Latest project: Upside: Surprising GOOD NEWS About the State of Our World (Bethany House/Baker Publishing Group, July).

Why do you think so many Christians are negative about the future? When people present the gospel and talk about Christianity, they often present it as an answer to a problem. I think that gives pastors and teachers a motivation to highlight the problems in the world. … I think that means that we spend a lot of time listening to people talking about how things are going badly with the world.

What good news do you talk about in the book? I didn't set out to find good news; I set out to find how things are doing. It turns out there's a lot of good news. … One of the areas of great news has to do with health. With just about every measure that we have, Americans and people throughout the world are getting healthier. People are living longer, babies are dying less often, there are fewer infectious diseases. Even people who get cancer are living longer.

What else did you learn? There are several places with a mixed bag. One is the economy. We're just coming out of a recession now, but I think that obscures people's perspectives, that in many ways things have gotten substantially better in the last 50 years financially. We make a lot more money. We have a lot less poverty. Worldwide, poverty rates are going down. But income and equality have increased substantially over the last several decades. 

Did any of your findings surprise you? Yes. I was surprised by how much healthier everyone's getting, even with the AIDS epidemic. It's much better now than it was 10 years ago, in terms of the rates of new cases.

Toward the end of the book, you ask, "What is getting worse?" One has to do with family relations. Compared to 50 years ago, we have a lot more people living together—not married. Divorce rates are a lot higher; premarital sex rates are higher. The number of kids being raised without both parents has increased substantially. Abortions are much more common now. These are things that, from my Christian worldview, I see as negative. Some say this is a dark cloud, but there is a silver lining. In a couple of these measures, in the last 10, 15, maybe 20 years, things have gotten a little better. So in the last decade or two, divorce rates actually have dropped a little bit. Premarital sex rates have sort of peaked—granted very high, but they're not getting higher. Also, another benefit is that the rate of abortions has decreased over the last 10 or 20 years. Overall, family relations are getting worse, or have gotten worse for the last 50 years, but in a couple areas in the last 10 or 20, they're getting marginally better.

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