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.

Last summer I praised Richard Scarry’s children’s books for showing how everyone in Busytown—Stitches the Tailor, Farmer Alfalfa, Blacksmith Fox, and others—could work and contribute. That contrasted with the chance-emphasizing Candy Land game.

This summer my entering-kindergarten granddaughter graduated to The Game of Life. Created in 1960, it has a lot going for it. Everyone gets married. Most have children, represented as blue or pink pegs. Players also learn that it’s good to buy auto and fire insurance.

In 1968 CBS, facing political pressure, finally allowed on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour a song, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” that implicitly called President Lyndon B. Johnson a “big fool” for leading America deeper into the Vietnam War. The song has a platoon fording a river that goes from knee deep to neck deep in the Big Muddy—“and the big fool says to push on.”

For more than 30 years I’ve read about and reported on the relation of worldviews to questions of international relief and development. American newspapers, hard hit by their loss of advertising to the internet, almost never do what The Milwaukee Journal did in the 1980s. It sent two reporters to Asia and Latin America to investigate problems of poverty. Working independently, each reporter came up with evidence pointing to five similar conclusions—and since we don’t see that kind of enterprise these days, I’ll report their findings.

Rush-to-judgment pundits left and right are opining about the two shootings this weekend. Nothing they or anyone else says will bring back to life the 31 who died. Words won’t repair the spirit of those who loved them or heal the bodies of the many who were injured. But for the rest of us, before the blame game goes into extra innings—let’s take a deep breath. 

Leo Tolstoy opened Anna Karenina with this now-famous line: “Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” That’s true about eras in American history as well.  

Kevin Williamson’s just-published The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics (Regnery) includes excellent insights. Williamson recognizes that social media are primarily “a means of seeking human connection, not communication but communion.” He sees that those who have absorbed Darwinism need to distract themselves from their “eternal insignificance.” 

In our last issue, we profiled five Hope Awards finalists that help people leave poverty. Please go to wng.org/compassion and vote for whichever of those local ministries moves you the most. But I regularly get letters asking about the big, national picture: Do we need to reform the U.S. welfare system, and if so, how?