New federal regulation could devastate religious colleges & seminaries. A lawsuit against Big Weed for touting cannabis as medicine. And Narnia movie update.
New Federal Regulation Could Devastate Religious Colleges & Seminaries
Church work has its rewards. But often those rewards are not financial. That fact could prevent future church workers from getting student loans.
The One Big Beautiful Bill passed last year had a provision aimed at college programs of dubious value. If their graduates do not earn more money with their degree than peers who did not earn that degree, the program would be labeled “failing” and applicants to that program would be ineligible for federal financial aid.
That would be devastating both for students who are pursuing low-wage vocations such as church work and for the schools that prepare them.
Christianity Today has published an article by Emily Belz entitled Christian Colleges Call New Federal Regulation an ‘Existential Threat’:
In dozens of meetings with lawmakers, [Christian college presidents] pleaded their case against a new Department of Education regulation they say could crater their programs. The regulation would label a bachelor’s or master’s program a “failure” if its graduates don’t earn more than their peers without the degree.
Students in these “failing” programs would be ineligible for federal financial aid.
The new rule portends a problem in particular for seminaries, theological schools, and Bible colleges at a time when clergy are aging and sometimes in short supply.
By the government’s own estimate, 53 percent of bachelor’s degrees for religion and religious studies would be considered “failing” under this new metric. Those programs, which would not qualify for federal loans, are projected to have the highest failure rate of any undergraduate program.
For master’s degrees, the outlook is especially bleak: The government estimates that 89 percent of religion or religious studies degrees would be considered failing.
Other programs that get quite a few “failing” scores are in Graphic Communication (17.7%), Film/Video and Photographic Arts (12%), Drama/Theater Arts (11.4%), Music (11%), Human Development/Family Studies (10%), Rhetoric/Composition/Writing (9.8%), Fine/Studio Arts (8.5%), Design/Applied Arts (3.3%). But all of these are far lucrative than B.A. programs in Religion (53.3%).
Some churches only require their ministers to have a B.A. from a Bible College. But if 89% of graduate seminary programs would become ineligible for student loans, this regulation would have the effect of eliminating federal financial aid for seminaries. And though undergraduate colleges offer other programs, seminaries offer nothing but religious programs. Many of our nation’s seminaries would have to be shut down.
Perhaps this regulation could serve as an impetus to increase the salaries of church workers. Otherwise, churches will not have any! Pity the Catholic schools whose church workers must take a vow of poverty. But too many churches and schools are in violation of 1 Corinthians 9.
This regulation reduces the value of an education to how much money it can make. A degree in religion or the arts has value to the students pursuing them and to the society as a whole, even though these fields may not pay much. In a classical approach to education, learning is valuable both in itself and in cultivating the mind and heart of the student.
To be sure, there are shady colleges that do little to cultivate the mind, the heart, or the pocketbook. Crack down on those. But a blanket regulation like this one serves only to place a bigger financial burden on people because they are already facing a financial burden.
A Lawsuit against Big Weed for Touting Cannabis as Medicine
A class action suit has been filed in an Illinois federal court against three major marijuana companies accusing them of hyping the medical value of cannabis against all evidence.
From Josh Code of the Free Press:
Three of America’s largest cannabis companies were accused in a class-action lawsuit filed on Monday of systematically advertising their products as medicine capable of treating mental health, pain, and other disorders while knowing that the science didn’t support those claims and that their products could even worsen the conditions they claimed marijuana could treat.
Patrick Kenneally, the plaintiffs’ lead attorney, said in an interview that the lawsuit’s aims are twofold: hold the cannabis industry accountable for “years of misrepresentation” of their products’ health benefits, and force them to “warn consumers about the well-known, obvious, and scientifically validated dangers of cannabis.”
The suit was filed in federal court in Illinois on behalf of consumers in 12 states. It could eventually include millions of plaintiffs. Between possible civil penalties, punitive damages, and even allegations that each company functions as an organized criminal enterprise, the stakes are enormous.
Parallels are being made to the lawsuit that crippled Big Tobacco with a $206 billion settlement. And, even more to the point, to the opioid epidemic:
The suit. . . quotes Harvard Medical School professor Bertha Madras to show how today’s marketing of marijuana mirrors past marketing of opioids. In a 2024 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Madras said that with both opioids and marijuana, “the benefits have been exaggerated, the risks have been minimized, and skeptics in the scientific community have been ignored.”
Narnia Movie Update
Back in March 2024, we wrote a poet entitled New “Chronicles of Narnia” Movies in the Works. It told about how Netflix has bought the rights to C. S. Lewis’s series of overtly Christian fantasies, the first two of which to be directed by Greta Gerwig, fresh off of her acclaim for her Barbie movie.
In that post, both Gerwig and Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos indicated that they would respect Narnia’s Christian themes, though some of us were skeptical.
At any rate, the project has gone forward and the first movie, The Magician’s Nephew, is in the works. Netflix will be following the chronological order of the Narnia tales, which Lewis preferred, rather than the order in which Lewis wrote them, which literary critics like me prefer. The Magician’s Nephew shows Aslan creating Narnia. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe will come next.
We now have a date for the release of The Magician’s Nephew. Though Netflix-funded movies usually go straight to streaming, the streaming company will make an exception for the Narnia movies. The Magician’s Nephew will be released in theaters, including IMAX, on February 12 of next year, and then streaming on Netflix on April 2.
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