Recent Viewpoints

Kerby Anderson Jean Twenge has been researching generational differences for a quarter century. But she noticed in 2012 abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. Up until that time there were gentle slopes of line graphs. Suddenly they became steep mountains and sheer cliffs. That year is when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent. Her article in The Atlantic asks the ominous question: “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” The generation she is thinking about would…

Kerby Anderson Where are the moderate Muslims? This a question I hear whenever there is a terrorist attack and there seems to be silence from the Muslim community. Christine Douglass-Williams tries to answer that question and many others in her book, The Challenge of Modernizing Islam. When she was on my radio program, she said the original title talked about reforming Islam. They concluded that wasn’t precise enough. She points out that currently there is a turf war within Islam…

Kerby Anderson Philip Yancey begins with an admission: “I am going through a personal crisis.” He explains that he used to love reading. In fact, he understands that “books help define who I am.” But that is his past, not his present. He has discovered that the Internet and social media have trained his brain “to read a paragraph or two, and then start looking around.” When he is reading an article online, pretty soon he is looking at the…

Kerby Anderson What if Christians and Christian institutions that provide so many social services went on strike? That is a question Addison Del Mastro asks in The American Conservative. He reminds us of the book by Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged. She poses the question of what would happen if entrepreneurs in America decided to go on strike because of an increasingly overbearing regulatory state. The book documents the dystopia the country falls into. While I doubt that Christians and Christian…

Kerby Anderson Pastor Rick Stedman asks, “Is it reasonable to believe that God exists?” He says it is because of zombies, superheroes, music, sports, and science. That is his premise in his book, 31 Surprising Reasons to Believe in God. He begins his book by telling a true story of a family on a rural property in northern California. They found a rusted can by a tree. They ended up finding eight cans containing 1427 gold coins worth an estimated…

Penna Dexter Commensurate with a president’s primary responsibility, to protect America, President Trump has set about rebuilding and strengthening our military. Unfortunately, he’s had to fight some court battles to get this done. Early on, President Trump announced he was rolling back the Obama transgender troop policy that mandated facilities and training to smooth the way for transgender Americans to serve openly. The president’s priorities for the military are to advance mission readiness and combat lethality. He maintains that the…

Kerby Anderson Americans currently promoting socialism tell us that we shouldn’t look at the failed socialist experiments in Cuba or Venezuela. Instead, we should look at Sweden as proof that socialism works and can bring great prosperity. That’s not what Swedish historian Johan Norberg says. He is featured in a new documentary, “Sweden: Lessons for America.” John Stossel also interviewed Norberg for Stossel TV. Norberg makes it clear that “Sweden is not socialist—because the government doesn’t own the means of…

Kerby Anderson Immigration will still be a big issue this year. That is why we need to be asking good questions, especially of our elected representatives. Michael Brown, in a recent column, asks four good questions that we might want to ask of those who are supposed to be trying to fix our immigration system. He admits that he is not an expert and has no agenda. He is genuinely asking these questions. He asks, “if illegal immigrants are flooding…

Kerby Anderson If you have ever taken a social science class, you have probably heard about the law of unintended consequences. Sometimes a policy generates unexpected benefits, but usually it creates unexpected problems and even perverse incentives. Although this reality usually develops because of government programs, it also surfaces within companies and corporations. Last year Starbucks announced that anyone has the right to use a Starbucks restroom. The company did this because two African-American men were denied access to a…

Kerby Anderson Yesterday I talked about how big the federal government has grown. It is an order of magnitude larger than the largest Fortune 500 companies. But there is a second problem that makes this first problem even worse. Many of the people who are supposed to manage this organization have never been confirmed and placed in those positions. The US Senate has confirmed less than half of the positions in four federal government cabinets. Those would be the Justice…

Kerby Anderson One thing the government shutdown has done is to remind us how big government is today and how many government employees there are. When just a quarter of the government shuts down and thousands of “non-essential” employees are sent home, you realize how large the federal government has grown. Many years ago, I had an opportunity to interview Senator Jim DeMint about his book that warned how the “BIGS” were taking away our liberty. Those would be big…