John Stonestreet – Page 44

When Solzhenitsyn Stunned Harvard

Oct 18, 2021John StonestreetCultureAleksandr Solzhenitsyn

*John Stonestreet, Radio Host and Director of the Colson Center*

A little over forty years ago, Soviet dissident and literary giant Aleksander Solzhenitsyn delivered a thunderbolt of a commencement address at Harvard University.

Survivor of the Soviet GULAG, a fierce opponent of communism, Solzhenitsyn stunned his elite audience as he took aim at the disastrous social and worldview trends happening in the West.

He bemoaned that Western societies had given “destructive and irresponsible freedom . . . boundless space.” By which he meant license, what Chuck Colson called freedom without virtue. Then he went after the Western appetite for “decadent art.” Finally, he argued, no healthy society or culture lacks great statesmen.

Solzhenitsyn was prophetic. But sad to say, the West has largely ignored his voice. Irresponsible freedom? Check. Decadence? Check. Now go through your mental checklist and see how many great statesmen or stateswomen you can name these days.

Come to BreakPoint.org for more on Solzhenitsyn’s stunning address, including a BreakPoint commentary.

China and Hollywood

Oct 11, 2021John StonestreetChinaCCP, China

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.

Homeschooling Spikes Thanks to the Pandemic

Oct 4, 2021John StonestreetHome SchoolHome School

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.”