In mid-August 2026, President Donald Trump signed an executive order reducing federal recommendations for routine childhood immunizations from 17 down to 11. The directive also proposes splitting the combined measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) shot into separate individual doses and spreading visits out over time, while repeating unproven claims linking vaccines to autism.

In 2022 the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the nationally sanctioned constitutional right of an abortion and in effect making it a state issue. The strategy of the pro-life movement was to prohibit abortion in conservative states and work for abortion restrictions in other states. But abortion pills now threaten that strategy. Nearly two out of three abortions in America are “chemical abortions.” They are especially popular in states that prohibit abortion clinics.

The war with Iran, begun by the US and Israel on 28 February 2026, involved Israeli and the US airstrikes on nuclear facilities, military and civilian infrastructure and the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenai—and other key religious and political leaders. But wars are judged by how they end, not by successes along the way. Much of the fighting is over, but the consequences—the brutal realties—of the war remain. As we near the end of summer 2026, what can we conclude about this war?

Karl Marx (1818-1883), the founder of ideological communism, was ethnically Jewish and came from a long line of rabbis on both sides of his family. However, his parents converted to Christianity for professional and social reasons before his birth, and Marx himself was baptized, raised without Jewish religious traditions, and later embraced atheism. Marx famously dismissed religion as an illusion, calling it the “opium of the people.” Yet, as Robert Orlando argues, “when his thought is examined carefully, a striking parallel emerges: Marx didn’t eliminate redemption. He translated it into political economy.

We live amid insecurity, uncertainty, and anxiety. Wars and threats of war remain constant, but financial pressures can also provoke deep concern. As I write, the U.S. stock market is reaching record highs, buoyed by investments in artificial intelligence and expectations of greater productivity. For now, there is little sign of a downturn. Some investors warn that the AI bubble will eventually burst, though not immediately. Even so, two major concerns should trouble thoughtful Christians who value wise stewardship at every level of life: the future of Social Security and the weakening market for U.S. government debt.

Pope Leo’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), is very long (more than 42,300 words). Although he deals with multiple issues, the central purpose of the document, however, is to challenge the unregulated development of artificial intelligence, which is of great interest to me. “Too often the debate over AI presents two extremes. Technological pessimists speak as if modernity itself were a mistake. Technocrats and transhumanists greet every computational advance as a step toward transcendence. One side would smash the machines; the other would surrender to them.”

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.

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.