When you pick up your latest issue of WORLD, do you think of it more as a business enterprise—or as a ministry? Do you think first of Truett Cathy or of Billy Graham?

The ideal answer—from my point of view as the magazine’s founder—is that you think of WORLD in both categories. 

Normalcy. What would you trade to get it back? How deep into your pockets would you dive to regain the life you had just three months ago? 

Forget it! It’s not only that, as North Carolina writer Thomas Wolfe said years ago, “You can’t go home again.” It’s not just that the past is a superficially or nostalgically different place. The past, we are discovering during this incredible “reopening” process, will prove to have been profoundly different in the fundamentals. But we will not be returning to those fundamentals. 

If I’ve asked a dozen people, I’ve asked a hundred. “So what,” I inquire again and again, “does this current crisis remind you of? The recession of 2008? Sept. 11? The Kennedy assassination?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. This is so totally different.” 

And the response has been unanimous. Even a few of my oldest respondents—maybe in their 80s and 90s, and old enough to remember the Great Depression or World War II—join the chorus. “This is radically different,” they say. “This is profoundly different.”

What makes them think that? 

My father was the ultimate do-it-yourselfer. He wasn’t always an especially patient man—which prompted him fairly often to “get on with things.” He dropped out of college and seminary two or three times, and always had an appropriate skepticism for academia. Which was odd, because folks who knew him tended mostly to take seriously his views on the task of education. In many ways, Dad was, until his death in 1978, the quintessential self-educated man.

Are you a fiscal or a social conservative?

“Wait a minute!” you say. “That’s a fallacious question—on a couple of counts.” The distinction is superficial at best. At their worst, the terms may be phony and unhelpfully misleading.

For one thing, it’s possible for someone to land in both camps. For another thing, I know a handful of people who are credibly in both camps but would never call themselves “conservatives.”

Do you really think it’s possible,” a visitor to my office last week asked, “that we might elect a self-professed socialist to our presidency before this year is out? How could that conceivably happen?”

Well, yes, I do think it could conceivably happen. Not likely, I add. But so many other unlikely things have happened in this topsy-turvy world in recent months that I’m reluctant to call anything impossible.

To say that President Donald Trump marches to his own drummer is to cut off debate before it even begins. You may or may not like the way he’s gone about things—but either way, you’re pretty much forced to agree that his has been a unique approach.

But just suppose that one of his aides were to email you this week to say: “The president is seeking some thoughtful outside-the-box thinking. If you had the ability and power to change just one thing about his administration, what would it be?”