It's Tuesday, May 7, 2024. I'm Albert Boler and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. You know sometimes it is

the intellectual the theological responsibility of Christians to take an issue

that looks to be very complex and say you know bibically speaking, that's actually a pretty simple

straightforward issue. It's a matter of do this or do that. It's a confrontation of

good or evil. It is the distinction between the truth and a lie. But sometimes

it's also a Christian responsibility to say, you know, when you are confronting some issues,

they get very entangled issues can get very complex and

sometimes it is our Christian responsibility to admit a bit of the complexity.

So you have headlines that occasionally bring something to light and you say,

you know that looks like a big issue. Maybe we better track that down a bit. So let's think

about the college campus protests. Let's think about one of the demands made by those protesters.

One of the demands is divestment.

They're saying we want these universities, prestigious universities with a lot of wealth,

a lot of endowments, that's of course funds

permanently held for the financial strength of the institution, basically like a

giant trust fund for the school, and you have the demands being made by some of these

militant students pro-Palestinian anti-Israel they're saying you need to divest

now the word divest has an interesting history because even as it means the opposite

of invest, invest is put money in, divest means take money out.

This goes back to similar kinds of moral efforts. One was most

famously undertaken in opposition to the apartheid regime in South Africa

where you had students and others protesting saying you need to take money out of any kind of

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