J. Nick Pitts serves as the director of cultural engagement at the Denison Forum on Truth and Culture.

He came to the Denison Forum in 2014 after a fateful conversation with its founder, Dr. Jim Denison. Pitts, a Ph.D. candidate at Dallas Baptist University (DBU), had spent the summer studying at Oxford with other students and faculty including Denison, a visiting professor.

He contributes to the Forum in the areas of geopolitics and popular culture, as well as serving as the editor of the Daily Briefing. He continues work on his doctorate and serves as an adjunct professor at DBU, teaching a master’s level course in the philosophy of leadership.

His Ph.D. research centers upon John F. Kennedy’s engagement of the religious community in the 1960 presidential campaign. He presented a paper on the topic at Calvin College’s 2015 symposium on religion and public life.

He is an editor at large for The Liberty Project, an online magazine, and his op-eds have been published by The Philadelphia Inquirer, Religion News Service and Townhall.com.

He received a bachelor’s degree in 2007 from Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, and a master’s degree in 2009 from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

Allie Beth Stuckey is from Dallas, Texas, and graduated from Furman University in Greenville, SC in 2014. She was chosen to deliver her university's commencement speech, and it was that experience that confirmed her gift of and passion for communicating. Since college, Allie Beth has worked as a publicist, social media strategist, blogger and an advocate of conservative values and voter education among Millennials. She just launched her new site, The Conservative Millennial Blog, where she keeps her readers up to date on millennial happenings and conservative ideas.

THE TOPLINE: The Trump administration on Monday revealed its proposed military spending budget for fiscal 2018, and the plan is getting jeers from both Republican defense hawks and Democrats.

The administration is proposing $603 billion for the base defense budget.

That's $54 billion more than spending caps would allow and about $18 billion more than the Obama administration had projected for 2018. But it's $37 billion less than the $640 billion figure defense hawks had proposed.

The Trump administration proposal would also slash $54 billion from nondefense spending to pay for the defense increase, with the Environmental Protection Agency and State Department facing steep cuts.

The argument against campus safe spaces is obvious. Just about every college conservative can recite some very persuasive iteration of it in their sleep.

For perspective on how widely accepted that argument is, even President Barack Obama embraced it on more than one occasion over the course of his time in the White House.

During an event at the University of Chicago last week, progressive pundit Van Jones jumped on the bandwagon, telling students, "I don't want you to be safe ideologically. I don't want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong — that's different. I'm not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots and learn how to deal with adversity."

More than 100 million adults in America claim to have a biblical worldview! Are they right? Does it matter?

A series of nationwide surveys conducted by the American Culture & Faith Institute (ACFI) addressed the question of how many Americans have a biblical worldview. Interviewing 6,000 people from three distinct populations – the general public, theologically conservative Protestant pastors, and SAGE Cons – the surveys produced some startling results. But does it matter?

“It’s very important to know how many people have a biblical worldview because peoples’ behavior is driven by their beliefs – we do what we believe. In other words, our worldview determines the choices we make and the resulting actions we take,” explained research veteran George Barna, who directed the studies for ACFI. “Everyone has a worldview. The critical question is which one people have embraced. If we want to transform our culture then we will need to change the choices people make that produce that culture. And in order to change those choices we must identify the beliefs that led to those choices.”

While it may sound complex or even impractical, understanding the concept of a worldview is not complicated. A worldview is the mental framework that helps people to make sense of their world. It serves as a filter to help us understand and respond to reality. Because a worldview determines what is considered to be good or bad, valuable or worthless, righteous or evil, right or wrong, and so forth, a person’s worldview is an indispensible mechanism for each of us to cope with life. Similarly, it is critical to understand if we are seeking to comprehend who we are and where we are going as a nation.