What precisely do the poor of Brazil and Bangladesh, or the reporters at The Milwaukee Journal who write about them—see my previous Saturday Series essay—need to be taught? I learned a lot at our Villars conference three decades ago, particularly from Udo Middelmann, president of the Francis A. Schaeffer Foundation. A number of understandings have remained with me all these years.

I read the news today, oh boy / … I just had to laugh / I saw the photograph (the Beatles, 1967).  

British and American journalists since the 19th century have known August as “the silly season,” the time when both Parliament and Congress are out of session: less political news, more opportunity to fill pages with accounts of trivial or frivolous matters. So we’ve had photos of bare-chested Vladimir Putin, a dozen people squeezing into a phone booth, massive vegetables, escaped cows, and dogs on surfboards.

July was the hottest month ever recorded according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report. The scientists said July’s sizzling heat wave soared to an average global temperature 1.71 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average. The previous hottest month on record was July 2016.

Karl Zinsmeister, vice president of publications for the Philanthropy Roundtable, was editor in chief of The American Enterprise from 1994 to 2006, and then George W. Bush’s chief domestic policy adviser. Earlier, he was a history major and a national champion rower at Yale. He has written 13 books, including The Almanac of American Philanthropy, and now lives on a houseboat with his wife: They have three children and three grandchildren.

Glenn Stanton’s The Myth of the Dying Church (Worthy, 2019) points out that, contrary to numerous big-media proclamations, atheism and agnosticism are not growing wildly, and more young adults are attending Biblically faithful churches than attended a half-century ago. Liberal churches, though, are hemorrhaging, and formerly evangelical churches that embrace homosexuality—Seattle’s EastLake is one example—often lose members. 

This fall brings the 50th anniversary of a guest lecture I attended while in college. The speaker was Herbert Marcuse, known in 1969 as chief theorist for the Marxist new left. Marcuse’s most famous book, One-Dimensional Man, argued that capitalism exploits people and nature and turns art and culture into commodities. I applauded, not knowing then the universality of sin and the historical fact that socialism is even more prone to lead to dictatorship and war.

Whoever digs a pit will fall into it, and a stone will come back on him who starts it rolling.”

The current drive for school choice illustrates well the slapstick humor of Proverbs 26:27. The U.S. Supreme Court on June 28 agreed to hear a case challenging bans on the use of taxpayer funds to pay for, indirectly, tuition at evangelical and other religious schools. Ironically, the ancestors of many of today’s evangelicals erected those stop signs 105-145 years ago.