Mark Twain is generally credited with the quip, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” The same can’t be said about climate change, which has become one of our most contentious and complicated public policy controversies. It’s also divisive. According to a recent Gallup Poll, sixty-two percent of those polled worry about climate change a great deal or a fair amount. Thirty-eight percent worry about warming just a little or not at all. What to do about it causes further disagreement, even among those very concerned about a warming climate. The question of how to best balance the use of fossil fuels and renewable energy sources takes up most of these debates, an issue for another day. But there are also disagreements about how to …
The existence of the human soul is usually described as a matter of faith unprovable by science. But is that true? What if evidence exists that we each do indeed have souls and even, that life continues after death? Whether we have souls and what happens to us after death — obliteration, reincarnation, heaven, hell — is a question about which humans have obsessed for as long as we have records of our existence. Indeed, it may be the ultimate question, for as a suicidal Hamlet laments in Shakespeare’s most immortal soliloquy: To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;For in that sleep of death what dreams may comeWhen we have shuffled off this mortal coil,Must give us pause… Wesley’s guests on today’s program respond …
It is a hard fact of life that — if we live long enough — we or those we love will receive a devastating medical diagnosis. How we cope in such difficult circumstances can both impact the course of our personal recovery and, in some cases, uplift the human condition. Christian apologist and journalist Megan Basham has walked this difficult road. Just after Thanksgiving last year, she was diagnosed with stage III colon cancer, which radically changed the expected course of her life. Since then, in an impressive display of courage and leadership, she has publicly shared how the disease and treatment impacted her life, her family, her career, and the importance of faith in devastating circumstances. Basham joined Wesley to share insights that she has gained from, in essence, walking …
Religious freedom — the ability to live and act according to one’s faith — is one of our most fundamental human rights. But as Western society has secularized, the importance of religious freedom seems to have been eclipsed by other concerns. Indeed, freedom of religion is too often devalued in the public square, and in some places in the world, is under direct — and even violent — assault. No one has put more thought into this urgent concern and what to do about it than Sam Brownback, returning for his fifth interview with Wesley on Humanize. In their discussion, Brownback explains why religious freedom is at the core of liberty and explains why he considers religious freedom to not “only” be a fundamental human rights issue, but an urgent concern for the …
Euthanasia is bad medicine and even worse public policy. Once a society accepts the principle that killing is a splendid answer to suffering, the kinds and extent of suffering that come to be seen as appropriate reasons to cause death expands continually. Often, this suicide agenda — let’s call it — advances so slowly that, over time, people become acclimated to policies that were once unthinkable. But that has not been the case in Canada, where the government and much of the population enthusiastically embraced what the law euphemistically calls medical assistance in dying, or MAID. As a result, the “slippery slope” can be seen slip sliding away in real time to the unfortunate point that euthanasia is now the fifth leading cause of death in Canada. Indeed, in …
