Monday, October 20, 2025
The Briefing with Albert Mohler
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
4.8 • 8.4K Ratings
🗓️ 20 October 2025
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Part I (00:14 – 11:28)
Decolonizing Tolkien? The Attempt to Deconstruct J.R.R. Tolkien is a Parable for Deconstructing the West and Truth Itself
- A degree used to mean something. Now students are taught to ‘decolonise’ Tolkien by The Telegraph (Judith Woods)
- If Lord of the Rings is ‘racist’, answer me this by The Telegraph (Michael Deacon)
The Spread of Assisted Suicide: The Moral Warnings from Great Britain and Canada Cannot Be Ignored in the U.S.
- Canada is Turning Itself into a Death Cult by The Briefing (R. Albert Mohler, Jr.)
- Canada is Killing Itself by The Atlantic (Elaina Plott Calabro)
- Canada’s assisted suicide laws are out of control by The Spectator (Dan Hitchens)
A Parable from Great Britain: Prince Andrew Surrenders Use of Royal Titles as the Scandals Surround Him Continue to Build
- Prince Andrew Surrenders Duke of York Title by The New York Times (Mark Landler)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Monday, October 20, 2025. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm Albert Moller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. |
| 0:13.0 | Higher education is in turmoil, no great news there, but what we learn day by day is that the virus that has been basically spreading through |
| 0:22.6 | higher academia, particularly the elite levels, is now filtering down to lower levels as well. |
| 0:28.1 | And so the intellectual corruption that really began in the academic elites, just, well, |
| 0:33.6 | given the way elites work, others want to basically copy the elites. They want to emulate the elites. That's why the elites have so much influence. And so what kind of academic nonsense goes on at Harvard, Stanford, Yale? Pretty soon it's showing up elsewhere. And the same thing's true across the Atlantic Ocean, where when you look at, say, the United Kingdom, Great Britain, the reality is that you have the elite |
| 0:55.9 | institutions, Oxbridge, as they're often referred to, most importantly, Oxford and Cambridge, |
| 1:01.0 | and then the other institutions basically follow their lead. It's also true that in some of these |
| 1:06.9 | situations, you have all kinds of developments that take place in which you just have |
| 1:11.9 | academics trying to make a name for themselves by reaching out with some form of modern |
| 1:17.0 | critical theory or some kind of academic nonsense, indeed, to gain a reputation. And I'll just |
| 1:22.1 | say this, they deserve a reputation. It's just not a reputation that anyone should want to emulate. |
| 1:28.0 | I want to make reference here to a major article that appeared in the Telegraph, very influential London newspaper. |
| 1:34.3 | In this case, the article is by Judith Woods. |
| 1:36.7 | And the headline is this, a degree used to mean something. |
| 1:39.2 | Now students are taught to decolonize Tolkien. |
| 1:42.9 | All right. |
| 1:43.7 | The subbed of the article from Taylor Swift Studies |
| 1:45.6 | to a woke analysis of Lord of the Rings, complete guff, that means nonsense, is being passed |
| 1:50.9 | off as education. All right. So we're not particularly surprised by nonsense in higher education, |
| 1:57.6 | but it would be, I think, very interesting to many people on both sides of the Atlantic |
| 2:02.2 | to know that elite universities and academic institutions are basically places where the |
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