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The World and Everything In It
4.11.25 Culture Friday, Arsenio Arteza on legendary vocalists, and Word Play with George Grant
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- [00:06]
Andrew Walker
Good morning.
- [00:06]
Myrna Brown
Today on Culture Friday, what would it take to recover a faith that values both grace and God's design?
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Nick Iker
Andrew Walker is standing by to talk about that. Also today, only, only, only world music critic Arsenio Ortezza on a punk icon's wild ride and a blue eyed soul farewell. Later, George Grant takes us back to the age of Samuel Johnson. That is with the wit, wisdom and dictionary definitions of England's great man of letters. Wordplay for the month of April.
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Myrna Brown
It's Friday, April 11th. This is the world and everything in it from listener supported World Radio. I'm Myrna Brown.
- [00:54]
Nick Iker
And I'm Nick Iker. Good morning.
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Myrna Brown
Here's Kent Covington with today's news.
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Kent Covington
Republicans are one step closer to passing a bill addressing President Trump's top priorities.
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Nick Iker
On this vote, the yeas are 216.
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Andrew Walker
The nays are 214.
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Nick Iker
The motion is adopted without objection. The motion to reconsider is laid on the table.
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Kent Covington
The House on Thursday passed a budget framework, a sort of blueprint for a massive bill to come later. And the president told reporters we're well.
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Arsenio Orteza
On our way to getting, as we.
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George Grant
Call it, the big, the great big beautiful bill.
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Arsenio Orteza
It's tax cuts, regulation cuts and many other things.
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Kent Covington
Democrats criticize it as a bill they say will hand tax breaks to the wealthy. House Speaker Mike Johnson explains what comes next.
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Nick Iker
We have our 11 committees that will get instructions for reconciliation in the House. They are ready to go. We've been working on this for many months, almost a year now really when.
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Kent Covington
We first started the effort.
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Nick Iker
And now we go through the process of marking it up and finding the.
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Kent Covington
Equilibrium points with everybody in simple terms, hammering out the details and getting everyone on the same page. Thursday's vote sets the stage to eventually push the so called big beautiful bill through the Senate using the budget reconciliation process that would allow Republicans to get around a Democratic filibuster. Meanwhile, across the Capitol rotunda, senators heard testimony about fixing the clock, adopting a fixed time year round. No more spring forward fallback time changes. But which permanent time would be best, daylight Savings or standard? Dr. Karen Johnson is a neurology professor at the University of Massachusetts.
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Nick Iker
The negative impact of daylight savings time on sleep and our brain health harms the economy.
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Andrew Walker
Workers, especially those with early start times before 8:30. Think of your farmers, your transportation workers.
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Nick Iker
Your factory workers are less likely to.
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Andrew Walker
Be productive and efficient.
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Kent Covington
But other witnesses testified about the potential economic benefits of year round daylight savings. Dr. Johnson countered that the US has tried and quickly abandoned permanent daylight savings twice before, most recently in 1974. One plan under consideration aims to give that one more try, but there is an alternative being discussed, letting each state decide for itself. Democratic Senator Lisa Blunt, Rochester what works.
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Myrna Brown
In my home state of Delaware may.
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Andrew Walker
Not work in Washington state, but some.
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Kent Covington
Say that approach would be too complicated. A recent Stetson University poll suggests most Americans prefer daylight savings over standard time, but the vast majority, three out of four, agree on ditching the twice annual time changes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says inflation cooled more than expected last month. World's Christina Grube has more.
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Myrna Brown
Economists were expecting some improvement in the consumer price index in March, but the numbers were much better than forecast. Prices were mostly steady last month. Overall, inflation ticked down just a bit, while prices for most goods except food and energy went up slightly over the last year. Prices are up 2.4% overall, and that number is 2.8% if you leave out food and energy. Economists expect tariffs that took effect earlier this month to raise prices for consumers and businesses. For World I'm Christina Grube.
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Kent Covington
American and Iranian negotiators are still set to gather in the Middle east tomorrow to begin new negotiations surrounding Iran, Iran's nuclear program. We previously mistakenly reported Amman, Jordan, as the site of those talks. However, the negotiations will in fact begin in the Sultanate of Oman. President Trump says Israel and Hamas are moving closer to a deal to release the remaining hostages held in Gaza.
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Arsenio Orteza
We're making progress.
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George Grant
We, you know, there's 59 hostages, but only 24 of them are living. But we're making progress. We're dealing with Israel, we're dealing with Hamas, and it's a nasty group.
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Kent Covington
Meanwhile, 10 Palestinians detained by Israeli troops reunited with their families yesterday after they were freed by the Israeli government. All of this comes as Israeli officials announced that they are holding talks with Turkey about the situation on the ground in Syria. Israeli government spokesman David Mentzer I can share with you that each side has presented its interests in the region and.
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George Grant
It has been agreed to continue the path of dialogue for the purpose of maintaining regional stability.
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Kent Covington
Since dictator Bashar al Assad was ousted from Syria last year, Israel and Turkey have been competing over their separate interests there. The talks are aimed at preventing conflict between Turkish and Israeli troops on the ground. The Trump administration has secured the freedom of an American with dual US Russian citizenship in a prisoner swap with Moscow. Russian authorities arrested Ksenia Karolina in February of last year while she was visiting family there, State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce told reporters on Thursday.
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Nick Iker
Ksenia was detained in Russia for more than a year and will soon be reunited with her loved ones.
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Kent Covington
Carolina is an amateur ballerina who lived in Los Angeles. In exchange for her freedom, the administration is sending to Moscow a Russian German man jailed on smuggling charges in the.
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Arsenio Orteza
U.S.
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Kent Covington
I'M Kent Covington. And straight ahead, Culture Friday, with World Opinion's managing editor, Andrew Walker. Plus, wordplay with George Grant. This is the WORLD and everything in it.
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Myrna Brown
It's Friday, the 11th of April. Glad to have you along for today's edition of the World and Everything in It. Good morning. I'm Myrna Brown.
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Nick Iker
And I'm Nick Iker. It's CULTURE Friday. Joining us now is Andrew Walker. He's a professor of Christian ethics and apologetics at Southern Seminary. He's also managing editor of World Opinions. Good morning, Andrew.
- [07:15]
Andrew Walker
Hey, good morning. Good to be with you.
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Nick Iker
Well, Andrew, I wanted to start with a recent column of yours because I think it names something that a lot of Christians are sensing but may not yet have put words to. It certainly resonated with me, kind of a frustration that I felt. But you write that after after years of cultural drift to the left, we're now seeing some signs, particularly among younger Americans and particularly among younger men, some signs of a rightward shift in the culture. But here is the irony that you point out. Evangelicalism, which for so long lamented progressive influence, is not actually ready to lead in this moment. And the reason for that is because too often we have emphasized grace to the neglect of nature. You say we have skipped over creation in our theology, focusing on the fall, the cross and the resurrection, but with no clear sense of what creation was for in the first place. So when the culture begins to rediscover some of these creational goods, like family, masculinity, conscience, limits, the church doesn't really know what to say, or worse, it responds with embarrassment or dismissal. So let me begin right there, Andrew. What would it look like to recover a theology, theology that embraces both grace and nature?
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Andrew Walker
Sure. That's a really wonderful question. And getting that relationship properly ordered is at the heart of what I think is going to be our answer for society. And one of the things I think we have to understand is that when we look at the New Testament, there's this phrase you'll often see, not necessarily in the New Testament, but per se, but that theologians talk about. They'll talk about the idea that grace restores nature, that grace does not destroy nature. And what that phrase means in theological circles is that the life of redemption is not the total negation of our earthly life, that when God created The earth. He created it. Very good. First, Timothy4 talks about that all things that God creates are to be received as gifts because they're inherently good. Now, obviously, sin enters into the equation in Genesis chapter three. But a part of the redeemed life is having a renewed understanding of what the original intention for our humanity was from the beginning. And then once we're redeemed, how to relate that earthly life to our redeemed life. And one of the examples I'll often give is Galatians, Chapter 3 talks about how when you're in Christ, there's neither slave nor, nor free, male nor female, or Jew or gentile. Okay. A lot of people sometimes think that is Paul exploding all of these earthly categories in a way that they no longer matter at all. That's not what the Apostle Paul is getting at. He's helping us to understand that you retain those earthly qualities that you were brought into the world within. But there's a new soteriological or salvific horizon that you now understand your earthly identity within. And so for me, what this means is I have brothers in Christ that are true spiritual brothers, but the fact that Nick Eichor might be my brother in Christ doesn't mean that I forsake or abandon my earthly brother Chris. It means that I am made aware of what the various relationships I have in those various domains, meaning in their proper order and their proper relationship.
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Myrna Brown
So, Andrew, you also write that some evangelicals treat creational goods like authority, masculinity, even national loyalty as red state baggage, just politics that distract us from the church's gospel task. I wonder what's the cost of that? And how do we begin recovering those things without going too far?
- [11:23]
Andrew Walker
Sure. So let me say one thing off the bat. We've probably all been in churches where there's maybe perhaps an ostentatious display of patriotism in unhealthy ways. So leaving that aside, I think there's been a trend in evangelicalism that has wanted to so celebrate our heavenly identity. Kind of the idea that the kingdom of God is transnational, and therefore it kind of eclipses your earthly identity to the point where you really can't have national pride in being an American. And if you go back to that paradigm of what I mentioned a second ago, grace restores nature. What grace restores nature means in the context of nationality and where you are is that you can love your country, you can love your nation with a rightly ordered patriotism, but you have to love the kingdom of God more, and sometimes Those things may come in conflict, and when they come in conflict, you are called to give that higher love to the kingdom of God. But insofar as there is no inherent tension right there, or there's no conflict that's causing a contradiction between the two, you can say I am an American. I love being an American, but I love being a Christian more. And in fact, the life of the Christian then informs our understanding of what our citizenship is going to look like as we rightly order our patriotism within the boundaries of our country.
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Nick Iker
So, Andrew, your column has gotten quite a lot of traction on our sites. Couple of weeks old, old enough that one of the last times John Stonestreet was here, I asked him to respond to some of the ideas in it, and he had a slightly different take. Interesting take on this. Let me briefly summarize that and then we'll play a short excerpt so you can hear what he said. But John largely agrees with the framing that you set out, that the evangelical church isn't prepar for a cultural moment like this. But he also offered a diagnosis of his own. He said the problem is not just that we have emphasized grace over nature, it's that we don't even have a habit of thinking theologically at all. We've lost what he calls our theological muscle memory. Let's listen to what he said.
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John Stonestreet
So there's not a sense of the church having a Christian worldview, a Christian view of reality that aligns with the revealed truth of scripture. Religious experience is what matters and Christian truth doesn't. Religious experience is what we're after, and we go after that in any way possible. And that's the limits then of what we can know to be true about Christianity. Now, of course, that's why I find it just so somewhere between interesting to bizarre when somebody comes out and really just thinks that the real thing that needs to be changed about Christianity is how much they talk about worldview. That just makes it so ridiculous to be. Because the thing that is missing in all of this is what we might call applied theology, the taking of what is true and thinking about the world through that lens. I don't think our problem is that we're talking about worldview too much. Maybe we're not talking about it precisely enough, but the bigger challenge is that we don't even think about faith in those terms.
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Nick Iker
So there you have it. We're not talking about worldview too much. We're obviously talking about worldview too little. So let me get your response to that, Andrew. Do you see it the same way is the real issue kind of this deeper lack of applied theology, a failure to think Christianly just full stop.
- [14:59]
Andrew Walker
It's interesting. The discussion around Christian worldview is batted around in a thousand different directions and that's often a reality of what pocket of evangelicalism that you're in. If you're in more kind of perhaps intellectual or academic circles within evangelicalism worldviews talked about a lot. But if you get inside more kind of popular evangelicalism, it's not talked about as often. And I think that that is a demonstration of I think attention within the evangelical world right now is that you'll often have kind of the intellectuals and the academics doing their thing and you might have popular evangelicalism doing its thing over here. And I think what we need to be doing is figuring out ways to bring those two lanes together more often than we are now. I want to give recognition to institutions like World and institutions like Focus in the Family and the Colson center that are doing really good work at bringing Christian worldview to bear for a more popular level audience. But I think the thing we have to recognize is that our sliver of evangelicalism is perhaps smaller than what we want to recognize. Because when you actually pull for theological beliefs with those individuals who identify as evangelicalism, there's mass theological illiteracy. So perhaps, Nick, a little bit of this conflict is is owed to a polling problem of how do you identify what an evangelical is? If an evangelical is someone who just kind of has that religious experience and doesn't really go to church and doesn't really have a biblical worldview, I'm not really sure that person is an evangelical. To me, an evangelical is someone who has a heartfelt commitment to Christ A but that is then realized in the reality that they are actively engaged in a local church and then they are trying to at some level cultivate a Christian understanding of the world. So maybe I can kind of split the baby between John and I and say maybe we need better polling is the solution here.
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Myrna Brown
Okay. Andrew Walker is a professor of Christian ethics and apologetics at Southern Seminary and managing editor of World Opinions. Thank you, Andrew.
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Andrew Walker
Thank you.
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Kent Covington
Additional support comes from Dort University where 100% of pre PT students are accepted into physical therapy school Dort Edu from Evangelism Explosion International helping believers share the good news of Jesus with the world. Evangelismexplosion.org and from the Colson Fellows Program, a nine month journey equipping Christians with clarity and courage to navigate today's culture. Colsonfellows.org World O.
- [18:21]
Arsenio Orteza
My love, my darling.
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Nick Iker
I've hungered for your touch Today is Friday, April 11th. Thank you for turning to world radio to help start your day. Good morning. I'm Nick Iker.
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Myrna Brown
And I'm Myrna Brown. Mmm. That unforgettable voice you heard a moment ago belonged to Bobby Hatfield. But it was Bill Medley's baritone that anchored the Righteous Brothers sound and carried their biggest hits.
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Nick Iker
You know, there was a time when pop music gave us voices like that, those that you could feel in your bones, deep, steady, unmistakable. And though that era is slipping away, a few of those voices do echo. World's music critic Arsenio Orteza has a tribute to two of them. One departed, one still singing with a sound that won't easily be forgotten.
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George Grant
You never close your eyes anymore When.
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Arsenio Orteza
I kiss your lips in 1964, a duo calling itself the Righteous Brothers scored a worldwide number one hit performing a song written by Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil and Phil Spector called you've Lost that Lovin Feeling. The record is a dramatic condensation of heartbreak into 3 minutes and 45 seconds. And it established the Righteous Brothers, Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield, as prime purveyors of what would come to be known as Blue Eyed Soul. More specifically, it introduced the world to Bill Medley's rich baritone voice. With the exception of their 1965 smash, Unchained Melody, which Hatfield sang by himself, it was Medley's lead singing that would define the Righteous Brothers chart topping sound throughout the decade. It was also the most distinguishing characteristic of I've had the Time of My Life, the song that Medley recorded with Jennifer Warnes in the late 80s for the Dirty Dancing soundtrack.
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Andrew Walker
Because I had the time of my life I never felt this way before.
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Arsenio Orteza
It too went to number one. Hatfield died in 2003 at the age of 63. Thirteen years later, Medley recruited Bucky Hurd and relaunched the Righteous Brothers as a touring act. They're on the final leg of the Lovin Feelin Farewell tour as I speak. Over the years, Medley also recorded a string of solo albums, most of which went unnoticed. But he has a new one, Straight from the Heart on Curb Records, and it's an exception.
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Andrew Walker
Don't take this heaven from me.
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Arsenio Orteza
It's possible that his advancing age and the growing awareness that he won't be around forever have something to do with the attention that the album is getting. But what's more likely driving the media coverage and positive reviews is the album's quality. Medley covers 12 country songs, many of them classic, such as Hank Williams, I'm so Lonesome I Could Cry, George Jones, He Stopped Loving Her Today and Buck Owens Crying Time. They're songs that unfold slowly and allow Medley to bring his voice to bear on the mysteries arising from between their lines. Four are duets matching medley with Michael McDonald, Keb Mo, Sean Colvin and Vince Gill, in that order. Medley handles the other eight by himself, and none more effectively than the Gilbert Beco Man Curtis Love song Let It Be Me. The singer David Johansson of the New York Dolls didn't enjoy the same acclaim or the success as Medley, but he had a similarly commanding, if altogether different voice. And because of his talent and adaptability, he not only survived in the music business for almost 50 years, but also left his mark. Johansen died at the end of February at the age of 75, three years after the release of a documentary about his life, Personality Crisis One Night Only Martin Scorsese directed it, and its title had a double meaning. Personality Crisis referred on the one hand to the best known song of the New York dollar, the band that first presented Johansson to the world in the early 70s. But personality crisis also referred to the wide range of guises under which Johansson performed. As a New York doll, he was an outrageously androgynous provocateur. Later he morphed into a solo rocker with soulful roots and album cover photos that looked like a model's portfolio. Later still, he'd lead an acoustic blues band called the Harry Smiths, and even later he'd lead a reunited version of the Dolls. But it was in the middle of his career that he hit upon his most unusual and most commercially successful Persona, the tuxedo wearing good time nightclub singer Buster Poindexter.
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Andrew Walker
Feeling hot, hot, hot feeling hot hot.
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Arsenio Orteza
Hot feeling with an infectious grin and a gravity defying pompadour, he became a regular on Saturday Night Live. He recorded four albums under the Poindexter name, each a master class in showmanship. And it was as Buster Poindexter that he unleashed his best known recording, a cover of the SOCA song Hot Hot Hot. He came to regret the degree to which it overshadowed every everything else he'd done. But its ubiquity did guarantee him a kind of musical immortality. I'm Arsenio Orteza.
- [24:59]
Myrna Brown
Today is Friday, April 11th. Good morning, this is the world and everything in it from listener supported world radio. I'm Myrna Brown.
- [25:08]
Nick Iker
And I'm Nick Eicher. Finally today, wordplay with George Grant. And today, the tale of a dictionary maker with a sharp mind Dry wit and very little patience for French.
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George Grant
Samuel Johnson was one of the most influential literary figures of the 18th century, and he remains among the most frequently quoted English prose stylists. It has long been traditional to refer to the second half of the 18th century as the Age of Johnson. Even so, he is best remembered not so much as a writer but as a conversationalist, mostly due to the account of his life written by James Boswell, his Ne'er do well travel companion. Many of Johnson's memorable quotations come not from his works but from his biographer's recollections of his conversations. So, Johnson quipped, almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble. And language is the dress of thought. He said, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully, and patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Born in 1709, the son of a failed village bookseller, Johnson struggled throughout his early life against the ravages of poverty. Though he demonstrated a precocious mind and a prodigious literary talent, he was unable to complete his education at Oxford. Instead, he began his lifelong labors as a freelance writer in London for various newspapers, magazines, journals and book publishers. He was phenomenally prolific and adept at virtually every genre, from criticism, translation, poetry and biography to sermons, parliamentary reports, political polemics, and dramatic stage plays. When he was nearly 50, he was commissioned to produce a dictionary. Over the course of the next seven years, he single handedly took on the task of comprehensively documenting English usage, which, when completed, set the standard for dictionaries ever afterward. The first edition contained 42,773 words. Each was not only succinctly defined, but illustrated with quotations from classic literature by Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and a host of others. Once it was published, the dictionary was universally regarded as the preeminent work of lexicography and etymology. Though it was largely academic, Johnson also introduced into it a good bit of humorous for example, he defined excise as a hateful tax levied upon commodities and adjudged by wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid. Oats, he said, was a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people. A sock was defined as something put between the shoe and foot, and a lizard was an animal reserv resembling a serpent with legs added to it. Johnson did not regard French loan words as proper for English usage. He omitted most of them, including champagne and bourgeois. Those that he did include were often hilariously derided. Finesse was dismissed as an unnecessary word creeping into the language. Ruse was dubbed a French word, neither elegant nor necessary. And monsieur, he said, was a term of reproach for a Frenchman. Tellingly, Johnson defined a lexographer as a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words. But that tracing and detailing set the standard for every dictionary that would follow, from Noah Webster's and James Murray's to William Collins and Thomas Nelson's, each labored in the shadows of that great harmless drudge. I'm George Grant.
- [30:15]
Nick Iker
All right. Time now to say thank you. Thank you to the team members who helped to put the program together this week. Mary Reichard, Mary Muncie, Kim Henderson, Daniel Darling, Josh Schumacher, Lindsay Mast, David Bonson, Carolina Lumeta, Jenny Lynn Schmid, Todd Vision, Teresa Haynes, Daniel Ser, Emma Eicher, Rachel Leland, Travis Kercher, Amy Lewis, Cal Thomas, Andrew Walker, Arsenio Orteza, and George Grant. Thanks also to our breaking news team, Kent Covington, Lindi Langdon, Steve Klosterman, Lauren Canterbury and Christina Grube. And thanks to the guys who stay up late to get the program to you early, Carl Peetz and Ben Jiker.
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Myrna Brown
Harrison Waters is Washington producer, senior producer Kristin Flavin is features editor, Paul Butler, executive producer, and Les Sillers editor in chief. The World and Everything in it is a production of World Radio, where we bring you biblically objective journalism that informs, educates and inspires. The Bible records the apostle Paul in Athens saying, the times of ignorance God overlooked. But now he commands all people everywhere to repent because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world and righteousness by a man whom he has appointed. And of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead. Verse 30 of Acts 17. When you gather with your brothers and sisters in Christ this weekend, don't just attend a service together, but show up ready to encourage one another with an uplifting word. And Lord willing, we'll meet you right back here on Monday. Go now. And grace and peace.