Breakpoint

In the 19th century, India was coming to grips with the modern world. While British companies, like the East India Company, helped modernize India through trade, British missionaries, like William Carey, helped modernize India through culture formation. One of the more creative interactions with the west happened in Bengal through the work of Christian missionaries.

For example, when Krishna Mohan Bannerjee was a child, he attended the School Society Institution started by David Hare, a watchmaker from Scotland. Though Hare's faith commitments are unknown, he was concerned about social welfare in Bengal and started several noteworthy schools in the area. Hare recognized Bannerjee's potential and pushed him to continue his education, first in Pataldanga, and eventually at the newly founded Hindu College (now Presidency University) in Kolkata.

Bannerjee thrived at Hindu College, where the atheist headmaster, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, advocated for free discussion and debate on any and every issue and profoundly influenced Bannerjee.

When his father died of cholera in 1828, Bannerjee was forced to support himself through manual labor, and yet, still excelled in his studies. After graduating from Hindu College in 1829, Bannerjee got a job teaching at David Hare's school.

In 1829, Scottish missionary Dr. Alexander Duff noticed that Christian missions in India had only reached the lower castes. Duff proposed a new mission strategy of offering education in English in the sciences and biblical studies, in order to help upper-caste Hindu students see the contradictions in their own beliefs and move toward Christianity. Like so many others, Duff connected Western learning and success with Christianity. He believed that making Western learning and the Bible available would inevitably lead to conversions.

Bannerjee began to attend Duff's lectures and even visited Duff's house for serious discussions about religion and philosophy. In 1832, Bannerjee converted to Christianity. His conversion came at great cost: Hare fired Bannerjee from the school, Bannerjee's wife was forced to return to her father's home, and a firestorm erupted in the local press about Hindu College. Ironically, Bannerjee's conversion was blamed on the atheist, Derozio, and the popular headmaster was forced out.

Bannerjee moved to the Church Missionary Society School, where he served as headmaster. He studied theology at Bishop's College and became the first Indian to be ordained as a priest in the Anglican Church in Bengal. Before long, Bannerjee became the foremost Indian apologist of his day.

Prior to 1865, Bannerjee followed the lead of Duff and other missionaries in seeing Hinduism as nothing but superstition and idolatry that needed to be destroyed. However, his entire approach to apologetics eventually changed, and he began to argue that Christianity was actually the fulfillment of Hinduism. He noted how sacrifice was the most important ritual in the earliest forms of Hinduism. Further, he showed from the Vedas, the Upanishads, and other Hindu writings that Prajapati, the Lord and Supporter of Creation, sacrificed himself to save humanity, and did so by taking on a mortal body. This, Bannerjee argued, prefigured Jesus' incarnation and sacrifice on the cross.

Bannerjee's efforts to find a doorway from Hinduism to Christianity grew out of his love for his country and his culture. He wanted to reconcile Christianity and modern education with Indian culture. In keeping with this goal, he became heavily involved in a wide range of social organizations in Bengal and worked for social reform. He opposed the caste system, polygamy, idolatry, the sale of girls into marriage, and sati, the practice of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. He also supported the education of women, seeing it as a yardstick for measuring the social progress of a country.

Beyond his work as an evangelist and apologist, Bannerjee was a critically important figure in the Bengal Renaissance, bringing modern ideas of scholarship and social justice to India and developing an approach to Christianity that honored Indian culture while remaining firmly anchored in the British evangelical tradition. He was a remarkable example of contextualizing the Gospel to India, and applying the biblical worldview to all areas of life. For Bannerjee, this started in school, inspired by a teacher who taught students to desire wisdom, seek truth, and follow honest inquiry. Eventually, this pointed Krishna Mohan Bannerjee to love God with all his mind, and to love his neighbors as himself.

John and Shane field a question from one listener for resources to support a Biblical practice of marriage. Another listener asks for resources for a child who enjoys art, but is trying to understand artistic expression from a Christian worldview.

In the latter part of the show, a listener asks if secular is a term Christians should use if "every square inch" belongs to God? To close, John and Shane discuss if "agree to disagree" is a good tactic to have in worldview conversations, if it is loving or actually harmful.

Business experts are noticing an increase in Gen Z-ers' need to know they're doing things well. "Sixty-six percent of Gen Z say they need feedback from their supervisor at least every few weeks in order to stay at their job," writes Ryan Jennings, a generation expert, "Considering Gen Z grew up in digital environments full of real-time feedback (likes, comments, shares, etc.), it's not surprising [they have] an elevated appetite for feedback at work."

On the other hand, many believe Gen Z is the most narcissistic generation. It's not hard to see why, when young people are constantly taught to live "their" truth and cut out "toxic people" - which is mostly anyone who makes them feel bad.

Incredibly, the latest peer-reviewed data shows that Gen Z-ers know they have this tendency, and don't really like that about themselves.

So, there's hope after all. Growth of any kind requires being willing to listen to others, even when they tell us things we don't want to hear.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is among a group of billionaires looking for the secret to immortality. Bezos funds Altos Labs, a startup pursuing breakthroughs in biological reprogramming technology. The ambitious new field has already seen some promising, not to mention terrifying, results in animal testing. Biological reprogramming technology attempts to revert cells to an embryonic state. If successful, this could unlock the potential to "rejuvenate" organs, perhaps entire bodies.

On the one hand, there's nothing unusual or controversial about the human desire to go on living. Christianity affirms that death is not a natural part of life in the strictest sense. It's a result of the fall. Death is, to borrow a phrase from theologian Neil Plantinga, "not the way it's supposed to be." Scripture calls death "an enemy." When Jesus arrived at the tomb of Lazarus, He wept at the death of his friend and the pain it caused, even though He clearly planned on turning that funeral into a party.

At the same time, the desperate race for immortality is not an attempt to reverse the effects of sin. Rather, it reflects how desperate man without God is to exert complete control over the cosmos, and to have life on our own terms.

Jeff Bezos is certainly not the first person in history willing to go to such extreme lengths to stave off the inevitable, only the latest and most resourced. Some speculate that this is nothing more than a mid-life crisis for the 56-year-old tech mogul. After all, Bezos's 25-year marriage ended in 2019, and, in July, he stepped down as CEO of one of the biggest and most powerful companies in the history of the world. Perhaps he's just looking for ways to spend his $200 billion. It would take a lot of trips to outer space to spend that fortune.

Perhaps he's reacting to the age-old truth, that even all the wealth in the world cannot ultimately satisfy a hole in the heart that is God-shaped. Another, more ancient billionaire once lamented, "When I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind." Of course, if life truly is meaningless in the first place, more of it won't fix the problem.

The Bible teaches that we can never be satisfied until we are reconciled with the God who made us. Until then, we remain enemies, selfish rebels at war with life itself. Living forever in this state wouldn't be an accomplishment. It would be a nightmare.

Genesis tells us that, after the fall, God kept Adam and Eve from the Garden in order to prevent them from eating of the Tree of Life:

Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—" therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.

God's actions were as much of mercy here as of judgment.

Later, King Solomon would describe how God "set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what [He] has done from beginning to end." We are created beings created for eternity. C.S. Lewis famously put it this way, "If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world."

The desire for immortality ultimately points us to, and can only be satisfied by, God Himself. He made us to live forever. He is life itself. The eternal life we seek, both the why and the how, is only found in Him.

In 2020, Chinese box office revenue officially surpassed that of North America. Shirli Li writes in the Atlantic, "Filmmakers and actors have always been subject to bosses who decide which movies get to soar at the box office….Now, more than ever before, that boss is Beijing."

Fast and Furious star John Cena demonstrated this deference in May when he posted a back-bending apology to China, in Mandarin, for calling Taiwan a country. Another example is the potential ban facing Marvel's The Eternals because its director, Chloé Zhao, criticized the Chinese Communist Party … eight years ago.

Repeatedly, U.S. film companies posture as courageous defenders of human rights when they vocally oppose laws in states like Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas. But then they're deafeningly silent about doing business in China, a country actively imprisoning more than one million Uyghur Muslims, hiding the presence of massive slave labor camps and no freedom of any kind when it comes to journalism. Hollywood, it seems, mostly just listens to the money.

The hope has always been that Western values would somehow infiltrate China and change it from the inside. But the opposite is happening. There's nothing like the allure of massive profit to drown out our collective conscience.

Whenever I struggle to understand C.S. Lewis's nonfiction work, I find it helpful to go to Narnia.

For example, so many of the concepts Lewis introduced in Mere Christianity are found in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Throughout each of the Narnia books, Aslan, the Pevensie children, and other characters embody many of the ideas he explored in his nonfiction.

Another example is The Abolition of Man, a book critically important for our cultural moment. In the book's opening essay, "Men without Chests," Lewis thoroughly critiques modern education which, Lewis says, fills students' heads with knowledge and their bellies with passion, but does nothing to cultivate the chest.

This idea from Lewis is based on something Aristotle taught, that the head is the seat of human reason and the belly is the seat of passion. Good citizens, Aristotle believed, are those whose heads govern their bellies. When someone is ruled by their passions, they are unstable.

Aristotle thought that humans could govern their bellies through the formation of good habits. There's certainly a lot of truth to that. But anyone who has ever been in a real conflict between head and gut knows that, typically, the gut wins. Even more, our reason becomes merely instrumental to justify whatever it is we want.

My friend Michael Miller, a senior fellow at the Acton Institute, once described the belly as an 800-pound gorilla constantly demanding, "Feed me, feed me, I want. I want, feed me, feed me." The head, on the other hand, is more like an 80-pound professor with a bowtie. Who's going to win the conflict between a massive gorilla and a tiny professor? The gorilla…every time.

This is what C.S. Lewis was critiquing in his essay "Men Without Chests." A person will only function well if they are bolstered by a strong "chest," or virtue. Only a well-formed moral will, which cares for virtuous things, can overrule and ultimately govern the belly.

For a story version of this opening essay of The Abolition of Man, see The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. This book has one of the best opening lines: "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." Eustace is the boy without a chest, as readers soon discover. He's a spoiled brat; as Lewis goes on to describe, he attended schools that filled his head with knowledge and his belly with passion, but did nothing to cultivate his chest.

A thematic undercurrent in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is how Eustace developed a chest. Spoiler alert: it had a lot to do with his relationship with Reepicheep, one of Narnia's smallest characters. The mouse, a perennial favorite character in all of Narnia, had much moral courage. He had, to borrow Lewis' phrase, a chest.

"Men Without Chests" is just one reason that The Abolition of Man is such an important book for understanding our current cultural moment. Lewis's analysis of culture in this book is more relevant now than ever. It is a must-read for any and every Christian.

Recently, Dr. Michael Ward, one of the foremost C.S. Lewis scholars on the planet, a researcher from the University of Oxford, and a visiting professor at Houston Baptist University, has written a companion guide to the Abolition of Man. The guide is called After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man.

In this book, Dr. Ward takes readers on a chapter by chapter, essay by essay journey through the most important ideas in The Abolition of Man. Because the analysis in this book is so critical to understanding our cultural moment, the Colson Center will send a copy of both The Abolition of Man and After Humanity: A Guide to the Abolition of Man as our thank you for a gift of any amount to the Colson Center this month.

In fact, anyone who gives this month will also be able to join an exclusive set of video introductions from Dr. Ward and a live webinar to discuss the key concepts in the book. This special opportunity to study one of Lewis's most important books, guided by one of the world's top Lewis scholars, is only for friends of the Colson Center.

Visit us at BreakPoint to give a gift to the Colson Center and get your copies, along with access to the live webinar and prerecorded introductory videos.

Recently, the US Census bureau reported, somewhat diplomatically, "It's clear that in an unprecedented environment, families are seeking solutions that will reliably meet [the needs] of their children." That's an understatement.

The New York Times reports that just last year, more than 1 million children did not enroll in kindergarten. The impact of learning loss from missed school time has parents worried across every grade. After years of the nationwide percentage of homeschool families hovering around 3.3 percent, that number jumped to 11.1 percent in the fall of 2020.

If all of this means a renewed emphasis on parental involvement, that's a good thing. Whether homeschooled or otherwise, involved parents consistently predict far better educational outcomes for kids. Which makes sense, because parents are the primary, God-given guardians of their children's future.

Education begins in the home. Or, as Tina Windebank put it over at Citizenlink, "Relax! Your kids are already homeschooled."