Ben Sasse, who is dying of pancreatic cancer, recently wrote an essay for the Wall Street Journal on AI and character development. He concluded with this reflection: “Character, whether of an individual or of a nation, is molded by habits and by time. This republic requires men and women to do long-form deliberation, serious thinking, honest humility and daily striving. What good is it to gain the whole world if we forfeit the souls that we’re supposed to form? We can’t expect to remain free without being virtuous, we can’t be bold without being rooted, we can’t be great without aiming first to be good. To stave off [Aldous] Huxley’s dystopia [in Brave New World], we must deliberately shape our children’s souls so that they can be creators, doers and thinkers embracing the next frontier.”

Christian columnist and attorney David French makes this astonishing observation: “A remarkable thing has happened on the world’s battlefields. Ukraine—a nation that was supposed to dissolve within days of a Russian invasion—has fought Russia to a stalemate, revolutionizing land warfare in the process. It has become an indispensable security partner in the Western alliance, including in the war against Iran. Now, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, is taking the next step, one that would have been unthinkable even as recently as 2024. By word and deed, he’s showing Europe and the world how the post-American free world can preserve its liberty and independence.”

Ben Sasse is the former US Senator from Nebraska and most recently former president of the University of Florida. Earlier in his life, he had earned a PhD in history from Yale. Sasse is best known as a senator, but before his election in 2014, he was the executive director for the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals (which produced the Cambridge Declaration), served in multiple roles in the George W. Bush administration, and was an assistant professor at the University of Texas. He now has stage four pancreatic cancer, which had metastasized to his liver, lungs, lymph nodes, and vascular system. He was originally given three to four months to live.

Sports gambling involves wagering on sports outcomes, transformed by the 2018 Supreme Court ruling into a legal, universally accessible, and rapidly growing industry in over 35 US states. Popular platforms like DraftKings, FanDuel and BetMGM offer extensive mobile betting on leagues like the NBA, NFL, and soccer. However, this boom has sparked concerns regarding high-risk bets, such as parlays, and rising financial issues like credit delinquency among bettors. The danger of sports gambling especially concerns young men.

What is the presidential pardon power and what are its limits? Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution vests the president with a broad but limited power “to grant Reprieves and Pardons.” According to the Supreme Court, the pardon power is intended as a tool for justice and mercy (an “act of grace”) and to further “the public welfare.” As one federal court has held: “The President, who exercises that power as the elected representative of all the People, must always exercise it in the public interest.”

By the mid- to-late 19th century, Diaspora Jews, especially those who settled in western Europe, believed that they could assimilate into European culture. In fact, most of the European democracies had granted Jews citizenship, facilitating this cultural accommodation. But this was not the case in Eastern Europe and Russia where Jews were segregated into ghettos and regularly experienced the violence of pogroms—anti-Semitic, government-sponsored violence against the Jews. Thus, accommodation in the West and pogroms in the East threatened the survival of the Diaspora Jews.

Mark 12:30-31 declares that we are to love God with our heart, soul, mind and strength. The challenge for the believer is what theologians call the noetic effect of sin: 2 Corinthians 4:4 affirms the depths of sin’s effect on our minds. For that reason, one of the weighty commands of the New Testament is to “renew our minds” (e.g., Romans 12:1-2; Ephesians 4:23). Colossians 3:2 commands: “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.” In 2 Corinthians 10:5 Paul speaks of taking “every thought captive to obey Christ.”

During my years as a university president, one of my joys was to be involved in inviting various leaders to our campus for a lecture series, Bible conferences, and other university events. One of the highlights of that joy was a conference that introduced Rev. John M. Perkins to our students. He became one of my heroes and stands out as one of the important evangelical, Black leaders of the church.

One of my hobbies is astronomy. When I retired from higher education in 2012, my wife bought me a telescope. Studying the stars and the planets is breathtaking. But beyond my amateurish investigations, I love to view the amazing photos provided by NASA from the Hubble Telescope and now the James Webb Space Telescope. The beauty, scale and sharpness of these photos are magnificent. And when I realize that these stars, galaxies and nebula are millions of light years away, I am drawn to King David’s affirmation, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the sky above proclaims His handiwork” (Psalm 19:1, ESV).

Marriage was the first institution God created (Genesis 2:24-25). Given how important marriage is to God, what is the state of this institution in the early decades of the 21st century?