Our kids pay some attention to what we say. They pay much more attention to what we do. And many are absorbing lessons from what some evangelicals are both saying and doing regarding Senate candidate Roy Moore.

I can set the scene by going back to politics-and-sex conversations of the 1990s, bookended by a 1990 GQ article lionizing Sen. Ted Kennedy and by the 1999 failure of the Senate to remove President Bill Clinton from office.

The past two days have brought more Roy Moore accusers, but the big news is the new front in the sexual predator wars: Washington, with accusations against Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., that contain photographic evidence. This development shows how the current cultural moment can be a positive one for a Biblical sexual ethic—if we don’t let short-term considerations overwhelm our theology.

UPDATE (November 15, 2017): Thank you for the emails and comments. The new information since Monday morning, when I wrote the article below, is a half-hour video of testimony from Judge Moore’s fifth accuser, Beverly Young Nelson, and her lawyer, Gloria Allred. It’s worth watching on YouTube or other online spots.

Three Texas churches will appear in court Tuesday to petition a federal judge to make the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) change its policy on aiding religious entities. But the judge might not have to do anything: In court filings related to the case, U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say the agency is considering a policy change in light of the lawsuit. The churches, which suffered damage from Hurricane Harvey, claim FEMA’s current disaster relief policies unfairly block faith groups from applying for funds the same way other nonprofit groups do.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—D.C. lobbying is a $3 billion-a-year industry employing 11,000 people. The relationships of politicians, staffers, and lobbyists aren’t always glamorous or nefarious. But they start with an introduction, usually over food, and to get a sense of that I didn’t spend a dime on eating during four days in October. Here’s how it went:

When editing WORLD during the 1990s and 2000s, I looked at other magazines and saw their cover stories about books their editors had just published. By not even mentioning in WORLD my books or those by culture editor Ed Veith, I felt very noble.

America nearing the end of President Donald Trump’s first year in office finds itself spiraling into metanarrative. Our national conversations don’t focus on what’s happening in the country and in the world but on what the president did or didn’t say about any of it, and the reaction to the reaction.

Headlines, commentators, and lunchtime conversations center on the latest outrage, and we find ourselves lurching from outrage, to outrage over the outrage, to outrage fatigue. Lost are actual events and a world of chaos where old orders are collapsing.