Recent Viewpoints

Penna Dexter I recently attended a breakfast sponsored by Alliance Defending Freedom. Attorney General William Barr was the speaker. The room was filled with prominent conservatives of a mind to turn the tide on the Left’s takeover of the federal government and culture. He could have talked about anything: politics, woke law enforcement, corporate bullying. He chose education. The former Attorney General said, “We must confront the reality that it may no longer be fair, practical, or even Constitutional to provide…

Kerby Anderson Conspiracy theories exist because they “create meaning, reduce complexity and uncertainty and emphasize human agency.” That is one of the insights in the book, The Nature of Conspiracy Theories, which was first written in German and has been translated into English. Earlier this week I talked about some of the clues we can use to evaluate news narratives. Although this is an academic book, the author does provide some clues we can use to evaluate conspiracy theories. Although…

Kerby Anderson Is America a force for good? The answer to that would have been obvious a few decades ago to not only Americans but to many other people around the world. But years of criticism in the media and in schools have convinced generations of Americans that America is not a force for good but a great evil in the world. Dennis Prager takes on this issue by reminding us that for all our flaws, which he says were…

Kerby Anderson For the last few months on my radio program, we have been talking about the need for discernment in our current news environment. We have even printed a booklet on media bias citing some of the studies and books documenting the need for us to exercise wise judgment. A recent commentary by Rob Jenkins on “How to Know When the Narrative is False” provides another tool for your discernment toolbox. A narrative is a story that may be…

Kerby Anderson A new term in psychology is eco-anxiety. Americans feel panic because of the hyperbole surrounding climate change. The chief science officer at the American Psychological Association concludes that existential concerns about the planet are now “impairing our ability to function every day.” A few weeks ago, a Scientific American article concluded that, “There’s growing recognition in the field of psychology that people are experiencing distress over climate change.” Three years ago, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication…

Kerby Anderson If you told me earlier this month that I would be doing a commentary on UFOs, I would not have believed it. But recent news stories require some comment. First, it was the TV program 60 Minutes doing a piece on UFOs that were spotted in restricted US airspace. The next night Fox News host Tucker Carlson devoted his opening segment and an interview to concerns about these UFO sightings. Former President Barack Obama said some of the…

Penna Dexter The US Supreme Court has agreed to review a Mississippi law that would ban nearly all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.  Legal experts on both sides of the abortion issue have indicated that the case presents an opportunity for the court to modify — perhaps even to overturn — Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Mississippi’s only abortion clinic, challenged the 2018 law as unconstitutional. Both a district judge and a…

Kerby Anderson Yesterday I talked about the American Worldview Inventory done by George Barna. He found that very few American adults have a biblical worldview. The most dominant worldview would be the worldview that could best be described as syncretism. The other major worldview could be described as “moralistic therapeutic deism.” This is a term developed by Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton in their book, Soul Searching first published in 2005. It was used to describe the worldview they were…

Kerby Anderson In his latest American Worldview Inventory, George Barna concludes that only six percent of American adults have a biblical worldview. This leads to the obvious question: What do the rest of American adults believe? Most of them (88%) hold to a worldview that could best be described as syncretism. Syncretism is a cut-and-paste approach to life. It is not an internally consistent and philosophically coherent perspective. Americans apparently are picking and choosing what they believe based upon their…

Kerby Anderson The three branches of our constitutionalist government are the executive, legislative, and judicial. Over the years, you may have written these names on a school test. You may have shouted them out as answers in a trivia game. But the three branches of government are much more than a school lesson or trivia game answer. They’re a big reason our freedoms have been protected so well for nearly 250 years. We enjoy such liberty and government continuity because…

Kerby Anderson The Democratic party has a God gap that will likely affect them in coming years. David French wrote about this in his recent book, but then decided to delete this chapter before it was published. Fortunately, he wrote about it earlier this month and joined me on radio to explain it. He begins by reminding us how close the last presidential election was. Donald Trump’s base shrank, yet Joe Biden nearly lost anyway. Roughly 44,000 votes in three…