a glance, as one man wearing a T-shirt with the image of a marijuana leaf held up his own homemade sign that read “God is a LIE.” Inside, though, anime devotees crowded around a booth with a blown-up image of Jesus holding an Xbox controller.

That Gamechurch EXPANDING booth, sandwiched THE BORDERS: between others selling Gamechurch at Anime Expo.

Pokemon toys and bigeyed anime posters, ­featured volunteers telling each passerby that Jesus loves them just the way they are, dyed-pink hair and kitten ears included.

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Notebook > Lifestyle



WORLD • SEPTEMBER 6, 2014

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ALL THINGS: group is T-shirt; planting seeds Gamechurch at these contradeshow ventions: One table. young man emailed to say he read the “gamer bible” on the airplane ride home, gave it to the person sitting next to him who seemed interested, and was emailing Gamechurch to ask for another copy.

Gamechurch also aims to minister to people through the context of relationship–in this case the camaraderie built from fighting monsters or protecting each other from enemy fire. Online multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft group strangers together to fight battles, and Brian Buffon, director of Gamechurch, said the time spent together in the game builds trust so that when a teammate goes through a difficult time such as a breakup, they can turn to him for support, creating an opening to talk.

Christian video game developers have been trying to bring Christ into the industry—mostly to tap the large Christian market—since the s, often by ripping off popular games and adding a biblical twist with titles such as Spiritual Warfare, the Left Behind series, and even Dance Praise. But with the rise of indie developers, more Christian developers have the freedom to create games that aren’t as overtly Christian, but are intertwined with a Christian worldview.

For instance, developer Ryan Green has created a buzz in the past year with

his game That Dragon, Cancer, an autobiographical empathy game that follows Green as he deals with his son Joel’s losing battle with cancer from age  to age . Green started creating the game with developer Josh Larson two years ago as an artistic way to sort out his feelings. In one level of the game, players take on Green’s point of view and find themselves inside of an ICU hospital room with a crying son in the crib, unable to be consoled. Through words on the screen and voice-overs, players hear the thoughts of helplessness running through Green’s mind, until the only option left is to sit down and pray—and the crying finally stops.

Reviewers from secular publications who tested the early demo of That Dragon, Cancer, praised the game, many leaving with tears in their eyes as they recalled loved ones they’d seen in that position. Green wrote that as a Christian game developer he had “the power to limit choice, to bend the player’s knee in prayer, to create a black and white world in which the pillars of faith can be crammed down their throat in megabyte-sized chunks. If I did that, then I would not be much like the one person in history I desire to emulate.” A

T-SHIRT: HANDOUT • POSTER: ANGELA LU

Gamechurch is a ministry reaching gamers right where they are by attending “nerd culture” conventions and running a video game news website. At Anime Expo, its volunteers passed out lanyards with the words “Jesus loves gamers” in block letters and more than , “gamer bibles” (the book of John with gamer-aimed commentary) that delve deeper into the gospel message.

Christians now have a small piece of a  billion video game industry that caters to tens of millions of Americans: The average age of gamers is , and nearly half are women.

The games themselves cover a wide range: Not just relegated to first-person shooters or role-playing fantasies, a new crop of empathy games artfully tell interactive stories about difficult topics like depression, autism, and poverty.

They are big business: Grand Theft Auto V, a raunchy crime-riddled game, cost a reported  million to make, and took in  billion in merely three days.

Many churchgoers have a negative view of video games; too violent and too sexual, which many are. But video games have as much variety as movies, which few Christians now boycott, and each highly involved game displays a worldview. Christian gamers see video games as opportunities for parents to bond with their children and for Christians to bond with nonbelievers.

At Gamechurch’s Anime Expo booth, most people were curious and inquisitive, some saying that even though they don’t agree with Christianity, they appreciate what Gamechurch is doing.

Some signed up for email updates in exchange for a poster of Jesus stylized like a warrior from the film .

A few passersby snickered but none expressed hostility. “How do you argue with ‘Jesus loves you’ and free stuff?” asked Chris Gwaltney, Gamechurch’s missions coordinator. “He loves you right now, you don’t have to shower first.” Founder Mikee Bridges, a former alt-Christian rocker who went on to open a skate park, PC gaming center, and now Gamechurch, believes the

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Download WORLD’s iPad app today; details at wng.org/iPad 8/18/14 9:45 AM

Raising Kids To Do Hard Things" 2014 National Tour with Gregg Harris"

A “wisdom workshop” for dedicated parents, grandparents & teenagers!

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T-SHIRT: HANDOUT • POSTER: ANGELA LU

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8/14/14 3:35 PM

Notebook > Technology

Internet for everyone

Project to spread web access could speed up growth in Africa By Michael Cochrane

>>

68

WORLD • September 6, 2014

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But those who applaud this experiment in economic development point out that simply providing a communications network in countries without one contributes to economic growth.

Leonard Waverman of the London Business School studied GDP growth in developing countries and showed that adding just 10 more mobile phones per 100 people increases average annual per capita GDP growth by more than half a percent.

The Internet.org initiative is in keeping with the economic development principles advocated by the late Nobel Prize–­ winning economist Friedrich von Hayek, who believed empowering people from the bottom up created greater economic opportunity. Hayek’s approach to development is discussed in the recent book by NYU economics Professor William Easterly entitled, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor. That book is WORLD magazine’s 2014 book of the year in the analysis category.

While Facebook, Airtel, and other internet-based companies hope these emerging markets will lead to more business and many criticize their motives, Zuckerberg deserves credit for taking up this important challenge and putting his money where his mouth is.

“If we were just focused on making money, the first billion people that we’ve connected have way more money than the rest of the next six billion combined,” said Zuckerberg. “It’s not fair but it’s the way that it is. And we just believe that everyone deserves to be connected and on the internet, so we’re putting a lot of energy towards this.” A

globe: tonivaver/istock • Zuckerberg: Jeff Chiu/ap

A simple smartphone app may become the key that unlocks economic development potential for dozens of underdeveloped nations. Last month the nonprofit organization Internet.org released an app that provides free internet data access to a set of core services for people in Zambia. The Internet.org app is being launched in partnership with cellular carrier Airtel, and will provide users with free mobile web access to services such as Google and Wikipedia, along with health information websites and online job listings.

The app will also include a free version of Facebook and its Messenger app, which is not surprising since Facebook is one of the founding backers of Internet.org along with Nokia, Ericsson, and several other leaders in mobile internet.

Internet.org is the brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s young CEO, who has made it a personal challenge to bring internet connectivity to the 70 percent of the world’s population currently without it.

“Getting access to the internet is a really big deal,” said Zuckerberg during a CNN interview last year about Internet. org. “I think we’re going to be able to do it.”

According to Internet.org’s director of product management, Guy Rosen, only 30 percent of the world’s population accesses the internet, however more than 85 percent lives in areas with existing cellular coverage. Many more people could access the internet but aren’t—­ primarily because they either can’t afford the data plans for their mobile phone, or they don’t really understand the Web and what it could do for them.

Reaction to Internet. org’s launch in Zambia has been mostly positive, but there are critics. One commentator described the rollout as “a Facebook growth tactic masquerading as altruism.” Others have complained that it creates a new kind of digital divide—with essentially a separate internet for poor people. Other critics say that having one portal for internet access in a country violates the tenets of so-called net neutrality.

Visit our website—wng.org—for breaking news and more

8/20/14 9:28 AM

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8/18/14 9:48 AM

Notebook > Science

Green light, red alert Is an expedited approval process putting unsafe medications on the market? BY JULIE BORG

>>

O   new medications available to consumers are later withdrawn from the market or given a black box warning due to safety risks. That represents a nearly  percent increase since Congress expedited the FDA approval process  years ago, according to a study published in the August issue of Health Affairs.

The Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA), passed by Congress in  after heavy lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry, addressed growing

concern about the time it took new medications to reach patients. PDUFA allows the FDA to collect fees from pharmaceutical companies to speed up the approval process. Average drug approval time has dropped by more than  percent, from  to  months, since the act was authorized. In  President Obama signed into law the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act, which includes reauthorization of PDUFA through September .

The study’s researchers admit the increased rate of medications being taken off the market or given a black box label does not prove the expedited process is the cause. Still, the statistics raise concern that some unsafe medications may be slipping through before side effects and risks have been thoroughly investigated.

Satellites orbiting Earth can function only as long as their fuel supplies last.

NASA is developing a robotic fueling station that can add years of useful life to spacecraft by going to a satellite and refueling, repairing, or relocating it in orbit.

Approximately , spacecraft orbit Earth. These include the international space station, weather satellites that predict storms and assist with search and rescue missions, and scientific spacecraft that study the stars.

NASA’s Bob Granath said NASA hopes to expand options for satellite operators who face tougher economic demands and aging fleets. —J.B.

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CAUTION: ISTOCK IMAGES • ROBOTIC FUELING: NASA • SOLAR FLARE: SDO/AIA/NASA

 

Inevitable solar super storms could have catastrophic consequences on Earth, warns University of Bristol aerospace engineer Ashley Dale in this month’s issue of Physics World. Dale was part of a team of space experts who examined the potential damage such an event could cause. The team’s report, SolarMax, called on policymakers to fund research and subsequent actions to protect society “as we know it.”

The sun goes through an -year cycle culminating with the SolarMax, a phenomenon in which the magnetic poles flip. It is during this time that gigantic explosions— solar flares—are most apt to occur. These violent events can disrupt Earth’s magnetic field and play havoc with all forms of technology. For example, power surges could blow up transformers, cutting off electricity for entire nations or even continents for weeks, causing disruptions in food and water supply, sewage removal, medical care, transportation, heating, etc. The result could be economic devastation and a global crisis, the scientists warn. It is estimated that even a typical solar storm can cost as high as  billion to  billion in total losses.

The strongest solar storm ever recorded hit Earth in , damaging telegraph lines and railroads and igniting auroras visible as far south as Cuba and Hawaii. Another solar storm in  knocked out the entire Quebec power grid leaving  million people without electricity for over nine hours and costing an estimated  billion to  billion.

NASA scientists said a powerful solar flare barely missed Earth in . They estimate there is a  percent chance that another solar storm, at least as powerful as the one of , will hit Earth in the next  years. —J.B.

Listen to WORLD on the radio at worldandeverything.com

8/20/14 8:25 AM

STEPHEN McGEE/GENESIS

Lights out

caution: istock images • robotic fueling: nasa • solar flare: SDO/AIA/nasa

Stephen McGee/Genesis

Notebook > Houses of God

The worship space of Hillsdale Orthodox Presbyterian Church is the recently purchased New York Central Railroad Depot in Hillsdale, Mich.

S e p t e m b e r 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W ORL D

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Notebook > Sports

 ,  

Money changer

District judge’s ruling may radically alter college sports beyond football and men’s basketball BY ANDREW BRANCH

>>



the trail in  days. “Proud” to have experienced God’s power in his weakness, he told me, he hopes to raise , for the orphanage by sharing the journey with church groups and through a documentary. His story?

“Failure in the eyes of the world in order to bring God glory.” —A.B.

W NCAA: G. FIUME/GETTY IMAGES • BURNETT: HANDOUT

D’    You’re not alone. After a summer of rule changes, settlements, and a landmark court decision, people who work in college sports may not understand college sports.

U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken ruled Aug.  that players in the Football Bowl Subdivision and Division I men’s basketball are entitled to at least , a year for rights to their names, images, and likenesses.

The NCAA is appealing the ruling and has long argued that athletes are students, not employees or professionals, and play for the love of the game. But its own love of money has made that philosophy irrelevant, even unjust, according to Wilken. NCAA organizations make millions from television contracts, video games, and merchandise featuring players—but they say compensation above scholarships undermines the student half of “student-athlete.”

The highly publicized antitrust lawsuit, launched by former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon, prompted many voluntary changes from the NCAA even before the ruling. The NCAA Board of Directors voted Aug.  to give the five biggest football conferences more autonomy over what benefits they give to players beyond scholarships. One of the first things on the agenda of a powerful new voting body will be providing stipends to athletes.

But with votes and appeals yet to take place, no one really knows what the NCAA will look like in coming years. The new rules generally apply only to men’s football and basketball, and that could lead to more lawsuits. Title IX regulations, for example, say female athletes are supposed to receive equal opportunities. What about Olympic sports? Smaller conferences or financially strapped schools may drop some sports altogether.

The NCAA brings criticism on itself, though, as stadiums become shrines, locker rooms become spas, and more schools enter the financial arms race to attract players. While select programs like Duke basketball and Notre Dame football succeed both in the classroom and on the field, winning often outweighs integrity. “The concept of college football no longer has any bearing on the quality of the person, the quality of students,” Kansas State coach Bill Snyder said. “Universities are selling themselves out.”

Wilken has thrown the NCAA’s legal language into confusion. But because the NCAA didn’t always practice what it preached about amateurism and integrity, it may have lost the credibility to preach.

He ran out of money. Seven accompanying vehicles broke down, with three totaled. He had to repeat  miles.

Drew Burnett faced many obstacles in his attempt to run the Appalachian Trail in record time for a Ugandan orphanage, where he and his family plan to go live next year (see “Run for the children,” June ).

He didn’t break any records, and he almost didn’t finish. The crew even ran out of money in West Virginia and discovered it needed , in  hours.

But after notifying his prayer team of the situation, he received , in  hours, without asking. “It’s hard not to trust Him after that,” Burnett told me.

Sure enough, Burnett met his wife and son Aug.  for the final hike up Springer Mountain in Georgia. He completed all , miles of

“Ja r w w

M

WORLD • SEPTEMBER 6, 2014

Download WORLD’s iPad app today; details at wng.org/iPad

SE

Pho

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8/20/14 8:31 AM

I N T R O D U C I N G C R O S S W AY ’ S CHRISTIAN GUIDES TO THE CL ASSICS

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Mitford Fans Rejoice

JA N K A R O N returns to Mitford in

SO M E WH ER E SAFE W I T H SO M EBO DY GOO D “Jan Karon’s books set in Mitford make me laugh, while reminding me of many of God’s important truths in walking this Christian walk. Seldom do we find books with such warmth and caring, spiced with laughter.”

— Christian Library Journal CREDIT

Mit ford B ook s .com

SEPTEMBER 2014

Jan Karon

Photograph of the author © Candace Freeland

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Audio available

8/15/14 10:46 AM

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8/15/14 4:55 PM

Mailbag ‘A life worth living’

July  My sisters and I cared for our mother through her decline with Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia to the very end. We offered this gift daily to her and to God, thanking her for her years of self-sacrifice. God transformed us while we cared for Mamma, improving our lives as He drew us closer to Him. Grelen’s point is so very true: God determines the purpose of life, not humans.

—F P B, Charleston, S.C.

No one can say how another person “experiences” life, and that should affect how we treat those at the beginning and the end of life. We must stand up for those who are most defenseless among us: the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly.

—G N, Louisville, Ky.

What will our four small children say about our marriage when I am on my deathbed? Will it inspire them and their future spouses and children?

Growing up I was blessed to see similar devotion in my grandparents and parents, and it strengthened my resolve to do the same if necessary. Taking care of the elderly at the end of life can be a beautiful thing to witness.

—C C, Chattanooga, Tenn.

‘Little word, big meaning’ July  This column was so encouraging.

I am a father of three preparing for the birds and the bees conversation with my oldest, so it is timely hearing that a commitment to sexual purity lies in complete submission to Christ and not in anticipation of a reward payable-upon-vows.

—R P, Birmingham, Ala.

Send photos and letters to: mailbag@wng.org

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How much has Christians’ widespread acceptance of premarital physical affection (as long as it stops short of “that little word”) contributed to the acceptance of sex outside of marriage?

We could help our young people by teaching them a fuller, more biblical view of sexual intimacy that goes beyond the act of consummation, one that focuses on how the glory of marriage reflects Christ and His bride.

—K C, Waynesboro, Ga.

‘The great escape’ July  Marvin Olasky’s column about how Christians should be saboteurs in “enemy-occupied territory” reminded me of Oscar Cullmann’s metaphor: We are living between D-Day and V-Day. We know Who has won, but we are still involved in a massive mop-up operation.

Only royal children can have such optimism.

—J L, Waco, Texas

Speaking the gospel to men in county jail, I point out that they are prisoners in a war between God and Satan, a situation much more significant and devastating than their temporary incarceration. Their only means of

escape from their POW status is faith in God’s Son, Jesus Christ.

—R R M, Alpine, Calif.

‘Debt decisions’ July  David Skeel asserted that student loans are justifiable as a “public good,” but where is the constitutional warrant for taking my money and transferring it to someone else’s children for their education? An endless list of items might benefit the “public good.” This excuse has been the manure to fertilize the growth of our fastgrowing, unconstitutional, and “benevolent” tyranny.

—J S, Lebanon, Ind.

‘Tolerance in the court’ July  While the Supreme Court was deciding Hobby Lobby’s case, demonstrators on both sides carried signs; but the photo of their expressions said much more than the words on their posters. The truth does not have to scream, shout, or angrily demand you conform to it.

—E N, Big Canoe, Ga.

Quotables July  What could Hillary Clinton say to college students that would be worth ,? What a waste of money when colleges are hurting for income.

—M T, Collierville, Tenn.

‘Dictated change’ July  The th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that homosexual couples have a “fundamental right” to marry, but fundamental rights involve things that have been around since the

SEPTEMBER 6, 2014 • WORLD



8/19/14 8:31 AM

Mailbag

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beginning. That includes life, marriage between a man and woman, bearing children, and worship of the Creator. Gay “marriage” will never enjoy this status, whether or not the courts impose it on us.

—J M, Flower Mound, Texas

‘Married to Darwin’ July  I am an evangelical Christian, a young-earth creationist, and a practicing scientist. I greatly respect those who try to reconcile modern science with the Bible, but I believe the issue is moot. Once you accept that God created supernaturally, you must also accept that you can’t extrapolate back from what we observe today to the origins. Given this, why would one compromise what the Bible plainly says just to accommodate what science teaches?

—A J. C, Dayton, Ohio

It really is a question of God versus Darwin and not God versus science. Christians, of all people, should know to embrace the account by God, who was there, rather than a human hypothesis.

—J P, Pensacola, Fla.

Thank you for the recent articles upholding the literal interpretation of Genesis. It is so refreshing. I also appreciate all the reporting done on the other topics in America and the world.

—T G, Siloam Springs, Ark.

‘Study halls’ July  Susan Olasky’s piece on Hemingway Editor had me laughing for days after I noticed that it included an image showing the website’s low score (readability: ) and assessment (“bad”) of her own story. Thank you for reminding me how to have a little fun at one’s own expense. And, by the way, she deserved a much better score.

—S F, Corvallis, Ore.

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8/14/14 3:11 PM

‘Humble pie’ July  I read this column on the same day I failed a test for a job on which I had placed much hope. In the past two years I’ve had plenty of painful failures in job pursuits and often felt as if I’ve wandered off the trail of God’s leading. I’ve prayed fervently to hear from Him, and in this column I did.

There’s still health care for people of Biblical faith!

—M M, Saratoga Springs, Utah

‘Defi ning pluralism’ July  Some define pluralism, as Joel Belz said, to mean that “all worldviews are equally true or valid” in an attempt to rationalize moral relativism or neutralize opposing worldviews. But that is irrational. It violates the law of noncontradiction.

—B J. W, Valparaiso, Ind.

Please remove me and this church from your mailing list. Your attacks on the president and anything other than conservative Republicanism stinks of anything but God’s Word.

—P K S, Buckroe Baptist Church, Hampton, Va.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to all the staff of WORLD. How blessed we are to have a publication like this.

—R C, Indianapolis, Ind.

Correction Nazry Mustakim’s drug offense, while not an aggravated felony in criminal law, qualified as an aggravated felony in immigration law (“Detention contention,” Aug. , p. ).

LETTERS & PHOTOS Email: mailbag@wng.org Write: WORLD Mailbag, PO Box , Asheville, NC - Please include full name and address.

Letters may be edited to yield brevity and clarity.

As a committed Christian, you can live consistently with your beliefs by sharing medical needs directly with fellow believers through Samaritan Ministries’ non-insurance approach. You do not have to purchase health insurance that pays for abortions, abortifacient drugs, and other unbiblical practices. Health care sharing satisfies the individual mandate in the recent Federal health care law (United States Code 26, Section 5000A, (d), (2), (B)).

Every month the more than 36,000* households of Samaritan Ministries (over 120,000* persons) share more than $10 million* in medical needs directly—one household to another. They also pray for one another and send notes of encouragement. The monthly share for a family membership of any size has never exceeded $405*.

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Biblical faith applied to health care www.samaritanministries.org

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8/15/14 10:39 AM

WM0914_SingOverMe_VisionVideo 8/5/14 1:49 PM Page 1

Since the early 1990s, Christians all over the world have been singing the songs of modern-day psalmist Dennis Jernigan, including “You Are My All in All,” “Thank You, Lord!” and “When I Fell in Love with You.” His music and ministry, sparked by his lifelong struggle with homosexuality and the healing that came through his relationship with Jesus Christ, have led him on a remarkable journey of redemption. Now he shares his inspiring story so that all may have a deeper understanding of God’s love.

This is a film about hope, identity, and the transformative power of the Gospel. By telling his story, Jernigan puts forth an example of what God can do in the lives of those who put their trust in Him. Nothing is impossible with God, and He wants to bring healing and freedom to all. 87 minutes.

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krieg barrie

• Mail to

www.SingOverMeMovie.com

8/15/14 10:49 AM

Andrée Seu Peterson

What the river speaks The danger of a once-productive waterfront—and nation—going idle

KRIEG BARRIE

>>

T     from nd Street in Manhattan on a commercial cruise line for a tour around the island. It was one of the last commercial things we would see. I don’t mean that the Wall Street financial district that thrust itself out at us as we rounded the lower tip at Upper Bay is not the very symbol of money and trade. I just mean it didn’t seem as if much is being made around here.

The quietness along New York City’s coastline is only partly explainable by the jumbo jet’s dethroning of shipping as the way America moves goods. The city’s silent docks (one pier has been converted into a strollers’ park) bespeak a truth some fathoms deeper.

Our host kept pointing out condo developments to the port and starboard sides of our boat—the entire stretch of Hoboken and Weehawken in New Jersey; the midtown Manhattan towers of Trump and others; the nouveau trendiness of East Village and even the Lower East Side.

Most of the -mile ride may as well have been a sightseer’s guide for luxury apartment seekers.

It used to be that skyscrapers were built to make office space—the Empire State Building and the Willis Tower in Chicago. Now they house humanity in vertical columns, all chasing views. We got to see  Park Avenue in progress, which at  stories will be taller than One World Trade Center, measuring roof to roof.

The sole commercial site of note was a ghostly ruin— the Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn. It was also a clue to the mystery. Erected on the waterfront in , its proud plant saw ships carry sugar to its doors from all over the world. More factories followed, till it became the greatest center of sugar processing in the world, supplying half the United States. In  the company fell victim to one of New York’s longest labor strikes. It closed its doors in  after  years.

Back in Philadelphia, I took an English as a Second Language (ESL) course at church. Our teacher likes to end the semesters by giving her students—Indians, Mexicans, Albanians, etc.—little souvenirs from her state, but she says it is hard to find things made in her state. A little American flag? The Chinese make them cheaper; that’s why our own government buys there.

Industry Week’s Robert Atkinson says pundits would have you believe the United States’ loss of . million (or  percent) manufacturing jobs in the last decade is

Email: aseupeterson@wng.org

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due to our superior productivity. In fact, he says, the reason is output—motor vehicles down  percent, apparel down  percent, textiles down  percent. It’s worse than the numbers would indicate.

The official assessment formulae overestimate the output of the electronics industry.

Back in the Big Apple, Soho, once Manhattan’s industrial center, became the haunt of artists’ lofts in the s, till these were priced out and gentrification moved in. Nothing wrong with the gentry, but somebody has to make shoes. And flags. And the souvenirs we give in ESL to show state pride.

This is not about nostalgia for the good old days of mom-and-pop stores and lunch pails and stickball and barbershop quartets, times which like all times were impermanent as morning frost, a historical blink of an eye no sooner here than passing away. No, this is about survival as a viable nation and the question of what industrial foundation will support the spawn of residential sprawl along the Hudson and East rivers.

The Jenga tower is looking pretty honeycombed. How long can a tower built on mushrooming social services and computer memory improvements sustain the illusion of prosperity, as the denizens of Wall Street—who make nothing you can eat or patch your tires with—turn wild and risky trades and create dollars where there were none just by artful playing with the rules of the game?

The river has seen it all, and the river knows. It saw the Lenape trading posts give way to Dutch East Indian trading posts, which in turn gave way to the English business interests for the Duke of York. These people all had things to buy and sell. One thing the river never saw before is wealth spun from thin air. A

SEPTEMBER 6, 2014 • WORLD



8/15/14 4:34 PM

Marvin Olasky

A matter of seeing

Christian schooling is about much more than behavior or information

>>



WORLD • SEPTEMBER 6, 2014

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it even takes a potshot against someone clearly supposed to be a member of the “religious right,” and thus a “book burner.” But what the movie fancifully shows is what millions of Christians (including myself) have experienced: A formerly invisible part of the world becomes visible, and that changes everything.

This is the sense in which Tertullian’s question from , years ago—“What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?”—is still the question every Christian teacher and parent needs to grip. The fundamental difference between Christian and public schools is not that one has a chapel and one doesn’t, or even that a student in the former may learn who Tertullian was. The difference between Christian homeschooling and other pedagogical pursuits is not that one has prayer and one does not, although that’s getting closer to the essential difference: a matter of seeing.

The prime purpose of Christian education is not to instill in students a certain set of behaviors, although that may be a side effect of good teaching and learning. It’s not even to put into our pet parrots’ heads a certain amount of factual information, although a well-stocked memory is a great aid.

No, our greatest educational task is to help students see the whole population of the world, including that which secularists do not think exists. When we see that the world is spiritually as well as materially populated, every aspect of life looks different. That’s why Christianity isn’t a hobby, and why life is more than the sum of our diversions.

Parents and teachers cannot make children see what’s invisible to many of their peers, because only God opens eyes—and in today’s society Christian kids face sneers. Nevertheless, the Bible teaches us to walk and talk with our children, and then pray ardently for their salvation. While we can and should try to be a helpful presence at public schools (see p. ), we should also sacrifice mightily to grow Christian education. I’m thankful for the many teachers and parents who do just that. A

KRIEG BARRIE

J M MA understands the battle lines of American culture. Here’s what she wrote two months ago after the Supreme Court backed Hobby Lobby’s position: “While the religious right views religion as a fundamental, and indeed essential, part of the human experience, the secular left views it as something more like a hobby, so for them it’s as if a major administrative rule was struck down because it unduly burdened model train enthusiasts. That emotional disconnect makes it hard for the two sides to even debate; the emotional tenor quickly spirals into hysteria as one side says ‘Sacred!’ and the other side says, essentially, ‘Seriously? Model trains?’”

Yup, sacred, as the -year-old Heidelberg Catechism suggests by asking in its question No. , “What is your only comfort in life and death?” The great answer: “That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with His precious blood. ... By His Holy Spirit He also assures me of eternal life and makes me heartily willing and ready from now on to live for Him.” Say that to a rude secularist and he’ll call a psychiatrist. Say that to a polite one and he may respond, “So you like model trains, do you?”

But it’s even worse than that. The premise of a terrific movie turned  this year, Field of Dreams, is that Ray Kinsella of Iowa turns a cornfield into a ballpark and long-dead major leaguers, including Shoeless Joe Jackson, show up. Ray’s problem, though, is that they’re invisible to almost everyone, and he’s going bankrupt, much to the disgust of his brother-in-law, Mark.

Mark trusts his own unseeing eyes. He tells Ray, “You’re going to lose your farm. ... You build a baseball field, and you sit here, and stare at nothing.” But suddenly, a traumatic incident changes Mark’s vision and he does a , telling Ray he must not sell the farm.

The earlier see-ers rejoice: Mark is now one of them.

I’m not at all suggesting that Field of Dreams is an evangelical film, because it surely is not: In one scene

Email: molasky@wng.org

8/19/14 2:50 PM

krieg barrie

Brand Cover World 6.14.indd 1 18 OLASKY.indd 3

5/15/14 1:52:15 PM 8/11/14 11:13 AM

KICKING THE CAN HAS CONSEQUENCES

Enslavement of a Generation Washington politicians have been cravenly “kicking the can” of debt down the road for years.

Our children and grandchildren will likely be shackled by an insurmountable mountain of indebtedness as a result.

In “wisdom” that could only originate in Washington, the supposed solution to America’s debt problem has been to multiply our debt at breakneck speed. Quantitative easing policies (printing money out of thin air) over the last several years have been a dismal failure in stimulating the economy, yet this same dangerous policy has now set the stage for a future inflationary or hyper-inflationary climate that could destroy the value of the dollar. Most Americans are unaware that the paper dollars they own have lost over 35% of their purchasing power over the last decade and more than 80% since America abandoned all monetary ties to gold in 1971.

The Great Global Wealth Shift Many foreign nations that hold large sums of U.S. treasuries have begun a pronounced transition out of dollars and into real, tangible forms of wealth.

China, the largest holder of U.S. debt, has embarked on a massive global buying spree of natural assets, real estate, oil interests, and over the last three years Chinese imports of gold bullion have increased over tenfold!

As the wealth of the West moves eastward, plans are already set in motion to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Eventually, international trust in Washington’s monetary and fiscal policies will evaporate, and the dollar could suffer a huge devaluation, similar to what the British suffered when the pound lost the distinction of reserve currency status.

Preserving Purchasing Power - The Key to Protecting Your Wealth Following President Nixon’s decision to cut all ties between the dollar and gold in 1971, no other primary asset class has served to protect purchasing power and grow in value as successful as gold. Gold has outperformed real estate and bonds, and grown more than twice as much as the DJIA since 1971.

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