In May 1967, the band’s debut single changed the musical world. Nearly six decades later it’s developed a long and protracted legacy

If you’ve had a child or known one who celebrates Christmas in the last 20 years, you know all about the Elf on the Shelf. In theory, it’s a great idea. The Elf serves as a bit of a spy for Santa Claus and encourages kids to behave before Christmas. But what started out as a fun idea turned into a whole ordeal by those extra kinds of parents who went way over the top. Just go to TikTok, and you’ll see what we mean. Some of these suckers are into hijinks every darn night. It’s exhausting. Plenty of parents agree and barely remember to move the darn thing. Don’t feel bad if you’re one of those people. Jason Kelce and his wife, Kylie Kelce, aren’t into the Elf on the Shelf business either, and we love them for it. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Not Gonna Lie with Kylie Kelce (@nglwithkylie) Jason Kelce and Kylie Kelce Don’t Have Time For The Elf On The Shelf During her podcast, Not Gonna Lie, Kylie explained that she and Jason are low maintenance when it comes to their elf “Emmy-Nemmy.” She’d love to be the extra mom, but that is so much work. Girl, same. “I love the idea of drawing on their face and then leaving Emmy Nemmy with a marker,” Kylie admitted. “But the idea of waiting until my kids are in a deep enough sleep and then scheming to get in their room and hoping they don’t wake up, that’s just a commitment I’m not willing to make.” Jason Kelce isn’t much into the Elf on the Shelf either. Sure. Wyatt, 5, Elliotte, 3, and Bennett, 19 months, would probably do it, but it’s not happening at their house. That’s not to say Kylie doesn’t worry. The mom joked, “I am nervous for the time where my girls compare notes at school because I’m nervous about the families whose elves bring gifts or other treats and fun things,” she continued, before joking that they’ll come home and ask her “why Emmy-Nemmy is such a deadbeat elf?” This story’s featured image is by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Night of Too Many Stars. The post Kylie Kelce Thinks ‘Deadbeat’ Elf On The Shelf Will Come Back To Haunt Her appeared first on InspireMore.

God longs to be a refuge for you. He longs to be a shelter to which you can run when life overwhelms you from any and all fronts. He longs to speak peace over your heart when storms arise.

I suspect most middle-aged Americans had never heard of Character.AI until The New York Times ran the tragic story of how 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III committed suicide after an obsessive and toxic relationship with a character from the AI chatbot service. Setzer would spend several hours a day in his room chatting with an avatar based on Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones. Their relationship was romantic and erotic at times. Setzer withdrew from his friends, hobbies, and school and focused solely on his digital relationship with the chatbot. Virtual reality overtook reality. Horrifyingly, over time he was able to convince the chatbot they’d be better off dead together. And so he took his life. Before we write off this story as an outlier, it’s important to note that millions of young people use Character.AI and are probably addicted to the platform. Three-quarters of its users are 18-34 years old and spend two hours a day chatting with characters. Character.AI offers users realistic conversations with sympathetic chatbots with whom they can form an emotional attachment, as Setzer did. Some characters offer intimacy with and access to our culture’s idols and icons—famous people, characters from stories, and so on. To some extent, this isn’t new. Fan culture, especially for the young, is built on the fantasy of a close relationship with your idol, and often that takes the form of a romantic relationship. This is why fanfiction so often entails stories of romantic involvement with attractive characters. But chatbots offer an immersive experience categorically different from normal fan culture. If fanfiction is reading a story of emotional attachment to someone you idolize, a chatbot is acting out a story of emotional attachment with someone you idolize. Whether people obsessively chat with their favorite characters from a book or characters of their own invention, the potential to create deep emotional bonds with chatbots reveals something about our social maladies and our need for deep, embodied relationships. Even more, it says something about the crisis of meaning in our time—our desire for something true and good that can bring order and significance to our lives. The developer behind Friend.com, a competitor of Character.AI, described the mission of his chat AI program in just these existential terms: “What I’m trying to do is create a new relationship in your life; radical transparency without concern of judgment. I think this is a relationship people used to have with God but is lacking in the modern world.” Loneliness Epidemic and the Meaning Crisis In 2023, the U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory that our nation is in an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” The advisory notes that “the rate of loneliness among young adults has increased every year between 1976 and 2019.” This shouldn’t surprise anyone who has been paying attention. Young people (and older people, for that matter) are more disconnected from embodied play and fellowship than ever. Everything is filtered through a screen, and that screen often displays abuse, bullying, and shaming. Jonathan Haidt has thoroughly described the dangers of social media and young people in his book The Anxious Generation. But we might add that this is also a lonely generation. One way young people have sought to respond to these feelings of loneliness, shame, anxiety, and isolation is through chatbots like those provided by Character.AI. The potential to create deep emotional bonds with chatbots reveals something about our social maladies and our need for deep, embodied relationships. Added to the epidemic of loneliness and isolation is the crisis of meaning. Although this crisis hasn’t received an official surgeon general advisory, it’s no less real than the epidemic of loneliness and is in fact related to it. With the crisis of meaning, modern people feel a loss of significance, order, and purpose. The telos of contemporary life (actualization of the self) is Sisyphean and hollow, and young people feel that hollowness. The “rat race” isn’t just the race to the top of the corporate ladder; it’s the race to discover and express our identity. And that race never ends. As a result, we have an aching feeling that there must be something more—some story that gives significance, order, and purpose to life. And one way to accomplish that is through relationships and the stories we create in them, even if those stories are only with chatbots. Appeal of Virtual Companionship I have no scientific way of proving this hypothesis, but if we look at each of the pieces of this puzzle, I think it’s reasonable to conclude a nontrivial percentage of Character.AI users use the platform to escape negative feelings of loneliness, meaninglessness, and isolation. We know we’re in a loneliness epidemic. We know it particularly affects the young. We know the young are particularly addicted to smartphones. We know Character.AI is wildly popular with Gen Z. We know Character.AI offers people a substitute for relationships through role-playing. And we know that at least in one case, that relationship was deadly. Consider the advantages of using Character.AI if you’re a lonely young person. You have a companion you can safely talk to about anything, whenever and wherever you want. They’ll never judge you. They’ll never shame you. Just the opposite: They’ll show care and concern for you. They’ll talk with you as long as you want. They’ll make you feel desired, important, and interesting by asking questions about your life. They can create a story of a relationship that gives significance and direction to your life. You feel your life is going somewhere because your relationship is evolving. (Even though the chatbots don’t remember your previous chats, users can and do easily fill in the blanks with their imaginations). And all these benefits can be yours in private. No one has to know you have this “friend.” Your classmates and parents can be utterly oblivious to what’s absorbing your heart, so they can’t make fun of you for falling in love with a chatbot. Character.AI is the perfect isolated “solution” to isolation. As AI progresses, as chatbots get more realistic, and as competitors offer bots with fewer restrictions on content (there are already complaints that Character.AI is too restrictive), it’s reasonable for us to expect that people, particularly vulnerable populations like the young, will turn to such services to try to meet their God-designed need for human love and fellowship. This will certainly take an erotic form for some, but for many, it’ll be about companionship. Due to the social stigma of having an emotional attachment to a chatbot, I suspect a lot more people than we realize currently use Character.AI and similar platforms to cope with loneliness and meaninglessness. And that’s likely to increase. Our Opportunity to Respond with Embodiment and Attention Technology will always adapt to try to fill needs that God designed to be met naturally in his creation. But there’s no shortcut to God’s design. We need the embodied presence of another human being in our lives loving us, spending time with us, and giving us attention, encouragement, and support. We all need the embodied knowledge that our telos is glorification in Christ. Technology will always adapt to try to fill needs that God designed to be met naturally in his creation. Thankfully, God has given us a structure—the local church—for supporting those who feel lonely and meaningless. Our first task is to ensure our churches are places where lonely people are welcomed and loved. Sadly, too often loneliness is just as present within the church as without. But it ought not be that way. This means the lonely people in our congregations need more than warm greetings on Sunday morning. We must do the hard work of building friendships with people outside our comfort zone over time. The church must also be a place where our purpose in life, and therefore the meaning inherent in life, is preached. We must be reminded of our hope in the resurrection and our final glorification. We must be reminded that our chief end is to “glorify God, and to enjoy him forever,” as the Westminster Shorter Catechism says. In families, we need to be vigilant to engage our children, encourage them to spend time in embodied play with friends, and remind them of their worth before God. Ideally, we should restrict smartphone use until our children are in their late teens or older. Having family dinners and making eye contact with each other rather than staring at screens are essential ways of resisting the pull of isolation within a home. But I think there’s also an opportunity for us to minister to our neighbors who are aching, lonely, and struggling with a sense of meaninglessness. As the path to digital substitutes for relationships becomes easier and more pseudorealistic, our neighbors will need our attention even more. In our attention economy, offering others our attention is one of the most powerful ways to love our neighbor. Give your time to your neighbor. Look him in the eye and listen to him. In doing so, you can do what no chatbot, no matter how advanced, ever can. You can offer a gaze of love that echoes God’s gaze of love. A gaze that says, “You were made in his image. You were made for glory. Come, learn how much he loves you.”

One hundred years ago, the legendary jurist Learned Hand dismissed the idea that the American criminal justice system, with all its procedural protections, could convict an innocent person. As he put it, “Our procedure has been always haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted. It is an unreal dream.” Today, we know that what Hand dismissed is too often a real-life nightmare. Since forensic DNA technology was first used in 1989 to overturn a criminal conviction in the U.S., around 3,600 people have been exonerated after convictions for crimes they didn’t commit. On average, an exonerated person spends nine years in prison before his or her innocence is discovered. Many languish for decades. One woman released in 2024 was wrongly imprisoned for 43 years. A man released in 2021 also spent 43 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. In Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions, best-selling author John Grisham partners with Jim McCloskey, a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary and former head of Centurion Ministries, to tell the true stories of 10 false convictions. Grisham, a lifelong Baptist, is mostly known for his fictional legal thrillers. But in 2006, he released his first nonfiction book, The Innocent Man, in which he recounted the wrongful conviction and near execution of Ron Williamson. The tales they recount are both gripping and infuriating. Their thesis is that, for the most part, wrongful convictions aren’t unfortunate accidents but rather the entirely predictable, if not intended, product of “abusive tactics used by the authorities.” As a result, “if we as a society had the political gumption to change unfair laws, practices, and procedures, we could avoid virtually all wrongful convictions” (xii). Different Stories, Common Culprits Grisham and McCloskey take turns recounting the stories of 10 prosecutions gone bad. For those who’ve studied wrongful convictions, the causes are entirely unsurprising. It’s things like junk forensic science, unreliable eyewitness identifications, coercive interrogations leading to false confessions, jailhouse informants who perjure themselves, and prosecutors who conceal exculpatory evidence. These problems are commonly recognized. In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences released a report from a blue-ribbon panel of experts on the use of forensic scientific evidence. While supposed experts testifying for the prosecution on blood spatter patterns, firearms ballistics matching, bite-mark identification, hair-fiber analysis, and myriad other topics are widespread, the National Academy panel concluded the evidence is mostly unreliable garbage with no sound scientific basis. Similarly, scientific studies have raised serious questions about witnesses’ ability to reliably identify total strangers, especially when the identifications are cross-racial. Of the first 250 people exonerated by DNA, 76 percent were convicted based on eyewitness identifications. One was identified at trial by six witnesses whom we now know to a certainty were all wrong. Furthermore, after lengthy and grueling police interrogations, it’s common for people to sign detailed confessions to crimes they didn’t commit. Eight percent of exonerations involved testimony from jailhouse snitches who claimed cellmates confessed to the crimes. And about 60 percent of exonerations involved official misconduct, usually police or prosecutors hiding evidence of the defendant’s innocence. The vivid examples in Framed illustrate how these evidentiary problems lead to wrongful convictions. Many injustices could be avoided if we had the political will to ban the evidence and tactics that cause the justice system to misfire. Due Process Is Biblical Many injustices could be avoided if we had the political will to ban the evidence and tactics that cause the justice system to misfire. What’s especially noteworthy about the stories told in Framed—but, again, not surprising to those who study exonerations—is the lack of accountability for the police and prosecutors responsible for the wrongful convictions. They weren’t criminally prosecuted, disciplined by the state bars that license and regulate attorneys, or even fired from their jobs. And the U.S. Supreme Court invented out of thin air the doctrine of “absolute immunity” that insulates prosecutors from federal civil rights lawsuits for violating a criminal defendant’s constitutional rights, even if that violation was intentional and resulted in the conviction of an innocent person. Official wrongdoers are, in fact, above the law. This is impossible to square with the concept behind Scripture’s teaching about punishing false witnesses (Deut. 19:16–21). Writing in the second century, Irenaeus of Lyon understood Christian teaching to require punishment for government officials when they abused their power to accomplish such injustice. As he put it in Against Heresies, “Whatsoever [the magistrates] do to the subversion of justice, iniquitously, and impiously, and illegally, and tyrannically, in these things shall they also perish.” Today, they may not even lose their jobs. At the same time, it’s worth noting that, in the United States, false convictions typically happen with the concurrence of juries who find proof beyond a reasonable doubt based on the flimsiest evidence. We tend to think of the requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt as designed to protect the accused. But its theological origin was as a means to protect jurors’ souls from the sin of convicting an innocent person. If jurors today felt more fear for their souls when they pass judgment on others, they might insist on compelling proof rather than deferring to prosecutorial judgment. Remember Those in Prison This book is part of a broader effort to bring to light the plight of wrongful convicts, which is facilitated by organizations like the Innocence Project and Centurion Ministries. Grisham sits on the boards of both organizations. Though the Innocence Project is the better known of the two, Centurion Ministries (founded in 1983 by McCloskey) was the first organization devoted to the exoneration of the wrongly convicted. If jurors today felt more fear for their own souls when they pass judgment on others, they might insist on compelling proof. Framed also stands as a warning to church members and leaders. One of the most heartrending stories in the book is of Joe Bryan, who was banished from his Baptist church’s worship services while awaiting trial because other church members were uncomfortable with his presence in the pews. The pastor, rather than standing up for due process, caved to the congregants and called Joe to request he stay away. That brother in Christ, whose presence they couldn’t endure in worship, was wrongfully convicted and served 34 years in a Texas prison for a murder he didn’t commit. But, due to God’s preserving grace, he never lost his faith. Joe is out of prison today, and McCloskey recounts, [Joe] still prays and reads Scripture every day, same as in prison. Always the teacher, he leads Bible study groups, same as in prison. He will even play the piano for the choir, if asked, same as in prison. He survived hell behind bars because of the strength he found in his faith. God protected him, as he knew He would. And Joe has long since forgiven those responsible for his persecution. (210) Framed makes for engaging reading for a general audience. We would do well to “remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them” (Heb. 13:3). Some might have been framed.

John Piper delves into the Gospel of Luke, showing how the first chapters highlight God’s central role in Jesus’s birth. He explores the significance of faith, humility, and obedience, drawing insights from biblical characters like Mary, Zechariah, and Elizabeth. He teaches the following: The purpose and structure of Luke’s Gospel The importance of confidence in faith Parallelism in Luke’s first two chapters The centrality of God in Luke Jesus’s unique nature Assurance of salvation through Jesus The way of faith and humility The joy of the Holy Spirit The call to receive the Holy Spirit The final encouragement to know and experience the gospel

It appears that the Regime Media, which just a few months ago breathlessly covered every aspect of civil and criminal litigation against former and future President Donald J. Trump, now have little interest in updating the status of one of the pending trials. There was nary a peep on the network evening newscasts about the disqualification of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from the trial involving President Donald Trump. The most comprehensive report on evening network news comes via NBC. Below are all 24 seconds of that report: NBC NIGHTLY NEWS 12/19/24 6:39 PM LESTER HOLT: In Georgia, a legal victory today for President-Elect Trump. An appeals court disqualified Fani Willis from prosecuting the Georgia election interference case against Mr. Trump. The appeals court said a lower court was wrong in allowing Willis to keep the case despite a  romantic relationship with the lawyer she brought in to manage the prosecution. Holt’s use of “legal victory today” within the context of the ramifications of the disqualification ruling seems unusually muted. Anodyne, even. Consider how Willis’s hometown paper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, covered that same ruling: The Georgia Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her office should be disqualified from the 2020 election interference case, a bombshell decision that upends the last remaining criminal case against incoming President Donald Trump. After hyping up the weaponization of state and federal governments against Trump, there is a collective shrug now that the last case against Trump would appear to begin to vanish. It bears repeating that NBC’s 24 seconds are the most thorough presentation of Willis on the big three network newscasts. ABC’s reaction to the disqualification was just as brief: MARY BRUCE: And David, tonight, another headline related to Donald Trump. This one about his election interference case in Georgia. The States’ Court of Appeals disqualifying Willis, the prosecutor who brought the case against Trump and his allies because of a relationship she had with a lawyer who she hired to prosecute the case. Now, the indictment still stands, but tonight Donald Trump is celebrating the move. These miserly 20 seconds and NBC’s 24 seconds far eclipse CBS, which could not even be bothered to cover the Willis disqualification.  As the Regime Media shift back to Resistance Media, we can expect a continued dilution of the kinds of stories that make Democrats look bad.  

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