A little over two years ago, I wrote an article about the growing push to affirm transgenderism in children and teenagers. National Geographic had just published an issue praising the movement, and featured a cover photo of a 9-year-old boy dressed like a girl.

Ken Zucker, a secular psychologist in Canada, had recently lost his longtime position at a mental health center in Toronto for suggesting parents should try to help confused children become secure with their birth sex.

During a remarkable convocation service at Liberty University on March 29, psychologist and best-selling author Jordan Peterson unexpectedly encountered the desperation of someone who wanted to change his life, but who seemed lost to know how to begin.

Fourth in a series on changing cities

On a clear morning in mid-February, a giant boom and a billowing cloud brought a dramatic turn in one of Colombia’s most infamous storylines. Engineers in the northern city of Medellín triggered 180 detonators and demolished the six-story building that drug-lord Pablo Escobar once called home. 

One of the most memorable emails I’ve received in my work as a journalist was from someone unhappy about a story I wrote on climate change. The reader was blunt. “I can’t decide,” he wrote, “whether you’re evil—or an idiot.” 

I confess I was more amused than angered by this email. And we ended up having a cordial exchange when I responded to the reader’s concerns. In the end, he told me he had decided I wasn’t evil—probably just an idiot—but only in the classic sense of the word, which means “uninformed.”

At a breakfast gathering in St. Louis on the first morning of a special meeting of the United Methodist Church (UMC) in February, Jerry Kulah set the table for the events of the next few days.

The UMC delegate had traveled all the way from Liberia to participate in the international meeting that would decide whether Methodists insist their clergy uphold Biblical teaching on marriage and sexuality or allow churches to decide for themselves.

On the second Sunday in March, as millions of Venezuelans were waking up to the fourth day of the biggest blackout in the nation’s history, Pastor Samuel Olson was thinking about morning worship at his Caracas church. “We hope to have one service,” he wrote in a text. “That will depend on the conditions.”

In a country already collapsing, conditions were dire.

When Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., kicked off his 2020 presidential campaign in Brooklyn, N.Y., he noted that his father was a Polish immigrant who fled Europe’s poverty and anti-Semitism. It’s a good thing, said Sanders, because most of his father’s Jewish family was wiped out by Nazis during the Holocaust.

That statement came just days before Sanders was one of at least two other Democratic presidential candidates publicly defending Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., after her series of remarks that many considered anti-Semitic.