Breakpoint

In the last month, we witnessed momentous—and disappointing--Supreme court decisions concerning abortion, transgender rights, and religious freedom. Many are wondering what the implications are for religious business owners and nonprofits and even churches in a country where radical sexual and gender ideology or becoming protected categories in law.

What can we learn from history? Does our cultural political moment resemble any other in the past? And if so, what can we learn from that time period?

Today on the BreakPoint Podcast, Colson Senior Fellow Dr. Glenn Sunshine joins Shane Morris to discuss these and other questions. Dr. Sunshine is a professor of history at Central Connecticut State University and is the author of numerous books, including Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home.  

 

Resources:

Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home, by Dr. Glenn Sunshine, available at the BreakPoint online bookstore. 

According to news reports, there’s at least on bright spot amidst all the COVID-19 bad news: the planet is beginning to heal itself. With those pesky and invasive humans stuck at home, animals are reclaiming wild spaces (and even city streets) and, of course, CO2 emissions are down. The underlying message of these news reports is: What the Earth needs to heal is fewer people.

The idea isn’t new. Since at least the 1970s, environmental activists have advocated for reducing the human “footprint,” which ultimately means reducing the number of humans.

For example, in his latest film “Planet of the Humans,” Michael Moore argues that green energy, such as solar, wind, and other renewables, will get us nowhere. Our only hope to combat climate change, he says, is limiting population growth.  While many environmentalists will disagree about the potential of “green energy,” most agree that we need population control.

In fact, the idea is now so firmly planted in Western minds, it is, for many, impervious to facts and reason.  When beliefs become pseudo-religious like this, we tend to ignore some facts and forget others.

Those who continue to bewail the human population ignore that, with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa, fertility rates have cratered in almost all of the world, leaving countries with a shortage of workers and an aging population. In fact, the median age of the population in North America has risen from 30 in 1955 to 39 today. In Japan, the median age has risen from 22 to 48 in just 15 years.!

And, we are quick to forget that some of the most horrific human rights abuses of the past fifty years were attempts to limit population growth. I’m not only talking about China’s infamous and horrific “one-child” policy. The war against fertility has been waged from Peru to India, and many places in between.

Still, the blindest blind spot driving the anti-human, anti-natalist worldview behind so much environmental alarm is something that has proven to be true over and over. Namely, the best tools humans possess to combat environmental challenges are human ingenuity and creativity. Put another way, it’s remarkably short-sighted to see humans as only problems to be solved. The human capacity to adapt, imagine, and innovate are the best solutions available.

Take for example Project Vesta, which is currently testing an ingenious way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere by taking a cheap volcanic mineral called olivine, grinding it up, and spreading it on sandy beaches. According to Project Vesta CEO Tom Green, the goal is to “speed up a natural process that normally takes place very slowly, over geological time.” When ocean waves and rain hit the ground up olivine, it “triggers a chemical reaction that pulls carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and into the water as a molecule called bicarbonate.” In turn, marine organisms use the bicarbonate to make sea shells and corals.  Or as Green put it, Project Vesta’s vision “is to help reverse climate change by turning a trillion tons of carbon dioxide into rock.”

The very audacity and imagination of Project Vesta reminds me of how enhanced agricultural production spearheaded by Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution made catastrophic predictions about overpopulation and food shortage look foolish. Or of India’s work developing safe nuclear reactors using thorium as fuel. There are simply so many instances like these that suggest people aren’t the problem. They are the solution.

Misanthropic worldviews obscure the obvious lessons of these stories, and instead advance the demonic idea that we must “cull the human herd” (a phrase that has made a comeback during the pandemic). There is, of course, no reason we should think that human ingenuity and adaptability has come to an end, in this day and age. Thus, there’s no reason to think that fewer people are the answer.

Of course, Christians should know this already, since we also know that every person is unique and valuable, created in the image of God. But, even a materialist, who thinks credit for our success as a species is due to natural selection, should be able to see our track record and conclude: humans are not the problem to be eliminated. They are the solution.

Recently, the world learned that researchers at London’s Francis Crick Institute used CRISPR technology to genetically edit 18 embryos. Around half of the embryos suffered the kinds of major mutations and genetic damage that could lead to birth defects and life-shortening medical problems. The horrifying results led one gene-editing expert to call for “a restraining order for all genome editors to stay the living daylights away from embryo editing.”

Unfortunately, the desire to play god with the human genome is not easily discouraged. For example, consider the title of a recent article at Wired which proclaimed a “Neobiological Revolution: “Covid-19 Is Accelerating Human Transformation—Let’s Not Waste It.”

“From gene editing to brain computer interfaces,” the authors write, “our ability to engineer biological systems will redefine our species and its relation to all other species and the planet… And Covid-19 is accelerating this transformation.”

The authors quickly go from confidence to hubris, in language that resembles Satan’s from Paradise Lost: “Our ability to manipulate RNA and DNA, bacteria, viruses, algae, and fungi gives us the power to engineer life.” We can, the authors promise, “prevent a future [COVID-like] lockdown,” and  failure to do so would be “a crime against humanity.”

“Imagine the day,” they warn, “when your great grandchild sues her parents for not genetically engineering her to protect her” from inheritable diseases or even failing “to enhance her in order to compete effectively.”

What is standing in the way of what they call “our godlike technologies”? Only “our Paleolithic emotions (like fear, jealousy, and greed) and our medieval institutions.”

Of course, all “neurobiological” revolutionaries with “godlike” abilities know that a few eggs have to be broken in order to make an omelet. Perhaps that’s why WIRED didn’t mention what happened at the Crick Institute and only offered a passing reference to “the risk of unintended consequences and a backlash from patients, consumers, regulators, religious groups, and more.” After all, according to this worldview of scientism, unleashing dangerous mutations on the human genome isn’t the real crime. The real crime is standing in the way of “progress.”

What is meant, however, by progress? For whom is progress promised? For humanity and human flourishing? As C. S. Lewis warned in his masterful book The Abolition of Man, “The Power of Man to make himself what he pleases means . . .the power of some men to make other men what they please.”

“The man-moulders of the new age,” Lewis continued, “will be armed with the powers of the omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.”

Of course, to warn of the true risks and human costs of our “neobiological revolution” is to be labeled “anti-science” and “anti-progress.” That should not dissuade us in the least from teaching others that what we know as science emerged as a product of the Christian worldview during the medieval period, grounded by the belief in a rational God Whose creation could be known through reason and inquiry. Because this rational God is also moral, science is not autonomous, untethered from ethical, moral, and, even theological considerations.

The Christian assumptions which undergirded the scientific revolution also undergird the dignity of each and every human being, and demand that we see everyone as ends in and of themselves, and never as mere means of our collective aspirations of “progress,” whatever that means. 

With so much at stake, distinctively Christian voices are needed in the sciences exactly now, perhaps more than ever. Courageous consumers must refuse any and all “breakthroughs” or conveniences built upon human rights abuses. Courageous pastors and teachers must clarify for the faithful the moral stakes of our technologies, especially when it comes to genetics and human reproduction. And, may God give us a new generation of scientists, who love God and want to discover His creation, and who can lead these fields of study in ways that honor God and protect those vulnerable image bearers among us.

Recently, in the midst of our national conversation about race, justice, and statues, left-wing activist Shaun King tweeted: “Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down. They are a form of white supremacy.”

Though it isn’t clear whether King was claiming that Jesus is a form of white supremacy or statues that depict Jesus as a white European are forms of white supremacy, King did get one thing right. Jesus was not a white European. Jesus would have looked like a First-Century Middle Eastern Jew. Because He was one.

And that He was, is no incidental or accidental part of the redemption story. Throughout Holy Scripture, God reveals Himself as a God of time and place. In Galatians, for example, Paul tells us that God orchestrated the incarnation at just the right time and in just the right place in human history.

Having the right picture in our minds of what Jesus may have looked like doesn’t seem to be that important to God (after all, if that were important to God, He may very well have chosen a time and place that was post-flash photography), but understanding the world in which He lived, the time and place in which He entered human history, that’s important. 

For modern Western Christians, that time, that place, and that culture can seem mysterious and even inaccessible. That’s why I’m grateful for the outstanding new book by the late Ravi Zacharias and his co-laborer at RZIM, Abdu Murray: Seeing Jesus from the East: A Fresh Look at History’s Most Influential Figure.

The idea for this ground-breaking work on culture, apologetics, and the life of Jesus originated the late apologist and former Muslim Nabeel Quereshi. After his untimely death, Ravi Zacharias, who is originally from India, asked Abdu Murray, whose family originally came from Lebanon, to help carry the project through. As he recently told me on a webinar, the fact that first Nabeel and now Ravi are with Jesus and see him with full clarity, is an especially meaningful thing for Abdu who hopes this book will help Western Christians better see Jesus by understanding His Eastern roots. Like Ravi, Abdu is particularly skilled at connecting dots between culture, personal stories, and timeless Truth.

Tragically, even as our culture comes to grips with the importance of culture and background in our national conversations about race and history, so many who are committed to tearing down or vandalizing statues of George Washington and even Ulysses S. Grant, can only see through their 21st century eyes. The lack of context and their lack of understanding of cultural artifacts and history are profound blindspots.  In the same way, our lack of understanding of the cultural artifacts and history of the middle Eastern context of Jesus’ life and ministry is a blindspot too.

In Seeing Jesus from the East, Ravi and Abdu explain how certain underlying norms of Eastern culture, including the role and purpose of stories and symbols, the power of the “honor and shame” mentality that pervades the East, the meaning and rewards of sacrifice, the role of teachers and prophets within a wisdom-oriented culture, and – my favorite - the use of parables, are all critical to understand if we are to comprehend the full biblical witness about Jesus Christ.

Seeing afresh the accounts of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, or, His transfiguration and confab with Moses and Elijah, or his parable of the day workers with the insights that would jump off the page to someone from the east is not only instructive. It’s inspiring.

Even more it underscores a critical theological insight of Christianity that is not found in other religions. In every other religion, God or the divine is understood either in terms of immanence or transcendence. Either God is outside of time and, in a sense, aloof to the human condition (as in Islam), or the gods are within the world, part of it like we are (as in Hinduism). Only in Christianity does the timeless, transcendent Creator of all also immanent to human beings and within human history.

“I hope that people who read this who are from the West,” says Abdu, “will see that He is not this imperialistic God of the Westesrners to control brown people . . . and those from the East [will see] that He is not a western god, He is a God who bridges both.”

You can receive a copy of Seeing Jesus from the East with a gift of any amount to the Colson Center during the month of July. Not only will you receive a tremendous resource, but you will enable the Colson Center to continue to equip thousands of other believers through daily BreakPoint commentaries, our ever-growing library of What Would You Say? videos, and our virtual training conferences such as Truth Love Together.

Go to BreakPoint.org/July to request a copy of Seeing Jesus from the East.

For more than a century and a half, evolution has been the center of a naturalistic account on how everything -- the universe, the earth, you and I -- came into existence. But for the last generation or so, a group of thoughtful experts in a variety of fields has challenged the dominance of evolutionary thought.

From a scientific and philosophical perspective, the Intelligent design movement has produced a wealth of books critiquing every aspect of the naturalistic account of origins for the laws of nature to the cell to the fossil records, DNA age, the origins of life itself.

Fortunately, there's a new resource that puts all of this in a brilliant little summary, Evolution and Intelligent Design in a Nutshell. Co-author Eric Anderson joins Shane Morris on today’s BreakPoint Podcast.

 

Resources:

Intelligent Design and Evolution in a Nutshell, by Eric Anderson, Thomas Lo, Paul Chien, Robert Alston, and Robert Waltzer

Seeing Jesus from the East, by Ravi Zacharias and Abdu Murray, yours with any gift to BreakPoint and the Colson Center. 

What will be the long-term impact of the Supreme Court's rulings on religious  freedom this term?  Will religious individuals enjoy the same protections that religious institutions do?

John Stonestsreet and Shane Morris give their perspective on the Court's decisions as well as on a letter on the dangers of cancel culture signed by left-of-center luminaries and a Massachusetts city's decision to recognize polyamorous relationships.

Finally, we share a portion of Shane's BreakPoint Podcast interview with Dr. Sam Allberry, author of Why Does God Care Who I Sleep With? And John and Shane answer your questions about systemic racism and social distancing at church.

 

Resources:

“Supreme Court Affirms Religious Institutions Are Allowed to Be Religious,”  by John Stonestreet and Roberto Rivera, BreakPoint

“A Letter to ‘Cancel-Culture’” by John Stonestreet and Shane Morris, BreakPoint

“A Massachusetts  City Decides to Recognize Polyamorous Relationships” by Ellen Barry, New York Times

“The Victims of Sexual Confusion,” a Truth Love Together virtual event presentation by Katy Faust

“Why Does God Care Who I Sleep with?” a BreakPoint Podcast interview with Sam Allberry

“Pastor or Parrot?” by John Stonestreet and Maria Baer, BreakPoint

To do or to say something insufficiently progressive these days risks the wrath of what’s being called “cancel-culture.” A mostly young and mostly online gaggle of so-called “social justice warriors” will attempt to silence anyone they deem to hold views sufficiently problematic or insufficiently “woke.”

So far, the list of cancel-culture’s casualties includes editors who publish controversial op-eds, campus speakers whose views were labeled “unsafe,” professors who quote from egregious classic literature, and researchers who published their politically incorrect findings.   

Though those behind cancel-culture would be on the far-left side of the ideological and political spectrum, the effect of what they are doing is the very opposite of liberal. Free speech and open debate, long-claimed values of classic liberalism, are stifled, not by a political oppression that so many feared, but by mob-like tactics.

On Tuesday, a number of high-profile thinkers (153 to be exact), many of whom would sit on the left of the spectrum, expressed their collective concern over cancel-culture. In a letter published by Harper’s Magazine, this group of very-high profile authors, journalists, academics, and artists warn of cancel-culture’s “intolerant climate” and reaffirm the value of open and civil debate. The group includes some of the brightest stars in the progressive firmament: Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, left-wing linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, author of The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood, feminist Gloria Steinem, Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, Malcolm Gladwell, and even John MacArthur (not that John MacArthur, this one).

The letter condemns “intolerance of opposing views,” the far left’s “vogue for public shaming and ostracism,” and its “tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”

Of all of the signatories, J. K. Rowling, knows this tendency firsthand. This longtime progressive superstar has faced an avalanche of accusations and criticisms, and a campaign to cancel her work. The reason? She fears that radical transgender ideology threatens the existence and protection of women,  and she’s been willing to express these very feminist views out loud.

The letter insists that the kind of tactics being turned on Rowling and others cannot sustain a free or democratic society: “The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other.”

Other than a few strange and unrelated swipes at the “radical right” and, of course, Donald Trump, the primary message of the letter was clear and unmistakable: discourse on the left has gone off the rails, and the only way to reclaim sanity is by insisting on and allowing open and civil debate.

The reaction to this letter from the ranks of cancel-culture was predictable. As one columnist at Reason put it, the reaction to the letter denouncing cancel-culture demonstrated why a letter denouncing cancel-culture was necessary in the first place.

One staffer at left-leaning Media Matters called the signatories “totalitarians in the waiting,” and accused them of wanting their younger counterparts to “sit down” and “shut up.” A writer at Vox, who identifies as transgender, after learning a colleague had signed the letter, immediately complained to their employer in an effort to get this coworker fired.

Already, two signatories have removed their names from the letter. One, a New York Times opinion writer, apologized profusely, saying she read it too quickly and didn’t know who else had signed it. Reading her tweets, you can almost hear her begging: Please don’t take my job.On one hand, it’s ironic that so many of the signatories of this letter have refused to be open and tolerant when it comes so many conservative views, especially about marriage, religious freedom, and abortion. Many would not allow a debate on the morality of abortion, for example, and would consider traditional view on marriage and sexuality “beyond the pale” for a civilized society. On the other hand, as they have certainly discovered by now, it took real courage to stand up to the ever-accelerating freight train of political correctness, even if they had a hand in getting that train moving in the first place.

If we hope to see free speech and open debate restored, and an end to cancel-culture, we will need to have the discussion this letter asks for, but it will require including views that many of the signers have a difficult time tolerating. It will also require revisiting where these classically “liberal” values of free speech and open debate came from in the first place. As a long list of authors and historians have demonstrated, from Os Guinness to Rodney Stark to Tom Holland to Vishal Mangalwadi, they aren’t products of secular thought. Instead, they are among the gifts that only Christianity gave to the world.

In a somewhat dizzying (but which will be seen, I think, as pivotal) few weeks at the Supreme Court, religious freedom has taken center stage. In two significant decisions yesterday, the Court protected our First Amendment’s First Freedom.

The first case, Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania, was the third time a group of nuns visited the nation’s highest court, and the latest installment in their 10-year-battle against the HHS Contraceptive Mandate. In 2017, a regulation issued by the Trump Administration exempted the Little Sisters and any employers “with sincerely held moral convictions opposed to …some or all contraceptive or sterilization methods,” from the Obamacare mandate which required them to provide and pay for the coverage.

The state of Pennsylvania challenged that exemption, and the Third Circuit court ruled in the state’s favor. Yesterday, with a 7-2 vote, the Supreme Court reversed the appeals court.

Justice Clarence Thomas authored the opinion for the majority: “For over 150 years, the Little Sisters have engaged in faithful service and sacrifice, motivated by a religious calling to surrender all for the sake of their brother . . . But for the past seven years, they—like many other religious objectors who have participated in the litigation and rulemakings leading up to today’s decision— have had to fight for the ability to continue in their noble work without violating their sincerely held religious beliefs.”

While the Little Sisters’ long battle seems to finally be over, it’s conceivable that another administration could replace the Trump administration regulation with something less sympathetic to religious organizations. That would spark another round of judicial challenges, local court rulings, and appeals.

The more decisive decision issued by the Court yesterday came in the case known as Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrisey-Berru. Two Catholic schools in California who chose not to renew the contracts of two fifth-grade teachers “due to poor performance,” including “failure to follow basic educational expectations” were sued by those teachers for discrimination. In another 7-2 vote, the Court sided with the schools because, as the opinion put it, “federal employment discrimination laws do not apply to teachers whose duties include instruction in religion at schools run by churches.”

The Court relied on the 2012 Hosanna-Tabor decision, which ruled that because teachers at religious schools can be considered ministers, they fall under the so-called “ministerial exception” when it comes to anti-discrimination laws. Though these particular Catholic school teachers weren’t called “ministers,” they did serve in a clearly religious role. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority: “What matters, at bottom, is what an employee does. And implicit in our decision in [Hosanna Tabor] was a recognition that educating young people in their faith, inculcating its teachings, and training them to live their faith are responsibilities that lie at the very core of the mission of a private religious school.”

Though, wrote Alito, the First Amendment doesn’t grant religious institutions a “general immunity from secular laws,” it does “protect their autonomy with respect to internal management decisions that are essential to the institution’s central mission.” Protecting the ability of religious institutions to hold and operate from its central mission is the reason there is a “ministerial exception” in the first place.

The two decisions issued yesterday make this very significant term of the Supreme Court even more so: Handcuffing the ability of states to restrict abortion, re-writing civil rights laws, further protecting the religious freedom of religious institutions to live by their convictions while limiting the rights of for-profit employers to do the same.

We’ve seen that it’s as wrong to place all of our hopes on Supreme Court decisions as it is to discount the courts and the elections that populate them. No. Elections matter. Judicial appointments matter. At the same time, we cannot outsource the hard work of protecting life to advancing truth to them. The rest of culture matters too.

Time will tell just how much these decisions from this session of the Court will ultimately impact our lives and our culture, especially as it relates to religious freedom. I will share my thoughts on this very soon. In the meantime, we can be grateful for these two decisions and hope together that the government will finally leave these poor nuns alone.

In his 1996, essay entitled “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died,” the late essayist Tom Wolfe predicted that new technologies (such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging or fMRI) would soon render our traditional ideas about the “soul,” the “mind,” the “self,” and "free will” obsolete. In their place would be a “brilliant dawn” of “Ultimate Skepticism.”  Today, to paraphrase another literary giant, it seems that Wolfe’s reports of the soul’s immanent death were greatly exaggerated. 

An fMRI is an instrument that measures brain activity by tracking blood flow.  As with other parts of the body, “when an area of the brain is in use, blood flow to that region also increases.” Neuroscientists attach a good deal of significance to this increased blood flow.

For example, in one study, participants were insulted and then asked to ruminate over the insults while an fMRI measured the blood flow in their brains. Researchers concluded that while anger over being insulted spurred activity in one part of the brain (the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex), “ruminating” or pondering the insults stimulated activity in a different part of the brain (the medial prefrontal cortex). Studies like this, say those Wolf called the “ultimate skeptics,” demonstrate that things like the “soul” or the “self” are, in reality, merely brain activity.

This leap in reasoning is an example of the hammer seeing everything as a nail. Just because certain parts of the brain are associated with specific tasks or emotions in no way proves that the soul or the self are illusions. And, since “fMRIs don’t actually measure brain activity directly (but) blood flow to regions of the brain,” we cannot be certain which region of the brain is actually active during a given task.

Even worse for those who saw conclusive evidence for their skepticism, Duke University researchers found inconsistencies in the blood flow measurements on which these conclusions were based. Re-examining 56 published papers of fMRI data, they discovered when individuals took the same tests weeks or months apart, there were “wildly varying results.” As lead researcher Ahmad Harriri, put it, “The correlation between one scan and a second is not even fair, it’s poor.”

In fact, inconsistencies of neuroscience testing over time seems to be a consistent feature of the field. The “Human Connectome Project,” which is widely regarded as the “bible” of neuroscience, also yielded inconsistent results: “For six out of seven measures of brain function, the correlation between tests taken about four months apart with the same person was weak.”

In other words, Wolfe’s prediction of a “brilliant dawn” was based on studies that don’t actually measure brain activity, but instead measure blood flow as a proxy for brain activity, measurements we now known to be basically useless.

As website Fast Company put it, the results of Harriri and company’s study are “rocking the field of fMRI research. In Harriri’s words, “This whole sub-branch of fMRI could go extinct if we can’t address this critical limitation.”

“Critical limitation” is an understatement. As the folks at Duke have demonstrated, we really don’t know what we’re looking at when we try to measure brain activity. How can anyone in the field, then, presume to talk with any level of predictive certainty about the soul, the mind, or the self?

Wolfe’s brand of “ultimate skepticism” began with the most basic assumptions inherent to a naturalist worldview: the everything that exists is physical. Nothing is metaphysical. Only that which can be physically measured can be known, and our ability to measure and know will eventually explain everything that is.  Naturalists are therefore committed to believing, before any evidence takes them there, that the soul and the self are illusions with biological explanations. Wolfe seized on fMRIs as “proof” of what he already assumed.

As the old saying goes, “science” is often used in the same way a drunk man uses a lamppost: for support, not for light. People of all worldviews do it, but especially those certain that religious beliefs are illusions. In this case, that certainty is what turned out to be the illusion.

The idea that children who exhibit anything but stereotypical behavior must be transgender has taken our society by storm, and now anything but "affirming" treatment is seen as abusive. But what are we to make of  entire peer groups of teenage girls deciding together that they were born in the wrong bodies and are actually boys? Of children being subjected to life-altering hormones and destructive surgery?

Author Naomi Schaefer Riley, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, joins Shane Morris to discuss her review of  Abigail Shrier's book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, as well as her review of Lisa Selin Davis's upcoming book, Tomboy.

 

Resources: “The Trans Cult: Review of ‘Irreversible Damage’ by Abigail K. Shrier,” by Naomi Schaefer Riley, Commentary Magazine   “Boy Oh Boy: Review of ‘Tomboy’ by Lisa Selin Davis,” by by Naomi Schaefer Riley, Commentary Magazine   Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, by Abigail Shrier