A four-day-old baby girl was rescued recently after she was found buried alive in a cemetery in India. An investigation has been launched to find her parents, who could be charged with attempted murder and child abandonment.

Such gender discrimination is pervasive in India, where millions of girls are unwanted and face rejection in their communities. According to the Invisible Girl Project, fifty million girls and women are missing from India’s population due to gendercide. 

If you’re thinking that your community is far more enlightened than their society, consider this fact: an estimated four hundred teenagers are sold for sex every day in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. One of them is a fifteen-year-old girl who was being sex trafficked at NorthPark Center, located in one of the most affluent areas of Dallas. Sex trafficking is a $99 million a year business in my city. 

“The reaction to drug addiction is safe injection sites.” 

These stories illustrate the fact that ideas matter. The idea that women are inferior to men has led to the gendercide of millions. The idea that sex is a commodity and people are a means to profits has led to the entrapment of 4.8 million people in forced sexual exploitation and 40.3 million in modern slavery. 

One of the tragic ideas of our culture is that ideas are subjective statements of personal preferences and cannot be expressions of objective truth and morality. This was the idea Attorney General William Barr addressed in his remarkable speech to the law school of Notre Dame University last Friday, a message I hope you’ll read in its entirety. 

Mr. Barr noted: “Religion helps frame moral culture within society that instills and reinforces moral discipline.” He added: “Scholarship suggests that religion has been integral to the development and thriving of homo sapiens since we emerged roughly 50,000 years ago. It is just for the…

It’s not always easy to find good news in the news. Here’s a story that encouraged me greatly: two cousins who survived the Holocaust have been reunited seventy-five years later.

Morris Sana and Simon Mairowitz fled from the Nazis during World War II. Sana last remembered seeing Mairowitz in Romania. Sana’s brothers had already been murdered. He escaped with his sister and mother, traveling at night and often sleeping between dead bodies during the day to avoid detection. 

Mairowitz escaped with his sister through the help of an English colonel. He grew up in England, while Sana eventually immigrated to Israel. A relative working on her family’s genealogy led to their reconnection. 

The Holocaust is the starkest reminder I know that ideas change the world. 

In the late nineteenth century, Darwinian concepts of evolution were applied to social problems. The result was the eugenics (“good genetics”) movement to improve the human population by excluding those deemed inferior and promoting those deemed superior. 

Following World War I, eugenics were combined with the claim to German racial superiority, leading to a program to “cleanse” German society of those identified as threats to the nation’s “health.” Among them were European Jews, six million of whom were eventually murdered. 

What motivates 75 percent of all charitable giving? 

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker tweeted this morning that agreement has been reached between the UK and EU on a new withdrawal deal. “Brexit” is an idea that will have profound effects on Great Britain and Europe. 

Closer to home, California’s governor recently signed legislation mandating free medical abortion services at its public colleges. It…

Six-year-old Noah Ponzer was one of twenty-six people killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre. As the grandfather of a five-year-old, I cannot begin to imagine the pain his parents and other families have endured in the years since.

However, conspiracy theories began spreading online almost immediately after the shooting, with some speculating that the tragedy was staged to generate support for gun-control laws. Grieving families became targets. Some were accused of being actors paid to play a role. 

Noah’s father, Lenny Ponzer, has tried to stop people from spreading such lies and from harassing him and other grieving families. He received death threats as a result. 

In June, Mr. Ponzer won a defamation case against editors of a book that claimed no one died in the Newtown, Connecticut, tragedy and that his son’s death certificate was a fake. This week, a jury awarded him $450,000 in damages from one of the book’s editors. 

Why has the youth suicide rate increased 56 percent? 

We’ve been discussing this week the power of ideas—whether they are positive or evil—to change the world. John F. Kennedy was right: “A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.” 

However, to change the world, we must sometimes retreat from the world. 

Work predated the Fall and is part of God’s design for us (Genesis 2:15). But overwork is a symptom of a culture that measures us by what we do, how much we do, and how fast we do it. 

As with any time we step out of our Creator’s plan for us, the costs outweigh the benefits. 

A new study indicates that people who regularly work more than ten hours a day for at least fifty days a year are at a 29 percent greater risk of stroke. The risk rises to 45 percent for…