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. 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 recently graduated with a doctorate from Dallas Baptist University where he also serves as an adjunct professor, 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.

As Discipleship & Outreach Director, Aszia leads our Justice Internship program designed to train emerging leaders as effective advocates for the exploited through spiritual formation and professional development. She also serves as the editor-in-chief of our annual magazine, develops our print and digital educational content, builds strategic partnerships nationally, and ministers our message to audiences across the country.

She is a graduate and fan of Oklahoma State University (Go Pokes!) where she studied Merchandising, Marketing, and English, as well as an alumna of a ministry/discipleship training program called the Kanakuk Institute.

Aszia is from the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex and is grateful that her journey with pureHOPE–starting as a 2012 intern in our Cincinnati office–brought her back home where she enjoys being close to family, friends and tex-mex and where she recently met and married her husband, Kyle.

There’s a new word touted by Webster that exposes a crisis in our culture of generational proportions.

It’s been called a lot of things: “Peter Pan Syndrome” or my favorite, “failure to launch,” but whatever the term, the phenomenon is undeniable. A record number of young people today are getting stuck in the transition between childhood and adulthood.

Despite attending college in record numbers, millennials seem to struggle to move on to the next phase of life. Just a decade ago, a healthy majority of young adults were able to successfully fledge. Now, those who’ve managed to leave the nest are a minority.

Of course, the recession and a sluggish job market are factors. Millennials do have tougher career prospects than their parents did. But the economy isn’t the only explanation, and the language young people use to talk about adulthood makes that obvious.

n case you missed it last evening, the Washington Post published a major story about President Trump reportedly revealing extremely classified intelligence in a meeting with Russian officials in the Oval Office last week -- which occurred the day after the president ignited a national firestorm by firing FBI Director James Comey. We'll get to the White House's response in a moment, but the Post's lede almost reads like the sort of nightmare scenario that a Trump-skeptical hawk might have offered during the campaign to illustrate why even many Republican-aligned national security professionals harbored grave concerns about Trump's fitness for the job:

Trump’s reported blunder with the Russians is no worse than the record of the Obama administration in such matters.

For Democrats, there is nothing like having the media and the intelligence bureaucracy on the team. We don’t know all the details, but let’s stipulate that if President Trump disclosed to Russian diplomats secret information that was shared with the U.S. by a foreign intelligence service, as the Washington Post alleges, that could have been a reckless thing to do. General H. R. McMaster, the president’s national-security adviser, claims the Post’s story is not true; but there has been pushback from critics who say that McMaster’s denial was lawyerly.

The matter boils down to whether Trump disclosed a city in Islamic State territory from which an allied intelligence service (perhaps through a source who infiltrated ISIS, or through a collection method that enabled intelligence to penetrate ISIS operations) discovered a threat to civil aviation (reportedly involving explosives hidden in laptop computers).