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Culture Friday on the Supreme Court’s parental rights ruling, a review of Pixar’s Hoppers, and Word Play on a remarkably versatile word. Plus, the Friday morning news
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Good morning, today on Culture Friday, parents, politics, and the meaning of marriage.
John Stone Street is standing by for Culture Friday.
Later, Pixar tries again to recapture its magic.
First, tell me what this is.
Okay, okay.
We call it hoppers.
World Arts and Culture editor Colin Garberino wonders whether Pixar even knows what once
made it great.
The word play with George Grant.
It's Friday, March 6th.
This is the world and everything in it.
From listener-supported world radio, I'm Erno Brown.
And I'm Nick Eiger.
Good morning.
Up next, Mark Melingard with today's news.
The US and Israeli air strikes on Iran, known in the US as Operation Epic Fury, have
intensified, sent com commander Admiral Brad Cooper.
America's bomber force has struck nearly 200 targets deep inside of Iran, including
around Iran.
US B2 bombers dropped dozens of 2,000 pound penetrator bombs, targeting deeply buried
ballistic missile launchers.
Cooper also says Iran's Navy is decimated, claiming the US has destroyed 30 of its ships,
including a massive warship, the size of a World War II aircraft carrier.
And Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth says firepower over Tehran is about to surge dramatically.
Iran is hoping that we cannot sustain this, which is a really bad miscalculation.
We have only just begun to fight and fight decisively.
President Trump says the operation in Iran is achieving its goals ahead of schedule.
We're destroying more of Iran's missiles and drone capability.
Every single hour, knocking them out like nobody thought was possible.
Iran and its proxies are continuing retaliatory attacks on Israel, American bases, and countries
all across the Middle East.
So far, the conflict has resulted in the deaths of more than 1,200 people in Iran, a dozen
more in Israel, and at least six US troops.
President Trump says Iran's interim leadership wants to make a deal to end the military action,
which Iranian officials deny and also says he needs to be involved in picking Iran's
new leader.
Meantime on Capitol Hill, Republicans have fended off efforts to rein in Operation Epic
Fury.
On this vote, the A's are 212, the A's are 219, the concurrent resolution is not adopted.
The House GOP Thursday narrowly rejected a war power's resolution that would have
limited the Trump administration's ability to conduct the military operation in Iran.
Two Republicans, Thomas Masi of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio, broke with their
party in support of the measure, while four Democrats opposed it.
The House vote came a day after the Senate voted down a similar measure.
That is the sound of Israel carrying out a fresh wave of airstrikes targeting the
southern suburbs of Beirut, along with areas of southern and eastern Lebanon, late Thursday
and early this morning.
Israel says the attacks are targeting command centers and weapon storage areas of Hezbollah,
the Iran-backed terror group that launched fresh attacks on Israel amid Epic Fury.
Israel's army had warned people in the densely populated areas to evacuate ahead of time,
leading to traffic jams before the strikes, no word on casualties so far, prior to today
more than 100 people in Lebanon had died in fighting over the past week.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Nome is out after months of rising criticism.
President Trump fired the head of DHS Thursday, and as World's Harrison Waters reports,
he also named the nominee to replace her.
The bridge too far came on Tuesday, when Nome testified under oath that President Trump
pre-authorized $220 million in advertising spending.
Did it correct?
Did you work with OMB?
Yes.
He did.
Yes.
Okay.
President Trump later refuted that claim.
Nome has also faced complaints for heavy-handed management.
Trump said on True Social that Nome would move to a newly created security adviser position.
In her place, Trump is nominating Oklahoma Senator Mark Wayne Mullen, a rancher, retired
mixed martial arts fighter and member of the Cherokee Nation.
He told reporters on Thursday, President Trump wants Mullen in his new role by the end
of March, so the Senator will soon face his colleagues for a confirmation vote.
Reporting for World, I'm Harrison Waters.
Republican efforts to pass a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security have failed
again, though the House did pass a DHS funding bill Thursday.
The Senate fell nine votes short of the 60 it needed to achieve closure.
A procedural move needed to advance the bill.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries laid out the conditions he says GOP leaders need
to meet for Democrats to negotiate a compromise.
If they are prepared to make sure that ICE conducts itself like every other law enforcement
agency in the country and stops brutalizing and killing American citizens in law-abiding
immigrant families.
The DHS funding cut off started February 14th.
Democrats are holding up the money because they want restraints on immigration enforcement
tactics.
After two encounters between agents and protesters in Minnesota turned fatal in January, Republicans
say passing the funding is urgent in light of the military operation in Iran, saying Democrats
will bear responsibility if there's a lone wolf terrorist or cyber attack in the US.
In less than a year, the US Postal Service won't be able to pay employees or vendors.
That was the warning Thursday from Postmaster General David Steiner.
He's asking Congress to let the USPS exceed its $15 billion borrowing cap.
That cap has been in place since 1990.
Later this month, the Postmaster General will go before Congress to advocate for lifting
that cap along with other rules he considers burdensome.
He says raising the borrowing limit will buy the Postal Service time to make needed changes.
Last year, the Postal Service's net losses were about $9 billion dollars.
I'm Mark Mellinger.
Right ahead, Culture Friday, the Supreme Court sides with parents on a major cultural
issue.
And later, wordplay with George Grant.
You really have to be there, emphasis on there for this one.
This is The World and Everything In It.
It's Friday, March 6th.
Glad to have you along for today's edition of The World and Everything In It.
Good morning.
I'm Mona Brown.
And I'm Nick Iker.
Well, I mentioned yesterday our team is on an editorial retreat this week, which of course
does not mean that the work stops.
It cannot stop.
So we have invited some board members and friends and colleagues to join us and sit in while
we do what we normally do.
So we do have friends in the room and so friends, would you say hello to your fellow listeners
to The World and Everything In It?
I tell you, we have had a full week here at the Retreat Center, David Bonson spent
a day with us talking about the economic truths that journalists need to understand.
He also led a session on what the Bible says about our work and how we do it.
John Stone Street has been here teaching on what the Bible has to say about culture.
We've had devotions.
We've had lots of singing all in all a great week.
And speaking of John Stone Street, he has been on his feet teaching most of the time.
So we asked him to come in, relax, grab a seat, sit down and keep talking.
Welcome, John.
Good morning.
Well, John, the U.S. Supreme Court this week sided with parents who were challenging California
policies that allowed schools to withhold information about a child's gender identity
from mom and dad.
Now, the court's majority said that parents likely have the constitutional right rooted
in the 14th Amendment to guide their children's upbringing and to be involved in major
decisions affecting their mental health and well-being.
For years, advocates of these policies had argued that schools should act as a kind
of protective, and I'll put that in quotation marks, a protective buffer between children
and parents.
But the court appears to be pushing back on that.
So we've been talking a lot about civilizational moments, John, over the past few days.
Does this feel like one of those civilizational moments, possibly a cultural course correction?
Are things getting better?
I'd love to call it a course correction.
I think it's maybe a little early, but it's absolutely the right decision.
I mean, listen, what's missed in all this is when school officials either say out loud
which some of them have or initiate policies that insert themselves between children and
their parents, they're intrinsically asking or answering another question, which is
if it's not going to be the parents, who's it going to be?
And the answer has increasingly, over the last several decades, been the experts, and then
the state, and then the state-appointed experts.
As if they would have more understanding and more empathy, more connection with children
than their parents, which of course on its face is just absurd.
But it becomes a thinkable thought in a culture that increasingly devalues the family, increasingly
sees parents as purveyors of traditional morality and traditional morality being not just
neutral, not just outdated, but actively harmful.
So this is the kind of thing, though, that we were talking about last week, the state
of the Union address, and it called at that one moment when the child came forward who
had been kept from her parents, had been kind of forced into this social transition and
finally freed up.
But this is of a peace with that story.
Oh, absolutely.
And what people need to know is that there have been kind of more modest attempts to separate
parents from children or to insert state officials in between parents and children.
But nobody went as far as the individuals leading this transgender movement.
And of course, the trans movement from the very beginning was always moving forward on
the backs of other so-called civil rights movements.
It never had its own case.
It never had its own reality.
It could never ground any kind of sense of identity.
I don't think, by the way, the gay movements grounding was in scientific or biological
realities, either.
But it was a little bit more successful and at least trying to argue that where the
trans movement just kind of hijacked a couple of other movements and went forward.
And increasingly, what's become revealed and exposed is that the claims to the science
being settled were completely bogus.
They were just made up out of thin air.
We know from the W. Pathy emails that so many of those who are ideologically leading this
movement were just making stuff up and not only just making stuff up, but even admitting
to doing things like socially experimenting.
What will happen is we'll find out that those who are really pushing forward this movement
were primarily middle-aged men with a sexual fetish.
Which if you go back 20 or 25 or 30 years ago, Oliver O'Donovan, for example, the Anglican
ethicist talked about this issue as being exclusively an issue of sexual perversion of
middle-aged men.
Then all of a sudden, we had this explosion of adolescent and pre-adolescent primarily
girls.
All this was being driven, I think, by these same men.
I think just so much as being exposed and being revealed, I think we can thank God that
it's being exposed and revealed.
We're going to have to figure out how to uncover the power that was wielded by some of these
men to make the absurd and bizarre happen.
Sounds like a call for some investigative reporting.
And some people should go to prison.
Well, John, this week, Minnesota Governor Tim Walls and Attorney General Keith Ellison
testified before the House Oversight Committee about fraud in federal food aid programs.
In the hearing, a Minnesota pastor invoked Matthew 25, you know, the passage about caring
for the least of these, arguing that Christians have a moral duty to support these programs.
So here is Reverend Mariah Tallgaard.
Jesus teaches us in Matthew 25, whatever you do for the least of these, you do unto me.
History will tell its story about us.
But long before then, our own souls will know whether we stood with them or turned away.
Now, Texas Congressman Michael Cloud responded that the passage is often quoted in Washington
but rarely in context.
You invoked Matthew 25, and that's the scripture we see tossed around a lot up here, but
often without contact.
And so I went and got my Bible and thought we'd dig into Matthew 25 for a minute.
Now, what Christ didn't say was to lobby your government and he said, if you have you
give, that's the general biblical principle here.
Second Corinthians chapter 9 gives us probably the best scriptural understanding of what
charity is.
It says, each of you should give what you've decided you're a heart to give, not reluctantly
under compulsion for God loves a cheerful giver.
If we're talking about what charity is, I'm always amazed in D.C. how much of we get to
define our personal worth as a politician or statesman or whatever you want to call us
by how much of other people's money we give away.
So John, Cloud's point is that scripture calls Christians to charity, but that doesn't
automatically translate into government programs.
Is that a fair distinction?
It's a very fair distinction.
That's exactly what the text is written for, is written to Christians to behave like Christians.
And there is a call to charity.
Now look, I think the legitimate critique here is that oftentimes Christians who call that
distinction out and say that these clear teachings of Christ are written to individuals
and not to the state oftentimes use that as an excuse to not actually be the sort of charitable
individuals that we should be.
And the more that non-governmental institutions take care of some of these social problems,
the less room there will be for the government to come in.
But listen, the whole practice of manipulating scripture in order to serve a predetermined
conclusion is, of course, a method that is a epidemic within the church, but especially
in the progressive side of the church, including the side of the church that this reverent
tall guard comes from.
There's always already an awful lot of twisting of scripture in order to justify all kinds
of things, including her own ordination.
But there's other things as well that are at work here.
And that is the danger of, I think, treating the scripture as a tool to be used to advance
some other kind of political agenda than it can be used by someone else.
So I think at some level, we need to be careful.
Those of us that do claim the authority of scripture that we're not guilty of trying
to manipulate the scripture and to saying whatever it is that we wanted to say in order
to support whatever predetermined point that we have.
We need to be under its authority.
It's not under ours.
So we talked a good bit about, or you did, talked a good bit about marriage.
And I've got something sort of on this subject, John, that I want to bring to your attention.
A new relationship trend, and it may not seem new, really.
But it's gaining some traction among younger couples.
I saw this in the New York Times this week, the wedding party without the wedding.
More couples registering as domestic partners, sometimes throwing these big, expensive
celebrations deliberately, though, stopping short of actual marriage.
So they want the photos, they want the DJ, they want the food, they want the public
affirmation, they want the party, but not the covenant, not the financial unity,
not the permanence that marriage traditionally implies.
So the Times carried a front page piece on what seems, as I say, a little passe,
you know, people taking advantage of domestic partnership laws.
And of course, you remember not too many years ago that this was floated as the alternative
to the push that was happening for same-sex marriage, but now it seems like it might
be back.
So question to you is, do you consider this kind of a signal of something to come, or are
you saying to yourself, what took the time so long to do the story?
I mean, what kind of story is it?
Is it an advertising story, is it a marketing story, is it an international trend story?
It's on the front page.
I mean, the number of ways that we have manipulated and changed marriage, and of course, it all
comes back to the fundamental question, is marriage a thing, is marriage a thing in reality
like gravity?
In other words, whether you recognize it or not, it's still there, or is marriage a social
construct?
And of course, in so many different ways, we have treated marriage as if it's whatever
we want it to be.
And so if we want to substitute it for marriage, or if we want to take another relational
arrangement, that's not marriage and call it marriage, then suddenly it becomes marriage,
or if we want to do something like this, which is just put together an alternative, and
then act like it serves all the same social purposes and so on.
But we tried that.
I mean, cohabitation is obviously the most notable example that has exploded in popularity
over the last several decades, even as the popularity of marriage is taking a real hit.
Fewer people are getting married, more people are living together.
But all the social benefits that have long been marked by marriage, you do not find.
And something that looks exactly like it, which is really a remarkable thing, right?
Because you know, people are told all the time, it doesn't matter if you stand up in front
of a justice of the piece or a church or your friends, all that really matters is that
you love each other, you know, as if, you know, love is all we need or whatever.
And the fact of the matter is, is if you look at the social outcomes, not only do you not
get the goods that marriage brings, you actually get the opposite, you get actual bad things
from cohabiting relationships on average, not that there's no good people that are involved
in cohabiting relationships, but you don't get that on a social level.
So this is just another way of trying to do something with marriage as if marriage isn't
a thing, as if marriage is a social construct like a speed limit that we just decide what
it is.
And as the social conditions change, we can change the speed limit.
It doesn't work.
It hasn't worked.
And I think it's the best that marriage is a triangle of truisms, father, mother and
child, and it cannot be destroyed, but it will destroy civilizations that disregard it.
And we don't have a future without marriage, and that includes, we don't have a future
with all the things that we substitute for marriage and treat it as if it's the same
thing.
Well, John, I want to go to some of the extremes on this and you're aware of the kind
of anti-marriage activists or the ones who are talking about this, the influencers, the
Andrew Tates, the perl whose name I can't remember exactly, but they are against marriage,
seemingly mainly on economic grounds.
Do you think that that may be a place that a lot of people say, well, you know, I don't
want to go as far as Andrew Tate, but I sure don't want to get messed up and get wrecked
in a divorce and all of this sort of stuff?
Historically, yes.
And I think there have been governmental policies that penalize marriage and it's foolish
and it's bad.
And so the mistake is then to turn around and say, like some of these influencers do, that
because there are bad policies that end up leading to bad outcomes and because we have
a bad culture with a bad understanding and a bad message of marriage, and then therefore
the promise with marriage itself, it absolutely is not.
I mean, there was almost a Christian version of this movement, you know, years ago, where
it was all like, yo, yeah, men need to stay free and they shouldn't be domesticated.
And I'm like, what?
Are you kidding?
Men absolutely need to be domesticated.
You know why?
Because men do stupid things systemically and epitomically and marriage is good because
marriage makes men think about something beyond the moment, right?
That's why you don't hear married men say, hey, y'all watch this as they do something
really stupid.
It's unmarried men that do that because marriage makes people think about something other
than themselves.
And that's what maturity is when it comes to men.
I do think, by the way, there's some really good news on this, which is we are seeing
study after study now, which says that it's more young men that want marriage and that
want children than young women do.
That's both good news and bad news, but it's good news that the men are coming around.
It's bad news that young women have been on a whole so convinced that who they are as
a problem that needs to be overcome, that their fertility is a disability or something
like that and that men are never out for their best interest.
So I think what we're seeing at some level, I guess, is men reacting to this constant messaging
that their masculinity is toxic.
And now women also are reckoning with this message and it's bad for them to believe
that messaging.
Mm-hmm.
Wake up, y'all.
Wake up, y'all.
Yeah.
Well, John, let's in our time together talking about basketball and we certainly know who
you want to win on the college level.
Wake Forest, right?
Absolutely.
Was it one of those North Carolina teams?
I asked that.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
I'm a Duke fan.
That's all.
I'm a Duke fan, which means I just lost most of the audience.
Well, I want to talk about really what's happening in the NBA.
Did you hear about the NBA player calling out the Atlanta Hawks organization for a promotion
it wants to run during an upcoming game.
The promo is involving a well-known local Gillamans club.
So here's the background.
San Antonio Spurs Center Luke Corned is asking the Hawks to rethink its Magic City Monday
plans for March 16th game against Orlando.
And a Magic City, John, is a strip club.
The Hawks is describing the one night collaboration as an old to an iconic cultural institution.
Luke Corned wrote this in medium.
He says the NBA should desire to protect and esteem women, many of whom work diligently
every day to make this the best basketball league in the world.
We should promote an atmosphere that is protective and respectful of the daughter's wives, sisters,
mothers, and partners that we know and love, allowing this night to go forward without
protest would reflect poorly on us as an NBA community.
John, I appreciate his willingness to bring out the point about the message, this so-called
celebration since, to women.
What do you think?
I think what needs to happen is Luke Corned needs to run for the state legislature in Colorado,
because obviously in my state, we have a bunch of lawmakers who think the exploitation
of women is a good way to advance women.
This is a foolish thing for the Atlanta Hawks to do.
These are institutions that are not to be celebrated, they're not iconic, they're damaging
because anything that not only degrades women but compromises the fundamental institution
of marriage in a society is not good for that culture.
What do you say?
Strip clubs have been good for the city of Atlanta.
Has anybody driven through Atlanta?
Are you kidding me?
These aren't the cultural highlights of this city and it's a cool city, right?
These are the parts of town where you don't want to stop.
These are the parts of town that are also enabling all kinds of other things.
This is the conversation we're having on a legislative level in Colorado that with these
sorts of sin policies that take things that everyone is universally understood to be
wrong and then pretending like they're okay.
In that case, prostitution, it comes along with other evils as well.
It makes other things possible.
Congrats to Luke Corned, I don't know who he is, I wonder if he's coming from a place
of faith with his courage to say something out loud like this.
I think so.
Yeah.
Well, good for him.
I do think, by the way, we're getting more and more examples.
Not as many as the NBA as we see, for example, in college football and even increasingly in
the NFL of people who are athletes and people of faith and willing to say it out loud and
not only willing to say it out loud, but willing to say things out loud that might be perceived
as being too conservative or too Christian.
We need more of those voices in the NBA.
We need more of them who are willing to speak out, but good for him.
I hadn't seen the story until you brought it up.
Hopefully it'll go a long way into convincing the Atlanta Hawks to do the right thing.
Standing up for Jesus' song.
Yeah.
All right, John Stone Street is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint
Podcast.
John, thank you for this terrific week and thanks for joining us week after week.
What a treat.
It is my pleasure.
Thank you both.
Additional support comes from Covenant College, where students are equipped with a Christ-centered
education rooted in the reformed tradition, Covenant.edu slash world.
From free Lutheran Bible College, grounding students in the Word of God for life in Jesus
Christ, on campus and in person in Plymouth, Minnesota, F-L-B-C dot edu slash world.
And from Boyce College, where truth comes first, every class begins with Scripture and
prepares students to live with wisdom, conviction and Christ-like faithfulness.
Boycecollege.com.
Today is Friday, March 6.
Thank you for turning to world radio to help start your day.
Good morning.
I'm Merna Brown.
And I'm Nick Eiker.
Coming next on the world and everything in it, Pixar's Pivot.
Once upon a time, Pixar meant inventive storytelling and dependable family entertainment.
But lately, the studio has struggled.
Apart from Inside Out 2 from 2024, Pixar has produced a string of box office disappointments.
Now the studio is hoping its newest release hoppers marks a turnaround.
Let's hear what world arts and culture editor Colin Garberino has to say about that.
This is incredible!
Hello?
Hi!
You're a deer!
What's up?
Hey, rabbit!
Sup, man?
In Pixar's hoppers, we need a nature-loving university student named Mabel, who leaps
into action when her favorite glade is threatened by a highway project.
Her plan?
Use advanced technology to transfer her consciousness into a very beaver robot.
First, tell me what this is!
Okay, okay!
We call it hoppers.
Hoppers?
We use a proprietary mind-casting apparatus to hop or inhabit a lifelike replica.
I don't know what that means.
We put this into this.
Once she's hopped into the beaver body, she can talk to animals displaced by the project.
She attempts to rally them to save the environment from evil developers.
Doesn't this sound a lot like James Cameron's original avatar?
In that movie, a human gets his consciousness transferred into an alien body so he can rally
the natives to save the environment from evil developers.
The parallel must have been obvious to Hopper's filmmakers, too, because they even joke about
it in the movie.
The problem is, the plot of Avatar was the worst thing about that film.
Taking that plot and transferring it into a kid's movie with cute beavers instead of
blue aliens doesn't make it any better.
How many more movies like this is Hollywood going to cram down our throats?
Hoppers is loaded with posturing and left-wing moralizing.
Of course, there's the typical idolization of nature.
Also, the heroes are quirky and ethnically diverse.
And naturally, the only white guy in the film is the villain.
What do you want?
Please don't hurt me!
Perhaps the film's biggest failing is that it perpetuates our society's pernicious
lie that deep down everyone is good at heart.
Netflix are used to be better than this.
Movies from the studio's Golden Era tend to subvert the clichés that our society
thrives on rather than confirm them.
Think about movies like The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Wally and Up.
Movies that challenged audiences to throw off lazy thinking.
Now it seems that the one's unconventional Pixar has been thoroughly tamed by Disney.
Mabel is just like a typical Disney princess minus the romance.
He's an entitled girl who ruins the lives of countless other people so she can get
her own way.
That's not to say the movie is as bad as it could be.
Perhaps the best thing I can say about Hoppers is that maybe someone could understand it
as an unintentional allegory explaining why it costs so much to live in California.
Also, some of the dialogue is amusing and some of the animal characters are endearing.
The animation style is cute enough, though hardly groundbreaking.
Writer director Daniel Cong even gets a little edgy by showing that nature can be read in
tooth and claw when a few named characters get eaten and squished.
But even though the movie tells the truth about how violent nature can be, it perpetuates
confusion about humanity's relationship to the natural world.
God has given us the task of subduing the earth.
We're not meant to pillage and exploit.
We're too steward and care for his creation.
But this movie tells kids that humans aren't exceptional.
We're just another animal that needs to learn to share.
Pond rule number three, we're all in this together.
It's all very disappointing and what's even more disappointing is that if Hoppers fails
to turn a profit, Disney and Pixar will undoubtedly learn the wrong lesson.
They'll assume audiences only want sequels and franchise films.
They'll say, well, we tried to be original, but folks only want Toy Story 7-8-9.
The ironic thing is that Hoppers is thematically one of the most unoriginal stories Pixar has ever
made.
It's sad that this studio that used to speak with a prophetic voice now prostrates itself
before current political fashions.
I'm Colin Garberino.
Good morning.
Good morning.
This is the world and everything in it from listener supported world radio.
I'm Nick Eiker and I'm Merna Brown.
Coming up next, a tribute to one of the smallest and most useful words in the English language.
You probably used it several times already today without even noticing.
Here's world commentator George Grant.
I've been thinking a lot about the word there.
Surprisingly, it's one of the most versatile linguistic tools we have in the English language.
Not to be confused with its homophones, they're a possessive meaning belonging to them,
or they're a contraction meaning they are, their T-H-E-R-E is usually either an adverb
referring to a location, it's over there, or a pronoun introducing a sentence.
They're once was a ship that put to sea.
But sometimes it's also used as an indefinite grammatical subject, fool there was, or an expression
of consolation.
They're there, or as an emphatic declaration, they're finally done, or even as a casual
form of address.
Hey, there.
One of the more unusual uses of the word happens when there quietly replaces a whole phrase,
a preposition and a noun bundled together.
Grammarians, of course, have a name for that.
They call it a pronominal adverb.
It was this use of there that really got me going down this obscure grammatical rabbit
trail.
On my Bible reading one morning, I kept noticing words like they're about, they're
at, they're by, they're for, they're from, and they're in.
And that was just the start.
There was, they're of, they're on, they're out, they're unto, they're upon, and they're
with.
I then began to think of all the great passages given form and heft by this versatile
word.
That there be light, and there was evening, and there was morning.
Never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.
There is a bomb in Gilead.
There is a river whose streams make glad, the city of God.
There is none like you, O Lord, nor are there any works like yours.
And in the same region, there were shepherds out in the field.
Jesus rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm.
There they crucified him.
Peter went into the tomb and saw the linen cloths lying there.
Suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind.
And there is salvation in no one else for there is no other name under heaven given
among men by which we must be saved.
And he shall wipe away every tear from their eyes.
Death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore.
The word entered old English by at least the eighth or ninth century is a simple word
of place, a locative adverb, as grammarians would say, rooted in Anglo-Saxon proto-German.
But by the 10th or 11th century, it had already begun to diversify, acquiring new and varied
uses, becoming a kind of handy linguistic Swiss army knife.
But just think of all the ways that we now use their colloquially in our everyday speech.
It's neither here nor there, hang in there, then in there, there, and then there be dragons.
There's no place like home.
Halfway there, there's something in the air there and back again.
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
There goes the neighborhood.
There comes a time there are no atheists and foxholes.
So there, ever since one of my seminary professors first posed the question of a text, what's
the therefore, therefore I've tried to make note of these sorts of obscure details, but
I'm going to have to leave it there for now.
Even though there is so much more to explore, there you have it.
I'm George Grant.
Time now to say thank you to the crew who helped with this week's programs, Mary Reichard,
David Bonson, Emma Eiker, Lauren Catterberry, Carolina Lumeta, Todd Vision, Jenny Ruff, Albert
Moller, Hunter Baker, Mary Muncie, Janie B. Cheney, Cal Thomas, John Stone Street, Colin
Garberino, and George Grant.
Thanks also to our breaking news crew, Kent Covington, Steve Closterman, Travis Kircher,
Daniel Devine, and Christina Groog.
And thanks to the Moonlight Maestro's serving up the program each week day, bright and early,
Ben Geiker and Carl Peetz.
Harrison Waters is Washington producer, Kristen Flavin, his features editor, Lindsay
Mast is producer, I'm executive producer, Nick Ike.
And I'm Murna Brown.
The world and everything in it comes to you from world radio.
World's mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.
Hear my cry, oh God, listen to my prayer.
And the end of the earth I call to you when my heart is faint.
Lead me to the rock that is higher than I, for you have been my refuge, a strong tower
against the enemy, versus one through three of Psalm 61.
Comfort and encourage one another this weekend.
Find a church faithful to the word, and sing Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with your
brothers and sisters in Christ.
And board willing, we'll meet you right back here on Monday.
Go now, in Grayson Peace.

The World and Everything In It

The World and Everything In It

The World and Everything In It