The Liberal Party has formally abandoned its commitment to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, ending weeks of internal clashes that have exposed deep ideological fractures and placed deputy leader Sussan Ley under pressure. Senior Liberal sources confirmed the shift after a lengthy shadow cabinet meeting on Nov. 13. The party voted to abandon the long-held target but keep Australia in the 2015 Paris Agreement, which obliges countries to steadily increase emission cuts.

Views of webpages used for the Conference of the Parties (COP) sites—referring to the annual United Nations climate change summit—emit up to 10-fold more carbon emissions than average site views. Leaders from around the world—with the notable exception of the U.S.—are on their way to Belém, Brazil, for the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP30, which takes place from November 10 to 21. COP is the main decision-making body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)

Nowhere near the skill level needed. The post The one artist Phil Collins wasn’t good enough to play for: “I’m the only person in the world who can say that” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

by Brian Shilhavy, Health Impact News: The White House Epstein files scandal was headline news all day today. First, Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released some emails this morning showing that Trump knew about Epstein’s child sex trafficking, and even spent time with the under-aged girls. This is one report from The Hill: TRUTH […]

Southern blues rockers Parker Barrow are currently touring the UK with the Damn Truth. It's not to be missed

There seem to be certain places in this world that, for whatever reasons, just have strangeness gravitate towards them. Perhaps it is due to lying on some sort of Earth energy line. Maybe it’s because of portals for aliens. Or possibly it is some innate quality of the land itself that draws in these bizarre forces. Whatever the case may be, these places in a way lie outside of normal reality, steeped in mystery and surrounded by strange phenomena. Here we will take a journey through some of these places, where reality and the paranormal collide. 

It’s not every day you’re threatened with hospitalization by a circus clown. I was once a budding environmental activist, and some friends and I were protesting outside a circus that (so we’d been told) was mistreating a captive elephant. So there we were, four or five of us, standing by the roadside next to the entrance with signs and placards. We weren’t doing anything illegal or uncivil, but our presence naturally gave some members of the public reason to rethink whether they wanted to purchase a ticket, and before long one of the performers—the head clown, he informed us (and thankfully not yet in costume)—made it clear that if one more car turned away, he’d personally send us to the emergency room. As if any of us needed further reason to be scared of clowns. We had to decide, then and there, whether to continue or call it a day. Did we care enough about the issue of animal cruelty to risk harm to ourselves? Not really, it turned out, so we made our way home. We weren’t quite the committed eco-warriors we imagined ourselves to be. In our defense, we were only 16. I’d long wanted to be an environmentalist. I joined Greenpeace and was involved in a number of their campaigns and activities. I cared about the planet. This was in the early ’90s, and we were then talking about things like acid rain and the ozone layer. Global warming was an issue, but climate change as a matter of international urgency wasn’t yet part of the mainstream media diet. When I turned 18, I became a Christian. In the space of just a few weeks, I’d realized that if God was real, I didn’t know him—and I was probably supposed to. I learned that Jesus had come to “seek and save the lost” (Luke 19:10), and I put my trust in him. Sometime later, I talked to one of my fellow wannabe environmentalist friends about my recent conversion. He was discouraged. As far as he was concerned, me becoming a Christian was going to be a loss to the green cause. Which raises a question: Was he right? Does the gospel pull us away from environmental concerns and toward more weighty and eternal matters? Does the health of the earth matter less to us when we come to know Jesus? As a teenager, I’d planned to be an environmental activist. Instead, I ended up becoming a pastor and a preacher. Had I let the planet down? As a teenager, I’d planned to be an environmental activist. Instead, I ended up becoming a pastor and a preacher. Had I let the planet down? Many voices would say becoming a Christian is bad for the planet: that the Christian faith itself is one of the drivers of environmental exploitation and degradation and that the creation mandate incentivizes abuse of the physical world. The secular world increasingly insists we should express environmental concern with near hysteria––that nothing can be more important than preserving our home. Parts of the Christian world, on the other hand, insist the physical world doesn’t matter at all, that it’s perishing. Therefore, because a new and better world is coming one day, we may as well drive as big a car as we can because the planet’s going to end up in smoke anyway. I haven’t found these two views compelling. And for the same reason: Jesus. His relationship to the physical world shapes his people’s. Creation Belongs to Someone In the 1994 movie The Lion King, the king, Mufasa, is trying to prepare his son, Simba, to one day receive the throne. At one point, they look from a perch to an amazing, expansive view of the savanna, and Mufasa says, “Look, Simba. Everything the light touches is our kingdom.” Simba, in wide-eyed awe, asks, “And this will all be mine?” “Everything,” Mufasa answers. Twenty-five years later, when a live-action remake of The Lion King came to theaters, the scene had been changed. The setup was the same; both of them were there, looking over the same view. But when Simba asks whether everything the light touches will be his, Mufasa says, “It belongs to no one.” We can imagine why that change has been made. In the Western world, especially, we’re sensitive to the problems that can come when people presume absolute ownership of the earth. Better (we might think) to attribute ownership to no one. But the Bible presents a different perspective. The physical world doesn’t belong to no one; it belongs to someone—and that someone isn’t us. “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him” (Col. 1:15–16, NIV). Jesus isn’t simply God over creation in some abstract way, as if this world were one among many things in his portfolio. He isn’t only the Creator, the One through whom all things were made; he is the purpose of creation. All things were made for him. The same idea is expressed by calling Jesus “the firstborn over all creation.” This doesn’t mean Jesus was the first thing to be created. Jesus is the Creator. The language of “firstborn” isn’t about chronology but primacy. The firstborn is the One who will one day inherit all of creation. In other words, creation is his. It all belongs to Jesus. It has been made for him. And this changes everything. While Christians may disagree over what level of responsibility and agency we should exercise over creation, we must realize the physical world around us isn’t neutral. (The word “environment” sometimes implies the physical world is nothing more than the setting in which we happen to exist.) It isn’t ours, as if we can do with it whatever we choose. The earth hasn’t ultimately been created for us (though our God-given responsibilities for it are significant); the physical world we interact with and affect belongs to the Christ we worship. Recognizing Jesus’s ownership over creation should be the truth that makes us most mindful of caring for it. We can’t be consistent worshipers of Jesus if we’re indifferent to the health of the physical environment that belongs to him. How you treat something that belongs to someone else says a lot about how you regard that person. We can’t say, “It’s only the environment—it doesn’t matter” if, in fact, the planet belongs to the One we claim to love above all else. At the same time, Colossians 1 challenges many of our environmentally aware friends. We can’t hope to truly care for the physical world if we ignore the One to whom it belongs. We won’t properly understand the environment or account for why it matters unless we know the Jesus who is Lord over it all. Even well-intended efforts at environmentalism will profoundly misunderstand what creation is. It’ll become a matter of utility—we need the planet to be well for our own survival, as if we were the ultimate bottom line—or a matter of false worship, treating the earth as if it’s ultimate, with humanity being seen only as a threat to it that needs to be curtailed. This will be a place where a Christian’s commitment to the physical world will differ from a non-Christian (e.g., in cases where in the name of environmentalism, we resort to “population control” as a means to “save” the earth). Stewards, Not Owners In several interviews and talks, well-known environmental activist Greta Thunberg has repeated a question that she says has often puzzled her: Why do humans have a unique capacity to affect the planet? Out of all the different species and animals in this world, why are the actions of our species uniquely consequential? We can’t hope to truly care for the physical world if we ignore the One to whom it belongs. The Bible answers this question. We have this unique capacity to affect the planet because God has given us that capacity. The Bible’s opening chapter, Genesis 1, talks about us being made in God’s image (vv. 27–31). We’re to be God’s representatives to one another and to his creation. Humanity is given the task of filling the earth, subduing it, and ruling over it. In Genesis 2, we’re told to work the garden and to keep it (v. 15). This unique responsibility is given to all of us image-bearers. Tellingly, even secular voices who might decry the notion that humanity has a privileged position in creation nevertheless assume we’re uniquely responsible for attending to the ecological challenges around us. Whatever the environmental crises, it’s down to us to resolve them. In 1967, Princeton professor Lynn White Jr. wrote an influential essay in Science titled “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” White blames Genesis 1 for much of his day’s ecological crisis. According to White, the chapter teaches us that we’re superior to nature and therefore encourages us to be contemptuous of it, using it for our slightest whim. White understood Genesis 1 as a mandate for abusing creation. But looking at the text of Genesis 1 and 2 shows us this isn’t at all the case. The message isn’t so much that we’re superior to creation but that God is superior to us and (as we’ve seen) everything has been made by him. We’re here to steward creation on his behalf. If we have an ecological problem, it’s because we have a spiritual problem. And the way to have a healthier attitude toward the planet is to have a healthier relationship with the Creator. The word “stewardship” helps us understand our role. Being a steward isn’t just having care of something—it’s having care of something that belongs to someone else. In my 20s, I shared an apartment with two friends, one of whom was very musical and had a number of guitars, one of which I’d often pick up and play. When the time came for us to move out, he handed me the guitar to take with me. I gratefully received it. Several years later (and I’m still not sure how this happened), it fell to the floor and its neck completely snapped. Figuring this was the guitar equivalent of a terminal diagnosis, I reluctantly threw it out and didn’t think much more about it. Until about six months later, when that same friend reached out and asked if he could have it back. It turned out it wasn’t a gift but a loan. So it wasn’t my guitar I broke––it was his. And to make it worse, he added, “It’s a family heirloom.” Ah. Needless to say, I felt utterly awful. He was gracious about it, but it still stings all these years later as I think about it. If I’d broken my own guitar, it would have been a shame. But to break someone else’s felt far worse. Stewardship can carry a greater sense of responsibility than ownership. So knowing that the Bible gives humanity a unique role in caring for creation only heightens our responsibility to do so diligently. We have more reason—not less—than a secularist to care for this physical world. Earth’s Heavenly Future God has eternal plans for his physical creation. God hasn’t made it and let it be ravaged by the consequences of the fall only to abandon it and move on. His plan for redemption goes far beyond us, embracing the very cosmos itself. One of the early indications of this comes in the account of the flood in Genesis 6–9. This has become one of the most familiar episodes in biblical history: God punishes runaway human sin by sending a cataclysmic flood, but spares Noah and his family, along with pairs of creatures to then refill the earth once the waters eventually subside. If we have an ecological problem, it’s because we have a spiritual problem. And the way to have a healthier attitude to the planet is to have a healthier relationship with the Creator. But the choice of a flood as punishment isn’t just dramatic; it’s profoundly meaningful. As we read the account of rushing waters, it’s clear that what we’re seeing is the reverse of the process God had originally used to create the world. The creation account had started with watery chaos (Gen. 1:2). God then separated the water into water above and water below and provided dry land for habitation (vv. 6–10). The flood narrative reverses this sequence. The water comes not just down from the sky in the form of torrential rain but up from underneath the ground (7:11). The waters that God had separated are rejoined. The land is engulfed from above and below, and once again all is watery chaos. The world hasn’t just been flooded; it has been de-created. So when, after the flood, God makes a covenant promising never to again destroy the world like this, he isn’t just promising to withhold watery destruction from the planet (while keeping other options open). He’s promising never again to uncreate his creation. However he intervenes to punish human sin, creation will not itself be collateral damage. This is underlined by the fact that God is making this covenant not just with humanity but with creation itself (9:9–10). God is promising this physical world a future. He’s committed to it. We see this in Romans 8, where we’re told creation waits with eager expectation for the revelation of the sons of God. When God at last completes our redemption, creation will be freed from all the effects of our sin (vv. 21–24). So this physical creation isn’t some unfortunate setting we need to escape from but something God will fully redeem for our eternal future. This is why the Bible ends in Revelation 21, with the wonderful vision of a new Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth (vv. 1–2). Our final destiny isn’t heaven above but a renewed earth below. We aren’t, ultimately, going to be taken up to heaven; heaven will come down to earth. Creation will not be vaporized but “heavenized.” That’s what we’re waiting for. Every time someone says, “The world shouldn’t be this way,” what he’s really saying (without realizing it) is that earth isn’t heavenly enough. Creation will not be vaporized but ‘heavenized.’ Jesus tells us to pray for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven (Matt. 6:10). And God gives us a sign he’ll do just that. In Genesis 9, the sign that God will keep his covenant with creation is a bow in the sky (vv. 12–13). God is hanging up his war-bow; there will finally be peace between God and this world. And as Charles Spurgeon pointed out, the bow isn’t aimed down toward earth but up toward heaven. The next time God comes to punish sin, heaven—not earth—will take the hit. And that’s what we see in the coming of Jesus. Just as a rainbow is light broken into its constituent parts, Jesus, the light of the world, was broken for us. It may seem like a subtle detail, but there’s a reason Jesus wore a crown of thorns during his crucifixion. When the first humans sinned in Genesis 3, the sign of how that would affect nature was that there would be thorns (v. 18). As Jesus went to the cross, even the crown on his head was a way of him bearing our curse, bearing creation’s curse, so that one day creation could be set free. If you really want to care about the environment, you need to know Jesus. And if you know Jesus, you really need to care about the environment. Becoming a Christian hasn’t overridden my concern for the physical world; it’s breathed new life into it. I’ve never had more reasons to care for the planet.

Today, we fight our culture wars on cable news and social media. The sides are neatly drawn, the moral claims are absolute, and everyone insists history will vindicate his or her opinions. But beneath the noise, the same question lingers: What ideas shape the way we see right and wrong? The battles we wage today over freedom, justice, and identity aren’t just about policies or politics—they’re about moral vision. Ideas still drive behavior, and they still justify our actions, sometimes in ways we barely notice. Four hundred years ago, England fought its own ideological battles—not on screens but in lecture halls, pulpits, and legal texts. Those arguments carried real moral stakes. In The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery: English Ideas in the Early Modern Atlantic World, John Samuel Harpham, assistant professor of constitutional studies at the University of Oklahoma, traces how English thinkers between 1550 and 1700 reshaped moral philosophy. What began as a debate over civil and natural law became a justification for owning human beings—an ideology that convinced early modern English people to justify, expand, and accelerate the evil of slavery into the lands of modern-day America. I’ve often asked myself the same question that explains Harpham’s motivation for exploring this topic. He writes, “I wanted to know how what we now consider perhaps the most terrible wrong in the history of the nation came to be seen not only as necessary or profitable but as right from a moral point of view.” He adds, “I needed to know what moral account I would have given myself if I had been raised where I was raised but had been born two hundred years before” (1). This book provides his answers. Death or Slavery: Only Options? According to Harpham’s account of English ideological history, the civil law tradition overcame the natural law tradition among the English in the early modern period. The natural law tradition was shaped by Aristotle, who taught that some persons are by nature slaves to be ruled, no matter their legal status. In contrast, the civil law tradition emerged from legal treatises during the Roman Empire and claimed that all persons are free by nature but that some might be made slaves as a result of accident or misfortune, most commonly through war. Ironically, the triumph of the civil law tradition entrenched slavery more deeply. Whereas natural law slavery depended on dubious claims about natural inferiority and thus carried internal moral limits, civil law slavery required no such justification. By defining slavery as a legal condition arising from accident or war, English thinkers could affirm universal natural freedom in theory while maintaining slavery in practice. In Harpham’s account, this legal formalism created a more expansive and durable framework for enslavement in the Atlantic world. The civil law tradition emerged from legal treatises from the Roman Empire and claimed that all persons are free by nature but that some might be made slaves as a result of accident or misfortune. Harpham works through an impressive body of literature from the civil law tradition. This tradition begins with the Corpus Juris Civilis (Body of Civil Law) compiled under Emperor Justinian in the sixth century. Harpham shows how the English adopted and adapted this text in various documents, including these: De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae (On the Laws and Customs of England) sometimes attributed to Henry of Bracton (ca. 13th century), John le Breton’s Britton (ca. 13th century), Thomas Smith’s De republica Anglorum (1583), John Cowell’s Institutes (1605), Hugo Grotius’s The Law of War and Peace (1625), Edward Coke’s Institutes (1628), Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689). Through this extensive review, Harpham shows how the English could claim that all people are by nature free and that some people may become unfree—enslaved. The strongest reason for this seeming contradiction was the belief that slavery was preferred to death. As Harpham summarizes, “Slavery had come to be accepted because there was no fate worse than death” (170). It’s regrettable that the early modern English hid behind a binary ideological choice rooted in confirmation bias. Did early modern English decision makers seriously consider ideological alternatives that decreased their wealth, land, and power? No. Similarly, we’d be wise to notice rhetorical moves that oversimplify some issues into binaries that bring clear benefits to those seeking or already in power. Christians Did Speak Up Despite impressively deep engagement by Harpham with the intellectual tradition of early modern English thinkers regarding slavery, he skims over at least one essential source: English Christians. There’s no doubt, as Harpham briefly shows, that the Spanish and English used evangelism as a justification for enslaving Africans and Native Americans: “Expansion in America was authorized by the intention of the English to convert the native peoples to Christian religion” (69–70). He also lightly engages the thoughts of the ministers Richard Baxter and Morgan Godwyn. For example, Harpham cites Godwyn, observing, “‘Our Planters [slave-holders] chief deity’ was none other than ‘Profit,’ and ‘their God, interest’” (175). Harpham also discusses whether the English believed that baptism and conversion emancipate enslaved people. But, overall, he’s selective in the texts and people he chooses to examine. In doing so, Harpham engages only a small sampling of the explicit Christian intellectual contribution regarding slavery while overlooking the ever-present Christian intellectual affirmation of slavery implicit in English beliefs in the era. Harpham states that his research is inspired by historian David Brion Davis’s monumental scholarship first presented in the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. Harpham’s book expands and deepens the scholarship on much of the intellectual tradition in this period. Readers can still prefer Davis’s breadth since his engagement of Christian sources—including sermons, theological works, and other writings from Christians—is broader and stronger. Mark Noll’s books In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492–1783 and—though it focuses on a later period—The Civil War as a Theological Crisis provide richer engagement with Christian sources. Virtually every person in England in the early modern period identified as a Christian. They may have been influenced by Aristotelian and civil law ideology, but any thorough study of the intellectual tradition of the English between 1550 and 1700 must engage Christian sources thoroughly. If Harpham had engaged them further, he’d strengthen his argument regarding the homogeneity of the English approval of slavery in this era—as well as set up his important forthcoming research on the continued intellectual basis for American slavery. When Ideologies Obscure Responsible Christianity When we think about early American slavery, we’re bound to ask, How did they miss it? Harpham gives one clear answer: ideology. He shows powerfully that the civil law tradition provided many early modern English people a rationale for exactly what they needed to continue their participation in evil, a “tradition whose origins were to be found in complex legal texts that had been produced in ancient Rome” (51–52). To this question, we can’t reply, “Their ideology made them do it.” Instead, English people, who almost exclusively identified as Christians, allowed their culture’s ideology to dictate their actions to enslave, dehumanize, and harm their fellow image-bearers. The honest answer to why they did it is closer to this: Their underexamined, self-serving beliefs rooted in secular ideology rather than neighbor-serving beliefs rooted in Scripture led to their actions to enslave people. Christians must reckon with our propensity to let political, popular, and even pastoral power blind us. We, alongside other Christians and our churches, must constantly check our views against what the Bible teaches. The truth is that without being anchored in the whole counsel of God, we drift with the cultural tide that sometimes dehumanizes and destroys people made in God’s image. A combination of factors contributed to the growth of abolitionism in the late 18th century: a rise in philosophies which emphasized freedom and independence, accompanied by the expansion of print media and journalism that brought previously unknown tragedies and personal experiences to light. None of that publicity would have been possible without the incredible courage of enslaved people risking their lives to tell their stories to people who would advocate for them. Christians were part of this story, but mostly after the cultural currents had already shifted. Tragically, Christians didn’t lead the way, though some of them (thankfully) grabbed an oar to join and row. Christians must reckon with our propensity to let political, popular, and even pastoral power to blind us. We’re right to celebrate later English Christians like William Wilberforce who confronted dominant ideologies and powerful entities to revisit the biblical teaching that all people are made in God’s image (Gen. 1:26). They faced enormous pressure as they argued that we ought to do for others what we’d want done for us (Matt. 7:12)—premises that reject the practice of enslaving people. Though it’s primarily written for an academic audience, The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery reminds Christians of our need to constantly evaluate our culture’s ethics against Scripture’s norms.