The American higher education system has become totally dependent on its students amassing huge debt to finance a college degree. It is now a system in crisis. The basic statistics explain the nature of the crisis. Josh Mitchell of the Wall Street Journal explains that borrowers owe more than $1.5 trillion in student loans, an average of $34,000 per person. Over two million of them have defaulted on their loans in the past six years, and that number grows by 1,400 each day.

In late May 2019, the Supreme Court declined to review Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky. That case was about an Indiana law that included a provision that would make it illegal for an abortion provider to perform an abortion in the state when the provider knows that the mother is seeking the abortion solely because of the child’s race, sex, diagnosis of Down syndrome, disability, or related characteristics.

In April 2019, The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention issued its Artificial Intelligence: An Evangelical Statement of Principles. The statement is an important tool, enabling Christians to think about the expanding technology known as artificial intelligence (AI). In the Perspective, I want to summarize this significant statement.

In 2019, America finds itself once again in the midst of an intense national debate about abortion. It centers on law, the Supreme Court and rights—the rights of the mother and those of the fetus. I have been reading extensively on various aspects of this emotionally wrenching ethical issue and believe, that as Christians, there are other considerations that should be factored into our thinking.

Several state legislatures continue to debate or consider laws that would grant fetal personhood, meaning that a baby growing in the womb would have the same constitutional protection as the mother carrying the child. As a dimension of this discussion, several states are considering “fetal heartbeat” bills that would ban abortion after detection of a heartbeat, which can be as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. Alabama and Missouri, for example, recently enacted laws prohibiting in effect all abortions except for circumstances where the health of the mother is in jeopardy.

The evidence that American culture is becoming more secular is overwhelming. For example, the rise of the religious “nones” is one of the more profound developments within American culture. They constitute about a quarter of the total population and, about a third of those who became adults in the new millennium, identify with the “nones.” As The Economist reports, “Comparing 2016-2018 with the last three years of the 20th century, declared participants in organized religion have plunged by nearly 20 points to 52%.

In late April 2019, before he walked into a synagogue in Poway, California, and opened fire, John Earnest wrote a seven-page manifesto spelling out his core beliefs: That Jewish people, guilty in his view of faults ranging from killing Jesus to controlling the media, deserved to die; that his intention to kill Jews would glorify God.

Chuck Colson regularly stated that “what was once unthinkable, becomes debatable and gradually becomes acceptable.” Independent journalist, Jeremiah Keenan, recently reported in The Federalist magazine a rather astonishing legal development concerning a 14 year old child, the child’s parents and the judicial system of British Columbia, Canada. It magnifies the bizarre and almost unthinkable developments in the next frontier of the human sexuality within Western Civilization. It also raises the troubling question of when do the rights of a child undermine parental rights? In this developing new normal, parents have limited rights, while the state sanctions sexual experimentation and novelty in the name of human rights.

According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, citing statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), suicide is the tenth-leading cause of death in the United States. In 2017, there were 47,126 suicides and nearly 1.4 million suicide attempts. The CDC estimates that self-inflicted deaths and injuries cost the US approximately $70 billion a year in direct medical and work-loss costs. Between 1999 and 2017, the age-adjusted rate for suicide in US increased 33%.

In the 1960s 1 in 6 Americans belonged to a mainline Protestant church. Today it is 1 in 20, and falling. More broadly, the number of self-described Christians in the US has continued to drop and is now below 70%. The United Methodist Church (UMC) offers a rather poignant example of the confusion and tension when a Protestant church abandons its theological and doctrinal roots.