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?

Daniel Darling is vice president for communications at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public affairs wing of the Southern Baptist Convention. He’s been a pastor in Chicago and Nashville and is the author of The Dignity Revolution. Here are edited segments of our Q&A.

Young adults in the United States are dying more often than they did seven years ago. That reverses the trend of the past 100 years, when public health, sanitation improvements, and the development of antibiotics led to longer lives. Now at a time of general peace, healthcare spending increases, and low unemployment, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report issued last week spotlights the bad news.

Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said Wednesday he would resign, effective Aug. 2. Protesters gathered around the governor’s mansion earlier in the day to call for his ouster. Hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans marched earlier this week in one of the island’s largest protests ever. Publication of 900 pages of sometimes obscene online messages between Rosselló and 11 top aides triggered the crisis, but concern about misuse of Hurricane Maria recovery funds is an underlying cause.