isis devastation: a ground-level look
MARCH 18, 2017 Diving into good reading Books of the Year in history, current events, science, and accessible theology Big Bang or creation... who cares? I consider myself a Christian and all. But seriously. I just want a good grade in Bio 109
and taking a stand for a Creator won’t help. What difference will it really make if I just go along with the crowd?
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WVA World ads 2016 2 11/7/16 2:45 PM CONTENTS | March 18, 2017 • Volume 32 • Number 5
32 19 48
54 62
FEATURES DISPATCHES 7 News / Human Race / 32 Books of the Year–sort of Quotables / Quick Takes As we transition to more timely reporting, here are 12 pages on top books published from April through December, 2016 CULTURE History and ideology: Upsetting conventional wisdom Movies & TV / Books / Understanding America: Cultural carnage in the land of the free 19 Understanding the world: As our vision expands, so does our Children’s Books / Q&A / Music appreciation Science, math, and worldviews: Darwinism heads toward senility NOTEBOOK Topping the Top 50: Christian leaders offer better reading options 59 Lifestyle / Money / Medicine / than last year’s Christian bestsellers Technology Reaching back: Three novels from the past offer insights into the political battles of today VOICES 48 Iraq’s grisly liberation 4 Joel Belz Areas freed from the Islamic State’s grip display the depth of 16 Janie B. Cheaney the terror group’s war crimes. As Iraqi forces continue that fight, 65 Mailbag American aid groups are staking out front-line positions, too 67 Andrée Seu Peterson 54 A heart for the brokenhearted 68 Marvin Olasky Grant Funk has lived the traumatic childhood he now sees every day among young people in Alaska
ON THE COVER: Photo illustration by Krieg Barrie; books photo by Jeff Wales
Give the gift of clarity: wng.org/clarity NOTES FROM THE CEO
“The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world and those who dwell therein.” Survey says: “More Books!” —Psalm 24:1
A few responses to our recent member survey surprised me a little. One in Chief Content Officer Nick Eicher Editor in Chief Marvin Olasky particular—that 13 percent of our members read more than 30 books per year— Senior Editor Mindy Belz surprised me a lot.
How can that be right? You’re making me feel Editor Timothy Lamer like an underachiever. National Editor Jamie Dean Managing Editor Daniel James Devine About half of our members read between 11 and Art Director David K. Freeland Associate Art Director Robert L. Patete 20 books every year. Another 30 percent read at Washington Bureau Chief J.C. Derrick Reporters Emily Belz • Sophia Lee least six, which is about one book every other East Asia Bureau June Cheng • Angela Lu Story Coach Susan Olasky month. Now that’s my kind of reading schedule, the Senior Writers Janie B. Cheaney Andrée Seu Peterson • John Piper kind that a mere mortal with a job and kids might Edward E. Plowman • Lynn Vincent be able to keep up with. Correspondents Sandy Barwick • Megan Basham Julie Borg • Anthony Bradley • Bob Brown James Bruce • Michael Cochrane • John Dawson Suffice it to say, WORLD members are a book- Katie Gaultney • Charles Horton Mary Jackson • Jill Nelson • Arsenio Orteza reading bunch. You’ve told us that our annual Books Jae Wasson • Emily Whitten of the Year issue is your favorite issue. Almost 80 Mailbag Editor Les Sillars Executive Assistant June McGraw percent of you say you take reading suggestions Editorial Assistants Kristin Chapman Amy Derrick • Mary Ruth Murdoch from this issue. We’re happy to help. Graphic Designer Rachel Beatty Illustrator Krieg Barrie Ever since you told us how much reading you do, Digital Production Assistant Arla J. Eicher we’ve added an extra page or two of book reviews in every issue. That’s a change you may have noticed already. Website wng.org Executive Editor Mickey McLean Here are some changes you haven’t had the chance to notice yet: To our annual Managing Editor Leigh Jones Assistant Editors Kiley Crossland Books of the Year issue we are adding another book-themed issue at the beginning Lynde Langdon • Dan Perkins of summer—a time of year when most of us try to squeeze in an extra book or two. Reporters Onize Ohikere • Evan Wilt Correspondents La Shawn Barber • Gaye Clark Also, we’re introducing a Children’s Books of the Year issue, which will generally Laura Finch • Samantha Gobba • Anna K. Poole Bonnie Pritchett • Julia A. Seymour coincide with Children’s Book Week. Look for both of those issues later on. Editorial Assistant Whitney Williams Meantime, we’ll just keep putting good reading in front of you. Website wng.org/radio Executive Producer/Cohost Nick Eicher Senior Producer/Cohost Joseph Slife Senior Correspondent Cal Thomas Correspondents Paul Butler • Kent Covington Jim Henry • Mary Reichard • Sarah Wedel Kevin Martin Producers Johnny Franklin • Carl Peetz (technical) [email protected] Christina Darnell • Kristen Eicher (field) Listening In Warren Cole Smith • Rich Roszel
Chief Executive Officer Kevin Martin Founder Joel Belz Development Pierson Gerritsen • Debra Meissner Marketing Jonathan Woods CONTACT US: 800.951.6397 / WNG.ORG Technology Greg Groppe Advertising Partnerships Michael Schuerman Follow us on Twitter: @WORLD_mag Ryan Banko • Matt Blahnik Follow us on Facebook Member Services Matthew Miller Samantha Abdul-Allah • Amanda Beddingfield Summer Dodd • Alison Foley • Nancy Herrera TO BECOME A WORLD MEMBER, GIVE A GIFT MEMBERSHIP, CHANGE KIDS’ AND TEENS’ PUBLICATIONS ADDRESS, OR ACCESS OTHER MEMBER ACCOUNT INFORMATION: Website wng.org/children Email [email protected] Publisher Howard Brinkman Online wng.org/account (current members) or members.wng.org (to become a member) Editor Rich Bishop Phone 800.951.6397 (within the United States) or 828.232.5260 (outside the U.S.) world journalism institute Website worldji.com Monday-Friday (except holidays), 9 a.m.-7 p.m. ET Dean Marvin Olasky Write WORLD, PO Box 20002, Asheville, NC 28802-9998 Associate Dean Edward Lee Pitts BOARD of directors FOR BACK ISSUES, REPRINTS, OR PERMISSIONS: John Weiss (chairman) William Newton (vice chairman) Back issues 800.951.6397 Mariam Bell • Kevin Cusack • Peter Lillback Reprints and permissions 828.232.5415 or [email protected] Howard Miller • Russell B. Pulliam • David Skeel David Strassner • Ladeine Thompson WORLD occasionally rents subscriber names to carefully screened, like-minded organizations. If you would prefer Raymon Thompson not to receive these promotions, please call customer service and ask to be placed on our DO NOT RENT list. MISSION STATEMENT To report, interpret, and illustrate the news in a timely, accurate, enjoyable, and arresting fashion from a perspective committed to WORLD (ISSN 0888-157X) (USPS 763-010) is published biweekly (26 issues) for $59.95 per year by God’s World Publications, the Bible as the inerrant Word of God. (no mail) 12 All Souls Crescent, Asheville, NC 28803; 828.232.5260. Periodical postage paid at Asheville, NC, and additional mailing offices.Printed in the USA. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. © 2017 WORLD News Group. All rights reserved. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to WORLD, PO Box 20002, Asheville, NC 28802-9998. UNION UNIVERSITY PREPARES STUDENTS to think. to create. to plant.
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“democratic capitalism,” arguing repeatedly that a purely capitalistic system, with no restraints, is almost certain—because of the sinfulness of humans—to produce unacceptably ugly results. At the same time, Novak was known as an optimist who was much more interested in how ‘ ’ the wealth of the world is first created than in System for sinners painful discussions about how that wealth should be fairly distributed. He referred often THE INSIGHT OF DEMOCRATIC CAPITALIST to the works of Adam Smith two centuries ago. MICHAEL NOVAK “What distinguishes Smith from contemporary inquirers,” said Novak in his “Socialism is a system for saints. lecture that evening, “is not so R Democratic capitalism works because it’s much that he favored one a system for sinners.” system over another as it is Over 50 years as a journalist, I’ve scribbled that he went after solutions lots of forgettable quotes in my reporter’s note- instead of analyzing prob- book. But these 15 words were nothing if they lems. It’s not hard to find doz- weren’t both electric and memorable. They just ens of people who study the kept leaping off the page. causes of poverty. Big deal! So All this was at the core of a 1983 interview I what? When they find the had with Michael Novak, who died Feb. 17 at causes of poverty, who wants his home in Washington at the age of 83. it?” Instead, Novak said, we I was nervous. Novak was a noted scholar ought to imitate Smith, who and an intellectual. I’d better get things right— studied the causes of wealth. not just the words and the quotes, but espe- “That is the only real way to cially the ideas and the concepts. I was young, help the poor,” Novak insisted. and had just become the interim editor of The Novak called Then, unforgettably for this young reporter, Presbyterian Journal, a magazine founded 40 Novak explained how he wanted to take a cue years earlier by L. Nelson Bell, father-in-law to on Christians from Adam Smith, calling on Christians to offer Billy Graham. The Journal was pretty good at to offer ‘a “a theology of creativity rather than a theology covering “in-house” issues. But when I learned theology of of liberation.” He suggested that way too many that Novak, a Roman Catholic, would be speak- church leaders have bought into the idea that ing at a nearby Southern Baptist college, I creativity there is a set amount of wealth in the world thought, “Here’s a chance to be part of a rather than a that cannot be increased and must therefore be broader conversation.” I asked for credentials at theology of fairly distributed. “The really unusual insight of a press conference to precede Novak’s lecture— Adam Smith is in effect a theological insight— and turned out to be the only reporter there. liberation.’ that the world is not a finished system. If it These were big ideas, I thought. I strained to were finished, then the urgent need would be listen to Novak’s soft voice and scrawled as fast for a distributive system. But God made the as I could. No, these were huge ideas. world differently, with the potential for Sometimes that evening, Novak sounded like constantly creating new wealth.” an evangelical. He quoted liberally from John For me, it was a staggering and magnificent Calvin and Martin Luther. But then, he regularly concept. I drove home, but couldn’t rest until I went so much further. Again and again, he relied wrote the longest piece I’d ever composed. It on Scripture itself to make his point. The evening was also, in fact, the easiest interview I’d ever had been funded by a handful of Baptist laymen assembled. “It makes such good sense,” I kept who were eager to promote the cause of free thinking to myself. enterprise. But ever so patiently, Novak kept Two weeks later, I got a brief but gracious explaining how “pure free enterprise” never note from Michael Novak. “Thank you,” he takes adequate account of man’s sinful nature. wrote, “for representing my thoughts so accu- He even dared to use the term “original sin” rately and fairly. Sometimes I’m pretty complex without suggesting it was an outdated concept. and explaining me can be hard.” So now, I’ve HANDOUT Both that evening and through the years got a string of 20 more words I can deeply since, Novak has always preferred the term treasure. A
4 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 [email protected] Brand Works World 3.17.indd 1 1/20/17 9:10 AM
SANTI PALACIOS/AP Visit WORLD Digital: wng.org DISPATCHES News News / Human Race / Quotables Quotables / Quick Takes Quick the sea ontheirway to Italy on 16,000 migrants andrefugees rescued offthe coast ofLibya March 18, 2017 18, March Feb. 25, two days after being African migrants aboard the rubber boats northofLibya. have entered Europe by sea, group onasingleday picked Golfo Azzurro up 332 migrants floating in by Proactiva OpenArms,a Spanish nonprofit. Theaid So far thisyear more than Water passage with over 400deaths. • WORLD Magazine WORLD gaze outover
7 DISPATCHES News
liberal illuminati. They cried out, “Where’s my BISCUIT?” 5 This year may be hard sledding for academia: President Trump prefers Where have all generals to professors and tends to lump brainiacs with maniacs. On Saturday, Feb. 25, NPR reported the unkindest cut the biscuits gone? of all: “Cuts for publicly funded colleges LONG TIME PASSING FOR MEDIA AND ELITES and universities” seem on the way. NPR ACCUSTOMED TO SPECIAL TREATMENT quoted the new Republican governor of Missouri, Eric Greitens, saying what by Marvin Olasky we’re also likely to hear from Trump: “Universities, college professors, admin- istrators are going to get less money than the politicians had promised them in the past.” I can already hear my former University of Texas colleagues crying out, “Where’s my BISCUIT?” 5 Illustrious actress Meryl Streep in January attacked Donald Trump, saying “when the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.” At the Oscars on Sunday, Feb. 26, many of filmdom’s elect artfully tried to bully the president and viewers. Inside Hollywood’s Dolby
Theatre where tight security prevailed, TRUMP: ALEX BRANDON/AP • OSCARS: AMPAS/SIPA/NEWSCOM award presenter and actor Gael García Bernal said he is “against any form of wall that wants to separate us.” Zootopia producer Rich Moore spoke of “tolerance being more powerful than fear of the other.” Candy, cookies, and doughnuts floated down from the Susan and I have had three dogs didn’t get the respect or adulation they ceiling three times on tiny parachutes, R during our 40 years of marriage. thought they deserved. Here are details: which meant attendees had no need to The third at the very ripe old age of 17 5 During his first month on the job, cry out, “Where’s my BISCUIT?” died in December, so just before Trump press secretary Sean Spicer Many Christians, of course, have for Christmas we bought from the Austin upset traditions. The Associated Press years criticized mediacrats and enter- Humane Society our fourth, Greeley. representative didn’t get to ask the first tainer-savants. Thirty years ago I wrote With bits of blueberry biscuit we’re question. The New York Times didn’t a book with the then-controversial title, training him not to bark or pull toward get kid glove handling. Reporters from Prodigal Press: The Anti-Christian Bias dogs or deer as we listen to The World outside Washington could ask and Everything in It during our morn- questions via use of “Skype seats.” ing 2-mile walks. Friday, Feb. 24, brought the cruel- One day during the last weekend of est blow: Spicer scheduled an February we forgot to carry a biscuit. informal briefing known as a Greeley displayed his good manners “gaggle” and invited the White several times and looked up, expecting House press pool—representative fine dining. He showed surprise when reporters who share their notes reward did not follow virtue. We with all media colleagues—plus sensed the plaintive question forming several more. He did not include in his head: “Where’s my BISCUIT?” a Times reporter and some other That same weekend, day by day, leaders in the three most influential definers of Cookies parachute from the ceiling at American culture—news media, uni- the 89th annual Academy Awards versities, and entertainment media— (right); President Trump (above).
8 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 BY THE NUMBERS
of the American News Media. Between then and now most leading journalists, instead of doing their job as watchdogs, $870 million have been lap dogs during liberal The revenue of ISIS in 2016, as estimated by King’s College London’s administrations and attack dogs during International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence. conservative ones. Meanwhile, many The amount was half the Islamic State’s 2014 revenue of $1.9 billion. leading professors have become propa- gandists. Many movie stars have seen themselves as philosopher-kings rather than court jesters. The sense of entitlement is so strong that National Press Club President Jeffrey Ballou said Spicer’s Feb. 24 gaggle selectivity “harks back to the darkest chapters of U.S. history.” Darkest, really? Akin to whipping slaves and fighting a Civil War in which 600,000 died? But who will say that our media emperors have no clothes, especially when they look so good on the pre-Oscar red carpet? In the late 1990s, while occasionally The reduction in the number of community banks since 2010, offering solicited advice to then-Gov. when the Dodd-Frank banking reform bill was passed. George W. Bush, I took a few minutes to tell him about University of Texas 15% lunacy a mile from his home. Bush sighed and said, “I know, I know, but I can’t take on UT and win.” Given the sad demise of one governor a generation before who had tried and lost, Bush 30 pounds was right. Besides, he truly wanted to The amount of edible gold dust, among other delicacies, on hand to quash be a uniter, not a divider. the appetites of the Academy Awards’ 1,500 celebrity guests on Feb. 26. Now, look at consummate divider Donald J. Trump. He’s fighting a multifront war against major media, universities, entertainment industries, the legal establishment, Washington careerists, and others. Admirable, maybe. Audacious, certainly. Rolling Stone correspondent Matt Taibbi bashes Donald Trump in his crude new book, Insane Clown President, but notes that every previous candidate concluded: “If you want power in this country, you The stock increase for CoreCivic, one of the nation’s largest private prison must accept the primacy of the press. operators, since Donald Trump won election on Nov. 8. The Trump adminis- It’s like paying the cover at the door of 140% tration has canceled an Obama-era phaseout of private prisons. the world’s most exclusive club.” Now, an astounding change: “Trump wouldn’t pay the tab.” So Trump, after his impressive speech to Congress on Feb. 28, entered March in a thoroughly modern version $12.58 trillion of the biggest story of 1813-1814: Could Napoleon defeat the combined armies U.S. household debt in the fourth quarter of last year—just short of the of Russia, Prussia, Austria, Great record level reached during the 2008 financial crisis. Britain, Spain, and Sweden? A
[email protected] @MarvinOlasky March 18, 2017 • WORLD Magazine 9 DISPATCHES Human Race
Many liberals wooden boat to thought avoid execu- Hannity over- tion by the powered Hayden- the quiet supported Colmes, but communist Colmes said government. he was con- Democratic AP VIA POST-DISPATCH LOUIS /ST. COHEN ROBERT • GRAVESTONES: SACRAMENTO CBS • NGUYEN: IMAGES ILYA SAVENOK/GETTY S. • COLMES: COMMUNICATIONS ROSS LARRY A. • COE: HANDOUT KELLER: HOME tent and felt Colmes leaders of the lucky to be on the state Senate, EDUCATED show, which ran until however, wouldn’t allow 2009. Colmes said most Nguyen to finish her Feb. people who watched the 23 speech and forcibly STUDENTS show probably didn’t removed her from the realize that he and his Senate floor. At the next THRIVE conservative foil were best weekend’s state GOP con- friends. vention, many Republicans wore “I stand with Janet” AT KING’S. Announced Prayer Breakfast in Removed stickers. Tim Keller said on Feb. 26 Washington, D.C., and Two days after the that he would step down as many state capitals. It was California state Senate Vandalized senior pastor of Redeemer Coe who made the prayer honored the late leftist Vandals either late on Feb. Presbyterian Church in breakfast an institution, activist Tom Hayden, GOP 19 or early on Feb. 20 The King’s College recognizes New York City in July. with the presence of every toppled more than 170 the dedication and achievements Three pastors will succeed sitting president since gravestones in one of the Keller, 66, as the Dwight D. Eisenhower and oldest Jewish cemeteries of home educated students. 5,000-member, multisite guest speakers that in Missouri. Investigators megachurch splits into included Mother Teresa were reportedly reviewing Our home educated student three separate congrega- and Irish rock singer Bono. surveillance camera foot- enrollment is quickly passing tions. Keller, who became Many in political life saw age for clues to the identity the 20% mark as our current the first pastor of the him as a mentor, someone of the vandals. The Chesed Manhattan church in 1989, who would provide spiri- Shel Emeth Cemetery in students invite their friends reportedly plans to remain tual guidance and keep University City, Mo., near to join us. active by teaching and their secrets. He had con- St. Louis opened in 1893. working with Redeemer’s nections with leaders from Police in Philadelphia Students experience close-knit church planting network. across the world, and he state Sen. Janet Nguyen reported on Feb. 26 that even sponsored some took to the Senate floor to vandals had toppled more Christian community, challenging Died private diplomacy, using offer the view of someone than 100 headstones at the academics, and countless internship Doug Coe, a religious leader his friendships to bring whose family had fled Jewish Mount Carmel opportunities in New York City. with influence in political together quarrelling par- Vietnam on a small Cemetery in that city. circles, died on Feb. 21 at ties. Coe became part of the Faculty and students together Fellowship after meeting founder Abraham Vereide seek understanding of our Western and took over the running civilization, embrace worthy new of the organization in 1969. ideas, and seek to bring glory Died to Christ in all we do. Alan Colmes, Sean Hannity’s liberal partner on Fox News, died on Feb. 23 at age 66. Colmes, a former tkc.edu/homeschool radio host and stand-up the age of 88. Coe led the comedian, joined Fox News 56 Broadway Fellowship Foundation, a in 1996 to act as Hannity’s New York, NY 10004 faith-based group that sparring partner on the talk sponsors the National show Hannity & Colmes. 888-969-7200
10 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 Visit WORLD Digital: wng.org HOME EDUCATED STUDENTS THRIVE AT KING’S.
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Our home educated student enrollment is quickly passing the 20% mark as our current students invite their friends to join us.
Students experience close-knit Christian community, challenging academics, and countless internship opportunities in New York City.
Faculty and students together seek understanding of our Western civilization, embrace worthy new ideas, and seek to bring glory to Christ in all we do.
tkc.edu/homeschool 56 Broadway New York, NY 10004 888-969-7200 DISPATCHES Quotables
‘I was bullied at school for being ‘It’s not gay. I now feel I’m being bullied at Synod for going to get being same-sex attracted and any better; faithful to the HANDOUT • ALLBERRY: AP VIA SYSTEM HEALTH KANSAS OF UNIVERSITY THE • GRILLOT: MONSIVAIS/AP MARTINEZ PABLO • ROBERTS: IMAGES GETTY VIA NAGLE/BLOOMBERG MICHAEL BERTOLINI: teaching of Jesus it’s getting on marriage.’ worse.’ Aetna CEO MARK BERTOLINI, on Obamacare’s death spiral, predicting more insurers will soon exit government-run marketplaces.
Pastor and writer SAM ‘Our law punishes ALLBERRY at the Church of England General Synod in people for what they London, England, on opposition to him and his views against do, not who they are.’ same-sex marriage. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice JOHN ROBERTS, in a Feb. 22 decision throwing out a death sentence against a black man based on ‘A lot of Jews in expert testimony that African-Americans Sweden are were more prone to violence. scared. Parents are scared to drop off their ‘Don’t think kids at the Jewish it’s going to be at preschool. the bar. … Maybe some People of all ages are scared grilling in the backyard of going to with a beer or two.’ synagogue.’ IAN GRILLOT on spending time with his new “best friend” JOHANNA SCHREIBER, a Jewish journalist in Stockholm, Alok Madasani. Grillot intervened on Feb. 22 when a man at on the rise in hate crimes and a bar in Olathe, Kan., shot Madasani and another Indian death threats against Jews in man, the assailant telling them to “get out of my Sweden. The Swedish National country.” Grillot was shot in the chest but is Council for Crime Prevention recovering along with Madasani. The other reported a 38 percent increase man, Srinivas Kuchibhotla, died. in reported anti-Semitic incidents in 2014.
12 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 Give the gift of clarity: wng.org/clarity
DISPATCHES Quick Takes
Road test Who’s a good driver? Everyone is, if you ask them. Predatory service That’s the finding of an American Automobile The mayor of London has a choice—cats or rats. London Assembly Association survey published in February that Member Tom Copley called on Mayor Sadiq Khan to end the pestilence found 83 percent of American drivers consider of mice at London’s City Hall by getting a cat, “preferably rehoming themselves somewhat or much more careful one from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home.” In a Feb. 18 interview with compared with other The Telegraph, Copley complained that mice recently tumbled down drivers they from ceiling panels and fell into a crowd of visiting schoolchildren. If encounter. Very Khan acquires a cat for City Hall, the feline will join an auspicious young drivers group of government cats that keep buildings like were among Number 10 Downing Street, the Foreign the most Office, and the Treasury free of vermin. confident, with only 0.2 percent of 16- to 18-year- olds regarding TEXTING: JASONDOIY/ISTOCK • CITY HALL: CHRIS RATCLIFFE/GETTY IMAGES • SOLANO: HENDRIK SCHMIDT/PICTURE-ALLIANCE/DPA/AP • HENRYETTA: HANDOUT • HENRYETTA: SCHMIDT/PICTURE-ALLIANCE/DPA/AP HENDRIK • SOLANO: IMAGES RATCLIFFE/GETTY CHRIS HALL: • CITY JASONDOIY/ISTOCK TEXTING: themselves as less careful than the average driver. More specific questions, though, revealed one-third of drivers had texted while driving in the previous month and half admitted they speed 15 mph above the speed limit.
Snow falls Adrian Solano of Venezuela managed entry into the qualifying round of the Nordic World Ski Championships in Lahti, Finland, which began Feb. 22, only to gain the twitter label “world’s worst skier.” After nearly falling at the starting gate, Solano wobbled through his start, took a tumble around one of the first curves, and repeatedly fell before running out of time only about a third Stepping out of the way through the course. Kick up your heels, Henryetta. The small The problem: Solano had Oklahoma town (population 5,765) deep trained for the event in the heart of the Bible Belt has finally but never on actual lifted a 40-year-old ban on public snow in his tropical dancing within 500 feet of a church. The South American home issue came before the City Council after country. He had instead town residents scolded Joni Insabella trained using skis with for planning a Valentine’s Day dance at wheels on them. Solano her business (see Quick Takes, March remained upbeat after 4, 2017). “We weren’t having alcohol or the race: “Maybe I anything. We just wanted it to be fun have fallen many for the community,” said Insabella, who times, but what ended up canceling the event. When really counts is news spread, the town’s mayor claimed that I will always to have never heard of the seldom- continue to rise.” enforced ban. Neither had the City Council, which on Feb. 21 voted unanimously to repeal the ban.
14 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 COWS: SUFFIELD POLICE • COX, TRASH: HANDOUT • INOUE: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON • CRJ-700 JET: WSB Manage your membership: wng.org/membership the plane. an emergency evacuation of down therunway andprompted caused afuel leak that shut members, butthecollision passengers andfour crew was harmedamong the44 Airport onFeb. 15. Nobody Charlotte Douglas International attempting to take offfrom the jet An AmericanEagle pilots would thinkto doso? deer, buthow many airplane are wise to watch outfor Drivers duringcertain seasons crossing? Deer revenge onhercollege-student son. When18-year-old Pennsylvania, heexpected cookies. What hegot instead inthecare ‘Did you send methewrong package? Why didyou send methis?’” His mother told himshewas justforwarding histrash. Thecollege recent triphome.Confused, Cox calledhismother, reportedly hitadeer while package was thegarbage heleftstrewn across hisroom after a A long-suffering Marylandmother has gained amodicum of opened aparcel from hismother at Westminster College in student saidtheprank gave himagood laugh. Trash collection CRJ-700 CRJ-700 and guidelines that make upourclasses.” staff, noting that racism canbe found “inthesystems, structures, rules,languages, expectations, consequences.” racist andpromising to encourage studentsto see grammar asa“set ofchoices withvarious University ofWashington issued astatement inFebruary callingprescriptive grammar rules Goodbye stylemanuals,hellosocial justice grammar. Thedirector oftheWriting Center at the College English Asao Inoue Terri Connor Cox : “[I said,] : “[Isaid,] attributed thestatement to theongoing work oftheWriting Center’s
short order. a faulty fence. Officers were able to roundupthe cowsin Authorities say thecows escaped from anearby pendueto bovines at thefront standing doorofalocalhouse. police departmentspotted apairofblack-and-white unfamiliar cows. Earlier that morning,officers withthe on theirFacebook page onFeb. 19: Don’t opendoors to Police inSuffield, Conn.,posted a warning tolocal residents Cattle call March 18, 2017 18, March • WORLD Magazine WORLD 15 VOICES Janie B. Cheaney
run a business or meet a payroll, that she regards herself as enlightened, and that she’s as white as I am (not an assumption, judging by her photograph). At least some of this is likely true. But what else? Is she happily married or bitterly divorced? Is she a mother, by turns delighted and frustrated in that role? INTRODUCING Very high stakes Has she ever been confronted with a scary medical diagnosis or a foreclosure? DON’T FORGET THAT POLITICAL OPPONENTS Has she ever been moved to tears by Bach’s THE TIMOTHY ARE IMAGE-BEARERS OF A HOLY GOD B-Minor Mass or a Paul McCartney song? Has she ever been trou- % Anyone who sails the high seas of political bled with doubt stirred by a TRACK. dialogue on the internet encounters a lot Thomas Sowell essay? 50 R TUITION of this kind of thing: “Dear White, Christian Does she understand SCHOLARSHIP Trump Supporter—We Need to Talk.” That’s some things I don’t? FOR FIRST YEAR the title of a much-shared article on The Rosaria Butterfield, the Huffington Post, written by a female social- former liberal lesbian pro- sciences professor at a West Coast university. fessor won to Christ, offers a But the combined condescension and anguish useful corrective to under- of the piece are echoing from every progressive standing the person she 12 CREDIT HOURS corner: What’s wrong with you Christian once was. What do RESIDENTIAL EDUCATION MEETS OF MINISTRY INTERNSHIP conservatives? Christians “just not get”— MINISTRY EXPERIENCE The piece takes an oddly passive-aggressive specifically about those who tone. Its author was raised in a blue-collar, identify as LGBT (though it churchgoing Southern family, studied hard, could apply to anyone on racked up degrees, and landed a university pro- What do the other side)? The most important thing: fessorship. Along the way she exchanged her They are people trying to make sense of their 20+ LOCAL CHURCH conservative roots for a progressive worldview Christians lives. They love their kids and significant oth- PARTNERS (a not-uncommon path for academics, after all). ‘just not ers, experience joy and tragedy, long for signifi- Now, “I feel you’re holding it against me now get’—specifi- cance. “People are people,” and however that I no longer share your views.” She knows difficult, spoiled, or ruined they appear, they that White, Christian Trump Supporters—let’s cally about are “image-bearers of a holy God.” just call them WCTSs—regard her as an ivory- those who C.S. Lewis took this a bit further in his tower elite, but like her fellow academics she identify as famous essay “The Weight of Glory”: “You have braved the hail of rigorous standards and peer never talked to a mere mortal ... [but rather] review. Therefore, “we really do know a lot LGBT? They immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.” about what we’re talking about.” She resents are people The stakes are actually not as high as the TIMOTHY TRACK being told to get over the election because her trying to professor thinks. They are a good deal higher, team lost: “politics is not a sport.” She’ll get and far more life-and-death than another over her disappointment that the Falcons lost make sense election cycle. the Super Bowl, but the NFL is not “life and Not to say that these immortal image- of their lives. SERVE. LEARN. LEAD. death. This election, however, is exactly that.” bearers who happen to be in opposition The aggressive side betrays itself with cer- shouldn’t be debated, or blocked, or sometimes tain assumptions: that WCTSs “think people fought tooth and nail. But it matters how we go are not Christians if they aren’t Christian in the about it. When I read a piece like the professor’s, The Timothy Track is now offering select residential M.Div students at Midwestern Seminary in-the-field ministry same way as you”; that they “cling to overturning I automatically bristle: Who is she to tell White training in a local church context. In addition to their regular studies, students in The Timothy Track will spend Roe v. Wade as the only way to end abortions”; Christians what they think and how they feel? their first two semesters participating in an internship with one of Midwestern’s partner churches. And along with that it’s “more important to you to win than to I start constructing pithy statements and gaining valuable ministry experience, all Timothy Track students will receive a 50% tuition scholarship. do good.” None of which is new or original, and thought-provoking zingers that will have fans I feel hackles rising. cheering from the sidelines. Maybe even put But wait. Am I making my own assumptions? together a catchy meme that goes viral. But KRIEG BARRIE The Timothy Track: For The Church, With The Church I assume that politics has become her de wait—before I write anything about her, I should facto religion. I assume she’s a tenured academic pray for her. with a cushy job. I assume she’s never tried to And that’s what I did. A mbts.edu/world
16 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 [email protected] @jbcheaney INTRODUCING THE TIMOTHY TRACK. 50% TUITION SCHOLARSHIP FOR FIRST YEAR 12 CREDIT HOURS RESIDENTIAL EDUCATION MEETS OF MINISTRY INTERNSHIP MINISTRY EXPERIENCE 20+ LOCAL CHURCH PARTNERS
TIMOTHY TRACK
SERVE. LEARN. LEAD.
The Timothy Track is now offering select residential M.Div students at Midwestern Seminary in-the-field ministry training in a local church context. In addition to their regular studies, students in The Timothy Track will spend their first two semesters participating in an internship with one of Midwestern’s partner churches. And along with gaining valuable ministry experience, all Timothy Track students will receive a 50% tuition scholarship.
The Timothy Track: For The Church, With The Church
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ServeSeattle.com | (206) 432-8360 [email protected] 20TH CENTURY FOX R the top-grossing Rmoviethe top-grossing of irreverent growing more common. most profitable. But it’s PG-13 nicheisstill seenas superhero flick,where the an unusualchoicefora to pursueanRrating. It’s 20th CenturyFox decided Wolverine, hasbeenonhow Jackman latest movie featuring Since 2016’s raunchy, by Meganby Basham CONTENT IN MARRED BY R-RATED IS SELF-SACRIFICE OF A SUPERHERO STORY sins his for Paying Movie focus on Most ofthemedia [email protected] asX-Men member Deadpool CULTURE Logan became became , the , the Hugh Hugh LOGAN Movies &TV @megbasham for superhero movies. ing aswelcome progress also hailing less adolescent)viewers. the caseof toward older(though, in squarely atadolescentboys genre thatoncewas aimed Cage Jessica Jones Marvel comicbookslike Netflix dramas basedon shifting. Popular, edgy all time, trends have been By andlarge, criticsare
have furtherpusheda Deadpool / Logan Books Books and Luke ’s Rrat , no , no / Children’s Books - story aboutgrowing old, [We’re telling]anadult being asuperhero. … we’re never talkingabout on Media hismindsetworking Frank describedtoRecode content. moral faultwiththe not just becauseIfind rial was still amistake. And addition ofR-rated mate a strong, classicstory, the While Logan Screenwriter Scott Logan : “On thisone, iscentered on / Q&A Q&A - / Music March 18, 2017 18, March down-on-his-luck hustler,down-on-his-luck him intheyear 2029, he’s a side. Thus, when we find live comfortablysideby science, andthetwo cannot he’s alsoamanofcon a weapon ofviolence. But Wolverine hasbeenusedas course oftheX-Men series, should pay for. Over the lot ofsinshebelieves he reportedly last time)has a Jackman fortheninthand about paying foryour sins.” Logan (played by Logan (played • WORLD Magazine WORLD - 19 CULTURE Movies & TV
drowning his pain in alcohol Logan does take worth- and drugs. With the excep- while risks and breaks some tion of Professor X (played good ground in superhero again by Patrick Stewart), storytelling. To have a hero there’s not a life in the saving not the world but a world he cares about single girl brings greater enough to save, including depth to the plot while his own. That is, until he reminding us that rescuing stumbles across a young one being led away to death girl with looks and charac- is every bit as noble as res- Actor teristics disquietingly cuing thousands. Likewise, Adam Bond similar to his own. Logan’s search for meaning in Finding Jesus There’s no question that is fulfilled only in the role of director James Mangold, personal, protective father. who also helmed one of the These are timeless lessons Television 21st century’s best Western that boys once learned from remakes, 3:10 to Yuma, stories of the Old West. It Finding Jesus intentionally draws on the would be nice if they could CNN may not be a Pilate to “fictional court- dusty outlaw archetype. If learn them now from the R reliable source for room dramas.” His Clint Eastwood had ever near future. Sadly, the enor- theological insight, yet reasoning: The Gospel played a superhero, it mous level of violence, lan- the network’s Finding writers downplayed the would have been Logan. guage, and brief but totally Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery role of the Romans We recognize in him a hero gratuitous nudity won’t could make for interest- (especially Pilate) in their from an older age—beat allow it. ing viewing. Academic crucifixion accounts down, selfish, cynical—who Perhaps the most moving voices from Duke because of the political ultimately finds renewed moment in the film comes University, Asbury climate they lived in. purpose through during the credits, which Theological Seminary, In another episode, self-sacrifice. roll as Johnny Cash sings and the University of experts suggest Lazarus, With this time-honored his brilliant Judgment Day Notre Dame join with not the Apostle John, setup and a gang leader as ballad, “The Man Comes rabbis, bishops, authors, was “the disciple Jesus fantastically reprehensible Around.” If Logan’s closing and journalists in the sec- loved” present at the as anyone John Wayne or symbol doesn’t convince ond season of this docu- Last Supper and the only mentary series about male disciple present at Alan Ladd ever faced, you that Mangold inten- Jesus. Re-enactments the foot of the cross. It’s Logan could have been one tionally links Wolverine’s keep the action moving, an interesting (if specula- of the best superhero films redemptive story to that although actors depict tive) theory since, after ever made. It misses the found in the Gospels, its both Biblical and extra- all, Lazarus above anyone A mark by spending so much closing song will. Biblical events (such as would have known that time indulging the freedom those described by death doesn’t mark the of its rating. the Jewish historian end of the story. When you see Wolverine BOX OFFICE TOP 10 Josephus) side by The best parts of stab the first head with his FOR THE WEEKEND OF FEB. 24-26 side, which is some- Finding Jesus are the in- metal claws, it’s shocking. according to Box Office Mojo times confusing. depth looks at recent The series archaeological discover- By the time he gets to the CAUTIONS: Quantity of sexual (S), violent (V), fourth or fifth, the reaction and foul-language (L) content on a 0-10 scale, doesn’t seem ies, such as the possible is more like, “Oh yawn, with 10 high, from kids-in-mind.com intended to prove or discovery of the site of Wolverine is stabbing heads S V L disprove the exis- Herod’s palace. Other `1 ...... again.” Again and again Get Out R 3 8 9 tence of Jesus or portions, focusing heavily
`2 the major events of on the authenticity of NETWORK NEWS HILL/CABLE MARK when the film could have The LEGO Batman Movie* PG...... 1 3 2 His life. But it does certain relics, may bore used its already-long run- `3 John Wick: Chapter highlight academic non-Orthodox audiences. ning time to delve further Two R...... 4 9 5 skepticism of Biblical Still, it’s exciting to hear into its central `4 The Great Wall PG-13...... 1 7 3 inerrancy. For exam- the words “I am the res- relationships and emotional `5 Fist Fight R...... 6 6 10 ple, one expert com- urrection and the life” on conflict, it instead gives us `6 Fifty Shades Darker R...... 10 4 5 pares the Gospel one of the biggest news more blood spatter during `7 Hidden Figures* PG...... 1 3 3 accounts of Jesus’ outlets in the world. increasingly boring action `8 La La Land* PG-13...... 3 2 5 trial before Pontius —by LAURA FINCH sequences. `9 Rock Dog PG...... 1 3 1 `10 A Dog’s Purpose* PG...... 2 4 1
20 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 *Reviewed by WORLD JAKE GILES NETTER/LIONSGATE See allour movie reviews atwng.org/movies R to theshack where his for God.Papa invites him endearment hiswife uses by “Papa”—a term of letter inhismailbox signed a breaking family,a hefinds ing grief, gnawing guilt, and Mack heaves underparalyz vanishes withherbody. As to asickserial killerwho daughter onacampingtrip loses hisbubbly6-year-old Phillips ( with littleaction. Mack in gravelly orhushedtones) theological dialogue (mostly film unfolds into along of sinful humanbeings. according to theimagination fashion styles—allportrayed ties, facial expressions, pers. They have personali and communicates inwhis Asian woman whogardens is aswan-necked, sparkly Sarayu (Sumire Matsubara) water; theHolySpiritor the shedandwalks on who tinkers with wood in a super-chill, kind-eyed Jew Young; Jesus (Aviv Alush) is beads andjamsto Neil black woman whowears is portrayed asa huggable as Papa (Octavia Spencer) Father Godorknown here visual, humanized persons: that presents Godinthree first majormotion picture mouth. outside ofScripture intoHis of manandputtingwords sonifying Godintheimage dangerous ground by per best-selling novel. troversial andheretical of WilliamP. Young’s con Shack The Movie Like thebook,entire The filmtreads on very title movie adaptation The Shack The Shack Sam Worthington isasame- is the isthe - - - - - ) shows upwithapistol. daughter died,so Mack what? You lostmethere.” Papa responds blankly, “My tions Papa abouthiswrath, When Mack pointedly ques from theGodofBible: god whoisfar removed God. But itis,of course, a intimacy andtrustwith weekend: buildinganew Mack spendshiswhole ing onthat.” Andthat’s how very well, butwe’re work you?” Papa answers, “Not hug, hegasps, “DoIknow him into abosom-crushing meets Papa, whoswooshes The first timeMack - - real andrelevant to even when Ineeded you?”) are tions (“Where were you PG-13 rating. Mack’s ques themes that earned ita brushing them—hardcore forgiveness withoutair evil, shame,judgment, and questions aboutsuffering, addresses serious, hard dies intheworld?” Thefilm God allows terrible trage question: “What kindof grapple withthistime-old ger for itscontents, which budget), so there isahun as a piffling $300 marketing copies against allodds(such The novel sold 10 million - - - - and personal experiences. out ofloose-gripped truths of creating afree-form God those ontheslipperyslopes another downhill pushfor sies) willmake itjust its answers (and itshere may raise good questions, and mind. to hell,provoke both heart love andwhoiscondemned and judge whoisworthy of challenges Mack to play God cation ofGod’s wisdom) in whichSophia(personifi Certain parts, like thescene the mostmature Christians. March 18, 2017 18, March But while • The Shack WORLD Magazine WORLD —by SOPHIA LEE
- - 21 CULTURE Books
on the right” about how they should change. She writes, “Surely it is true” Glimpses that the right emphasizes “obedience to authority” and the left “originality.” (Surely that is a psychological over- of other generalization: I’ve seen firsthand how people on both sides tend to worship human idols.) cultures Lamin Sanneh’s Beyond Jihad: The A LIBERAL VISITS Pacifist Tradition in West African LOUISIANA, A HISTORIAN Islam (Oxford, 2016) is much better because the right has moved right, not cultural analysis. The main thrust of EXAMINES ISLAM because the left has moved left.” Really? Islam has often been a sword thrust to by Marvin Olasky Did the Democrats’ platform in 1960 the throat or belly, but Sanneh shows endorse abortion and same-sex how some converts to Islam from poly- Give UC Berkeley professor Arlie marriage? theism freely chose Islamic rituals that R Hochschild credit for descending Example: Hochschild says the tea foster “habits of personal discipline into darkest Louisiana to see party’s answer to economic problems and tidiness.” whether tea party and is “to circle the wagons around Given how the ISIS affiliate Boko Trump supporters family and church, and to get on Haram has murdered and raped its would eat her alive. bended knee to multinational way across northern Nigeria, Sanneh’s She received hospita- companies,” but, “For the lib- description of some radical Muslims’ ble treatment but in eral left, the best approach is second thoughts is pertinent: writing Strangers in to nurture new business Abdullahi dan Fodio and others wor- Their Own Land through a world-class public ried “that their original moral goals (The New Press, 2016) infrastructure and excellent had long been overtaken by the lust for did not change her ideo- schools.” Even-handed analysis? power and gain.” Also, some Muslims logical tune. Hochschild’s last chapter includes in past centuries grew rich on the slave Example: Hochschild writes that a 16-line letter to friends on the liberal trade and objected to Christians who America has become politically divided left about how they should change, and threatened their social and economic since 1960: “This split has widened a 54-line letter to “my Louisiana friends interests.
BOOKMARKS faith, you pull the rug out from under Daniel Dreisbach’s Reading the Bible with your right to Christian morality as the Founding Fathers (Oxford, 2017) under- well … you smash the whole system.” cuts theories that America’s founders Older distance runners will be emphasized Enlightenment thinking over interested in Frank Shorter’s My Biblical wisdom. We have fallen far: Nicholas Marathon: Reflections on a Gold Eberstadt’s Men Without Work: America’s Medal Life (Rodale, 2016): Shorter, Invisible Crisis (Templeton, 2016) points out who tells how his father abused him that one-sixth of men in their prime working and his sisters, won the 1972 Olympic ages are not working at all, yet some economists glibly say marathon in Munich. Fans of detective fiction with high tol- the United States has “full employment.” Many among the erance for academic writing (where a paragraph can be one-sixth fill their days with television and video games— two pages long) will relish thoughtful insights in Susanna and not only they but America are the worse for it. Lee’s Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction & the Decline of Moral Spurgeon scholars will relish The Lost Sermons of C.H. Authority (Ohio State University Press, 2016). Spurgeon, Volume 1 (B&H, 2017): Spurgeon’s handwritten Bruce Feiler’s The First Love Story: Adam, Eve, and Us outlines and editor Christian George’s notes let readers (Penguin, 2017) features sprightly journalistic writing, tour the great theologian’s brain. C. Ivan Spencer’s fascinating information on perceptions of the Adam and Tweetable Nietzsche: His Essential Ideas Revealed and Eve saga over the centuries, and some inexpert howlers: Explained (Zondervan, 2016) comes through on its subtitle Skepticism about the reality of Eden grew as “no one promise. Nietzsche was obnoxious in lots of ways but cor- found a walled garden,” but no one expected to, since the rect in his conclusion that rejecting God yet embracing Genesis curse and then the Genesis flood changed the HANDOUT Biblical values is illogical: “When you give up Christian landscape. —M.O.
22 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 RELIGIOUSLY THEMED BOOKS reviewed by Douglas Flanders, Jenny Schmitt, Kim Henderson, & Susan Olasky
CHURCH IN HARD PLACES: HOW THE LOCAL AFTERWORD CHURCH BRINGS LIFE TO THE POOR AND NEEDY In just 158 pages, Jen Wilkin Mez McConnell & Mike McKinley sets out a readable and wise The authors identify two problems with evangelical mercy ministries: book on God’s attributes. failure to share the explicit gospel and a lack of long-term None Like Him: 10 Ways discipleship. Both authors are pastors who serve the poor. McKinley God Is Different From Us works with immigrants in Sterling, Va. McConnell, an ex-convict who (and Why That’s a Good grew up in housing projects, called schemes, in Edinburgh, Scotland, Thing) (Crossway, 2016) works in those schemes. They combine examples from their ministries argues that to be true “God- with extensive Biblical references to argue that poverty alleviation fearing” women we need a must come from the local church. Food pantries do not radically good understanding of change lives—only Jesus does—and addressing poverty in isolation does not meet the under- God’s perfections. Wilkin lying need of sinners for a holy God. writes in a straightforward yet winsome style and THE WONDER Emma Donoghue doesn’t use 10 words when Mid-1800s rural Ireland, misty with traditional Catholicism and one will do. superstition, looms as an independent character in this atmospheric At the heart of Aimee historical novel. In it Lib Wright, a pragmatic Florence Nightingale– Byrd’s No Little Women: trained nurse, faces an unusual task: observe the “miracle” of an Equipping All Women in the 11-year-old girl who purportedly has not eaten for four months. Household of God (P&R, Skeptical at the beginning, Lib gradually warms to her pious young 2016) is the problem of charge, and her mind opens to the possibility of belief. Though skill- theologically ignorant fully written, the book drags at parts before rushing to a conclusion. women absorbing and pass- Donoghue doesn’t write from a Biblical worldview, but she raises ing on bad theology. It’s a intriguing questions about belief and reason. problem the church needs to address, and one that AMONG THE LIVING Jonathan Rabb Christian women need to As a refugee, Holocaust survivor Yitzhak Goldah comes to live with guard against. Bad theology his cousin in postwar Savannah, Ga. The cousin and his social-striving is everywhere—especially in wife are uncomfortable with Yitzhak’s suffering and hope to turn him Christian publishing, where into an American with a name change and social invitations. The personal style, vulnerability, novel conveys a distinct time and place and offers a twist on the and social justice passion racial conflicts of the Jim Crow–era South. Exploring conflicts count more than Biblical between Conservative and Reform Jews, and between Jews who orthodoxy. Learning to read lived through the war and those who watched it unfold from the critically is key: To that end United States, it leads readers to ponder evil and different responses Byrd offers excerpts from to great suffering. several popular books and questions to encourage HEAVEN’S DITCH: GOD, GOLD, AND MURDER close reading. —Susan Olasky ON THE ERIE CANAL Jack Kelly Two hundred years ago untrained engineers broke ground on the Erie Canal, learning by trial and error as they went. Kelly tells the story of that engineering feat and the movements that sprang up alongside it. He follows Joseph Smith from boyhood to death, tracing the rise and appeal of Mormonism. He follows William Miller, who reckoned the end of the world was coming in 1843—or ’44—and Charles Finney, who shook up evangelicalism. Although an engaging history, the book suffers from Kelly’s hostility toward Christianity: “The soft glove of concern covered an iron fist of coercion, ready to strike those who persisted in sin.” Wilkin
HANDOUT —Flanders, Schmitt, and Henderson are graduates of the World Journalism Institute mid-career course
To see more book news and reviews, go to wng.org/books March 18, 2017 • WORLD Magazine 23 CULTURE Children’s Books OUR PROFESSORS DO more than instruct; Wonder and discovery FOUR RECENT SCIENCE BOOKS reviewed by Emily Whitten they practice what they preach.
ADA TWIST, SCIENTIST Andrea Beaty AFTERWORD Beaty’s first book in this series,Rosie Revere, Engineer, spent This year’s Newbery Medal more than 80 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. for excellence in juvenile Ada Twist, Scientist shares many good qualities with the origi- literature went to Kelly nal, including its cheerful illustration style and rhyming text. Barnhill’s The Girl Who One noteworthy difference—this book includes a young black Drank the Moon heroine named Ada Twist. Ada bubbles over with questions (Algonquin (What’s that stinky smell?) and goes to great—often very Young Readers, messy—lengths to test her hypotheses. Parents won’t appre- 2016), a fantasy ciate a climax in which Ada covers a wall with her drawings. about a town However, they may still appreciate this simple introduction to ruled by sorrow the scientific method. (Ages 4-7) and the magic that sets it free. A BEETLE IS SHY Dianna Hutts Aston Though it con- DAVID ALLEN Kids get a vivid introduction to beetles in this 40-page picture tains elements book. Award-winner Sylvia Long uses colorful repetition to that could be interpreted as enliven the visual presentation, and her intricate drawings New Age, the story is worth- Dean of the School of Preaching allow kids to learn about everything from beetle life cycles to while for readers mature habitat just by looking. While the basic narrative uses one enough for nuance. Javaka Distinguished Professor of Preaching sentence per spread (“A beetle is microscopic.”), further Steptoe’s Radiant Child explanations throughout let older readers go deeper without (Little, Brown Books for Director of the Southwestern Center overwhelming younger ones. Overall, a delightful marriage of Young Readers, 2016), a for Expository Preaching words and images focusing on one of God’s smallest but most picture book biography of artful creations. One note—Aston claims beetles first Brooklyn artist Jean-Michel George W. Truett Chair of Ministry emerged several hundred million years ago. (Ages 5-9) Basquiat, won the Caldecott Medal for illustration. The SOLVING THE PUZZLE UNDER THE SEA: MARIE artwork reflects the exuber- THARP MAPS THE OCEAN FLOOR Robert Burleigh ant style of this tragically This picture book biography conveys how Marie Tharp, an short-lived talent. Four PREACHER oceanographer from the early 20th century, came to create the medals, including the Printz first map of the ocean floor. Soft, inviting illustrations by Puerto Award for young-adult Rican illustrator Raúl Colón bring the lackluster text to life. literature, went to March: AUTHOR Colón displays the scientific principles involved (soundings Book Three (Top Shelf made from ships) as well as the beauty and vastness of the sea. Productions, 2016), the Most of all, he paints Marie and other characters in a humaniz- conclusion of a gripping pastor ing way, despite the text’s inability to create drama. The back of graphic nonfiction series by the book includes a summary of the real Marie Tharp. (Ages 5-9) Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., about his role in the civil EVANGELIST THE WAY THINGS WORK NOW David Macaulay rights movement. (Includes some harsh language and Originally published in 1988, Macaulay’s classic book on tech- Leader nology gets an update here. Many of Macaulay’s explanations of violence.) machines haven’t changed much. However, the new version Also noteworthy: Rick includes more color illustrations and helps readers understand Riordan, author of the popu- swbts.edu recent advancements such as 3-D printers and smartphones. lar Percy Jackson series, won Teens and adults who don’t like science will want to pay the LGBT-related Stonewall Dr. Allen is the author of numerous publications attention to Macaulay’s woolly mammoth. He uses it to add Award for The Hammer of including The Extent of the Atonement: History and humor and create a narrative arc throughout the 400-page Thor (Disney Hyperion,
HANDOUT Critique, Hebrews in the New American Commentary book. Macaulay again proves himself master of making wise the 2016), which features a (technologically) simple, so that even a $35 price tag seems “gender-fluid” character. Series, and Preaching Tools: an Annotated Survey of reasonable. (Ages 12 & up) —Janie Cheaney Commentaries and Preaching Resources for Every Book of the Bible.
24 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 OUR PROFESSORS DO more than instruct; they practice what they preach.
DAVID ALLEN Dean of the School of Preaching Distinguished Professor of Preaching Director of the Southwestern Center for Expository Preaching George W. Truett Chair of Ministry
PREACHER AUTHOR pastor EVANGELIST Leader swbts.edu Dr. Allen is the author of numerous publications including The Extent of the Atonement: History and Critique, Hebrews in the New American Commentary Series, and Preaching Tools: an Annotated Survey of Commentaries and Preaching Resources for Every Book of the Bible. CULTURE Q&A
Baseball players are now R at spring training—and George Will noted in Men at Work, his 1990 baseball book, that training means daily labor, not play. The same goes for being a major league writer, as John R. Erickson, author of the popular Hank the Cowdog series of chil- dren’s books, has learned. We ran part of an interview with him last May 14. Here’s a second part that digs into the discipline needed to keep producing two books each year for 34 years. After the first Hank book came out, you wrote the second one in about two weeks. Was that inspiration, financial desperation, or both? Financial was an important part of it. We were self-publishing these books, paying the printer bills, and buying groceries with what I could sell during the day. I started writing at 5 a.m. or 5:30 and wrote as hard as I could for 4½ hours. Then I went out and sold books and called stores to try to get them to carry the books. And you still do your daily 4½ hours of writing: Do you nail yourself to your chair? No, I go to the coffeepot. It’s good to get up and walk around at least once every hour. Do you ever wake up in the morning and say, “I’m just not going to do it today?” I’ve been sick a few times. But if you’re healthy … Sometimes I’ll slack and sleep JOHN R. ERICKSON until 7:30; but when you establish the habit of doing your work early in the morning, it’s hard to get out
of the habit. MARVIN OLASKY A writer at work You view yourself not as a RISING EARLY, SLAYING ADVERBS, AND tormented genius screaming at the storm but a mule PRESERVING A VOICE by Marvin Olasky pulling a plow. Yeah.
26 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 Would you advise aspir- ing writers to set up a ‘The best preachers are storytellers. schedule like yours, or does each have to discover Jesus did it with parables, and nobody individually what works? I know some people call even called it preaching, probably.’ themselves night people. When I was at the University of Texas, I slept After a book has sat for two first time, talk a little louder. and we access the universal as late as I could and stayed years and you go back to it, And if they still don’t get it, by doing a thorough and up as late as I could. Most of you don’t remember exactly yell.” You can’t do that as a honest job of describing one the writing I did was after what was on your mind at storyteller. tiny part of it. One man and 10 at night. But after I got the time you wrote it, so Teachers sometimes one woman living together married and had to work in you’re reading it as a reader. tell children writing with in a marriage. Not marriage the outside world, it wasn’t You write: “Preachers nouns and verbs, “You have in general, not marriage on handy for me to be a night can tell us, but storytellers to dress it up with adjec- Mount Olympus, but just person, so I changed. There must show. You can’t begin tives and adverbs.” In your one man and one woman. is a certain amount of free a story with the ending. ideal piece of writing, how Or one mother raising a will involved in whether You can’t start a story with often would an adverb pop handicapped child. you’re a night person or a the finished product. You up its ugly head? I never What was the last novel day person. I think the early can’t reach a resolution use adverbs. I despise them. that you read, and when? morning hours are without tension and con- Anytime I’m proofing any I read a lot of fiction during unbeatable. flict.” Do preachers in your kind of writing, I strike my apprentice years, before You write that you try experience tend to tell and adverbs automatically. 1982; but when I came up to screen out the noise not show? The best preach- People use them to cover with the template for the of popular culture and ers are storytellers. Jesus emptiness or to create false Hank stories, I began to deliberately have a sensory- did it with parables, and emotion. realize that this was an deprived writing environ- nobody even called it Good writing deals with artistic vehicle perfectly ment. No music? Nope. preaching, probably. I was the specific instead of the suited to the talents and No art upon the walls? raised in a Southern Baptist general. You really can’t experience I had, the place I My daughter cleaned my church, and we often had approach the universal was living, and my deepest office a couple of weeks ago preachers whose approach directly. You have to beliefs, plus my desire to and put up some photo- was, “If they don’t get it the approach it in a small way, laugh and enjoy what I was graphs on my wall. I’ve got a doing. I didn’t invent that lot of books. No magazines, myself. I stumbled into it, or no radio, and I can’t get it fell out of the sky like a internet there. I don’t have John Erickson’s writings appear frequently in WORLD dead pigeon and hit me on any desire to go back to the Digital’s “Saturday Series,” which highlights each week the head. I didn’t want to office after I finish my 4½ one interesting essay, book excerpt, or sermon. Among risk messing that up by hours, but for that time the essays available at wng.org/authors/john_r_erickson continuing to imitate other that’s where I’m supposed are these: Erickson’s “Memories of Medgar Evers and writers. to be. Mississippi” (Feb. 4, 2017), “Artists: Dealing with vexing Hard not to do that? How have those pic- problems and finding true success” (Nov. 12, 2016), When I was reading Philip tures on the wall affected “Remembering my father” (June 18, 2016), “Art at its Roth or J.D. Salinger or your writing? I don’t even most basic level” (Jan. 9, 2016), “A disappointed man: Norman Mailer, I would imi- notice them. The religious views of Norman Thomas” (Nov. 7, 2015), tate the style even if I wasn’t Elmore Leonard says and “Mugged by Nietzsche” (Oct. 24, 2015). doing it consciously. So In “The nourishment business” (July 23, 2016) writers should leave out when you’re given a gift like Erickson describes the “spiritual dimension to storytell- the boring parts, so I’m the Hank stories, you’d bet- ing. … A writer has the opportunity to make readers wondering after you’ve ter stop being a mimic and better than they were before. … We who were given the just figure how to do the best done a draft of the Hank talent to write (or compose music or make movies) story, how do you know should use our gifts to strengthen the people who use with the gift you were given. what the boring parts are? our products. Like humble cooks, we’re in the nourish- So the last novel you I let Hank books sit for ment business, and that changes the focus of art from read was … Probably by a three years. I go back and Me to Us.” —M.O. Texas writer, Elmer Kelton. read them 10 or 15 times. That was 30 years ago. A
[email protected] @MarvinOlasky March 18, 2017 • WORLD Magazine 27 CULTURE Music Classically classical A BULGARIAN RADIO DISPUTE SUGGESTS AUDIENCES MISS OLD CLASSICAL MUSIC by Arsenio Orteza
Critics have written much about Critics have tended to explain this As part of its anti-Soviet Cold War R the break that occurred in the usurpation as just one more shift in strategy, the Congress for Cultural 20th century between the traditional fashion. As the possibility of making Freedom promoted art and music con- and the experimental branches of clas- fresh music with the elements of old demned by the USSR. And, because of sical music, usually with an aim toward forms dwindles, imaginative composers its radical emphasis on freedom, no explaining the dwindling popularity of inevitably seek new ways to combine music was more condemned by the the genre as a whole. notes and rhythms. And (so the argu- Soviets than that without a tonal center. Two recent articles shed new light ment goes) thus has it always been. Thus, Garrie reasons, a generation of on the situation. The problem with that logic is that critics, musicians, and professors were In a Balkan Insight piece headlined new fashions generally become fash- raised on a steadier diet than they other- “Classical Music Boosts Bulgaria’s ionable because lots of people like wise would’ve been of composers who, all Public Radio,” Mariya Cheresheva them. How is it, then, that serialism, things being equal, would have remained reports on a 20 percent listenership atonality, and their offshoots have marginal. It was these gatekeepers who increase experienced by Bulgarian become “cool” while simultaneously eventually shaped, or distorted, the National Radio since a contract dispute alienating the masses? contours of the classical landscape. with Bulgaria’s largest music copyright Writing at The Duran, Adam Garrie If Garrie is right, listeners have been holder has limited BNR to playing lays the blame on, of all things, the living downstream of a dam dividing music produced before 1945. CIA—particularly its funding of the them from one of their heritage’s most The data, based on a monthlong anti-communist organization that it important streams for over two genera- survey of a dozen BNR outlets, provides founded in 1950, the Congress for tions. It’s that stream that Bulgaria has no explanation for the uptick. But a Cultural Freedom. begun rediscovering. BNR representative, while grant- ing that “recent political events and news” may play a role, opined that the new (or is it the old?) musical diet—one rooted in 16TH-CENTURY CHORUSES centuries’ worth of tonal Three new recordings hold out the hope that the Bulgarian revolution may spread— melodic refinement—probably and that it may prove as spiritual as it does aesthetic. explains a lot. Da Pacem: Echo der Reformation (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi) by RIAS To put the matter simply, Kammerchor and Capella de la Torre and the two-disc Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott: Luther and the Music of the Reformation (Ricercar) by Vox Luminis and the organist Bulgarians apparently prefer Bart Jacobs have been timed to honor the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s 95 music they can hum along to. Theses. Both albums showcase devotionally rich compositions contemporaneous Serialism and atonality, the IMAGES AGOSTINI/GETTY ORTI/DE DAGLI A. and consonant with that watershed moment in breathtakingly radiant settings. movements most responsible for Missa Reges terrae (MSR Classics) by the a cappella ensemble Choir of St. Luke making 20th-century serious in the Fields comprises compositions by the 16th-century Catholic composer Pierre music distinctly less humma- de Manchicourt. The prismatic ble, existed before 1945. But glories of the choir’s dozen voices not until much later did permeate the entire project, but it’s they usurp the place of the world-premiere recording of baroque, romantic, and the 37-minute title suite that makes classical-period music in Manchicourt’s belated recognition the hearts of tastemakers, feel the most overdue. —A.O. composers, and performers.
28 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 [email protected] @ArsenioOrteza SHAKESPEARE-MUSIC ALBUMS reviewed by Arsenio Orteza
SHAKESPEARE SONGS Ian Bostridge, Antonio Pappano On 22 of these 29 Shakespeare-based art songs, Sir Antonio Pappano earns his co-billing by providing a piano accompaniment that’s as sensitive and precise as the tenor ENCORE singing of the top-billed Bostridge. How precise? Even lis- Last summer, the piano teners unfamiliar with Elizabethan English or these specific duettists (and sisters) Katia texts will have little trouble making out the words. And, if and Marielle Labèque anything, the lutenist Elizabeth Kenny’s accompaniment on signed a contract merging the six compositions by the Shakespeare contemporaries their KML imprint with the William Byrd, Robert Johnson, Thomas Morley, and John venerable German label Wilson casts Bostridge’s technique into even sharper relief. Deutsche Grammophon. The deal has resulted in a TWELFTH NIGHT & RICHARD III Claire van windfall for their fans. Kampen & the Musicians of Shakespeare’s Globe November alone saw the Anyone curious about the kind of music, incidental or oth- release of the six-disc box erwise, that the King’s Men’s audiences would’ve heard Sisters (previously released will relish this recording’s fidelity to history. In terms of its KML material circa 2006- instrumentation, its source material, and its live ambience, 2013) and the new recording the album lacks only the period’s visuals and smells to Invocations (which features transport the listener back to pre-Enlightenment days, a rousing rendition of the when women were banned from stage and bear baiting original 1913 piano-duet was cool. Equally appropriate, neither the singing nor the arrangement of playing flirts with over-refinement or anything else that Stravinsky’s Le might’ve gone over the heads of the groundlings. Sacre du printemps). SHAKESPEARE IN MUSIC & WORDS Now the Various Artists Labèques have jumped into the In a sense, this compilation takes the easy way out. Shakespeare- Combine the best-loved melodies from operas and other music sweepstakes with classical works inspired by the Bard (Disc 1) with Love Stories, a bold, Romeo recitations of his best-loved sonnets and his plays’ best- and Juliet–themed pairing loved soliloquies and dialogues (Disc 2), and, voilà, of their 2011 recording of Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits. Of course, for those hitherto West Side Story with a immune to the riches of high culture, such an approach is new recording of David also the easy way in—not only to Shakespeare, but also to Chalmin’s avant-garde Prokofiev, Mendelssohn, Vaughan Williams, Dame Peggy ballet Star-Cross’d Lovers. Ashcroft, and Sir John Gielgud. Scored for two pianos, electric guitar, electronics, SEARCHING FOR WILLIAM Woods of Birnam and drums, the music These five Germans take their name from Macbeth’s “moving inflates the Capulet- grove.” And since 2013 they’ve been doing for Shakespeare Montague tragedy to turbu- what The Alan Parsons Project once did for Edgar Allan Poe: lent, dystopian dimensions. setting passages of his work to varieties of catchy art-rock. By requiring the sisters to Unlike Parsons, however, there’s no residue of Pink Floyd, not operate well outside their with the folk loveliness of “My Rude Ignorance” (Sonnet 78) putative comfort zone, it and “Where the Bee Sucks” (from The Tempest) as likely to uncovers fresh facets of spring up among the artier bits as the pop loveliness of their talent and musical
LABÈQUE: UMBERTO NICOLETTI UMBERTO LABÈQUE: “Seals of Love” (Measure for Measure). flexibility.—A.O.
To see more music news and reviews, go to wng.org/music March 18, 2017 • WORLD Magazine 29
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samaritanministries.org BIBLICAL 888.268.4377 COMMUNITY APPLIED TO facebook.com/samaritanministries HEALTH twitter.com/samaritanmin CARE BOOKS Books of the Year–sort of As we transition to more timely reporting, here are 12 pages on top books published from April through December, 2016 by Marvin Olasky
ongtime WORLD members may winners during our first five years of David C. Cook, Princeton University remember that for the past two awards were the ESV Study Bible, Press, Basic Books, HarperOne, Ldecades we’ve published our The Battle by Arthur Brooks, The Center Street, Crown, Random annual books issue at the end of June, Triumph of Christianity by Rodney House, Oxford University Press, in line with the annual convention of Stark, and two books focusing on Portfolio, Encounter, Discovery the Christian Booksellers Association. Darwinism: Should Christians Institute, W.W. Norton, Viking, That convention, though, is now the Embrace Evolution? and God and Knopf, Kensington, Liveright, and "International Christian Retail Show," Evolution. Little, Brown. and one big bookselling chain, Family In 2013 we started having catego- And the 2016 Books of the Year are: Christian, decided last month to close ries and short lists, and year by year all 240 of its stores. we’ve expanded: 10 short-listed History/Ideology: With other products sometimes books in three categories, then 14 0 Illiberal Reformers drawing more attention than books and 16 in four categories. Among the by Thomas C. Leonard (Princeton) at the retail show, we’ve decided to honored books: Melanie move our main books issue to Kirkpatrick’s Escape from North Understanding America: December, when we can honor the Korea, Rosaria Butterfield’sSecret 0 Hillbilly Elegy calendar year’s top books more Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, Tim by J.D. Vance (Harper) quickly. This issue is an intermediate Townsend’s Mission at Nuremberg, step: In it we praise books that came William Easterly’s The Tyranny of Understanding the World: out during the last nine months of Experts, and Bret Stephens’ America 0 Street of Eternal Happiness 2016. We’ll have another books issue in Retreat. Last year’s winners were by Rob Schmitz (Crown) this December that will offer Books Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler, The of the Year for 2017. Prodigal Church by Jared Wilson, Science, Math, and Worldviews: Since many WORLD members Wind Sprints by Joseph Epstein, and 0 Undeniable are voracious readers, we also plan to In Those Nightmarish Days by Peretz by Douglas Axe (HarperOne) publish at the end of June a special Opoczynski and Josef Zelkowicz. section on Beach Reads—light read- This year on the pages that follow Accessible Theology: ing for the summer—and another five WORLD staff writers and five 0 The Life We Never Expected this fall on heavy reads, particularly World Journalism Institute gradu- by Andrew and Rachel Wilson books in connection with the 500th ates review 30 short-listed books (Crossway) anniversary of the Protestant from 23 publishers. Six publishers Reformation. have two or three books: Crossway, Novels: We began honoring a Book of the Zondervan, InterVarsity, Harper, 0 A short list of five, but no winner Year in 2008: Tim Keller’s The Picador, and Yale University Press. Reason for God was our first. Other Eighteen have one book each: P&R, Read on, please.
32 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 PHOTO BY JEFF WALES March 18, 2017 • WORLD Magazine 33 BOOKS History and ideology Upsetting conventional wisdom by Marvin Olasky
eaders in academia and media imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we William Ripley, elected AEA presi- have long pressed upon us a fable institute poor-laws; and our medical dent in 1913, was one of the many Labout the nature of progress: men exert their utmost skill to save the eugenicists with plans to constrain “Progressives” are on the side of the life of every one to the last moment. immigration. He had contempt for tired, the poor, the huddled masses There is reason to believe that vaccina- Jewish immigrants from Europe who yearning to be free, and “conservatives” tion has preserved thousands who from were part of the “great Polish swamp of front the reactionary forces mainly a weak constitution would formerly miserable human beings” and too stupid interested in protecting their privilege have succumbed to small-pox. Thus to be useful. Psychologists had devel- and suppressing the weak. The abor- the weak members of civilized societies oped the first IQ tests: They showed tion battle over the past four decades propagate their kind. No one who has that 54 percent of Army draftees were has certainly shown up that thinking, attended to the breeding of domestic “morons” with the intelligence of 8- to but thoughtful historians are doing the animals will doubt that this must be 12-year-olds. Immigrants from Eastern same. highly injurious to the race of man.” Europe were particularly below par. One 2016 example: Thomas AEA presidents were forthright in Columbia University’s Henry Rogers Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers, pub- their Darwinian emphasis on survival Seager, AEA president in 1922, said “we lished by a mainstream outfit, the of the fittest. Harvard economics pro- must courageously cut off lines of Princeton University Press. Leonard fessor Frank Taussig, AEA president in heredity that have been proved to be shows how the early progressive founders of the American Economic Association (AEA) in 1885 argued that ‘The feebleminded … those the needs of the state trumped indi- vidual liberty, and the progress they saturated with alcohol or tainted sought included running over the poor with hereditary disease … [and] and anyone else in their way. the irretrievable criminals and Leonard provides fascinating infor- tramps. … We have not reached mation on proposals for a minimum the stage where we can proceed wage a century ago. The big idea from big-time economists: “The minimum to chloroform them once and wage would throw the least productive for all; but at least they can be employees out of work or prevent segregated, shut up in refuges their employment in the first place. … and asylums, and prevented Removal of the less productive [was from propagating their kind.’ not] a cost of the minimum wage but ... a positive benefit to society.” They —Former AEA president Frank Taussig could be “brought under the surveil- lance of the state—institutionalized, segregated in rural colonies, or even 1904 and then Woodrow Wilson’s eco- undesirable by isolation or sterilization.” sexually sterilized.” nomic adviser, thought the minimum Another AEA president, A.B. Wolfe, The progressives wanted progress, wage would weed out “the feeble- called elimination of the inefficient and they feared that caring for the minded … those saturated with alcohol consistent “with the spirit and trend of least and the lost would slow human or tainted with hereditary disease … modern social economics.” University evolution. After all, Charles Darwin [and] the irretrievable criminals and of Chicago pastor and sociologist LIBRARY OF CONGRESS had written in the decade before the tramps. … We have not reached the Charles R. Henderson also proposed AEA’s founding: “With savages, the weak stage where we can proceed to chloro- forcible sterilization of the obviously in body or mind are soon eliminated. … form them once and for all; but at least unfit to “deprive them of liberty and so We civilized men, on the other hand, they can be segregated, shut up in ref- prevent their propagation of defects do our utmost to check the process of uges and asylums, and prevented from and thus the perpetuation of their elimination; we build asylums for the propagating their kind.” misery in their offspring.”A
34 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 S H ORT LIST
HEYDAY Ben Wilson (Basic) As the debate about free trade vs. Trump protectionism intensifies, Wilson’s fact-filled but fluidly written history of the 1850s—“Dawn of the Global Age,” as the subtitle argues—is worth reading. Wilson shows how the 1850s in Europe and America were years of eco- nomic advance via international trade and tells how the decade’s cotton boom enriched Southern plantation owners and hurt slaves. He connects technological developments with wars and rumors of war in China, Japan, India, Australia, and Nicaragua, largely omitting religious influences and showing in the process that capitalism without Christianity makes us go fast but not straight. —M.O. BOOK OF THE YEAR LIBERTY OR DEATH: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION ILLIBERAL Peter McPhee (Yale University Press) REFORMERS In one volume, Australian historian Peter McPhee tells the story of Thomas C. Leonard the French Revolution, showing how France’s involvement in the New (Princeton University Press) World—including the French and Indian War and our Revolutionary War—drained France’s treasury and fed popular discontent with Although “social justice” the monarchy. The book’s scope means that some aspects of the Christians see themselves Revolution get less attention than others. For instance, McPhee walking in the footsteps of mentions the support that Protestant clergy gave to the radicals Social Gospelers like but doesn’t give an adequate explanation of how they squared their Washington Gladden and support with Scripture. What we do get is a well-written account of Walter Rauschenbusch, they a period that bears some resemblance to our present unhappy should check their shoe sizes. time—including occasional bad language. —Susan Olasky Thomas Leonard quotes Gladden’s contention that a respect for individual liberty MY BROTHER’S KEEPER: CHRISTIANS WHO was “a radical defect in the RISKED ALL TO PROTECT JEWISH TARGETS OF thinking of the average THE NAZI HOLOCAUST Rod Gragg (Center Street) American.” Rauschenbusch The loss of 6 million Jewish lives is, of course, the main tragedy of said unfit workers whom the Holocaust. A secondary one: Many non-Jews, even those who capitalists could manipulate called themselves Christians, were passive—but not all. In brisk, made possible the “murder- frills-free prose with helpful historical context, Gragg details the ous” free market system, so extraordinary courage of 30 ordinary people who believed Jewish those workers should be lives mattered and did extraordinary things to preserve them. eliminated: It was time to Among the heroes: a London stockbroker, a 13-year-old Austrian direct human evolution, to girl, a Scottish schoolteacher, and a French farming couple. Some “make history make us.” were former Hitler supporters who became disillusioned and Leonard’s conclusion: disgusted with his regime. For most, their Christian faith was the “The original progressives’ propelling force behind their sacrifice.—Sophia Lee illiberal turn did not stop at property and contract rights. They assaulted political and LUSITANIA: THE CULTURAL HISTORY OF A (Yale University Press) civil liberties, too, trampling CATASTROPHE Willi Jasper on individual rights to person, When a German submarine in 1915 sank the Lusitania, a British to free movement, to free luxury liner, almost 1,200 civilians, including 128 Americans, died. expression, to marriage and British journalists saw the act as proof of German perfidy, and the to reproduction. The progres- United States started its slow movement toward entry into world sives denied millions these war. Historians, though, have often overlooked the effect on basic freedoms, on grounds Germany. Citizens there could have reared back in horror, but the that their inferiority threat- effect was the opposite: One German newspaper “regard[ed] with ened America’s economic and a wry smile the general howls of anger and screams of indignation. hereditary security. They … No sentimentality: just a fight to the finish with this nation of were wrong on both counts. vulgar shopkeepers.” German professor Jasper shows how his That did not stop them, nor people tried to justify becoming their brothers’ killers, and even
JEFF WALES JEFF has it stopped those who, enlisted the writings of Goethe to their side. —M.O. unaware of the history, repeat the same false claims today.” —Marvin Olasky March 18, 2017 • WORLD Magazine 35 BOOKS Understanding America Cultural carnage in the land of the free by Sophia Lee & Marvin Olasky
illbilly Elegy is the most mov- and graduated from Ohio State and Yale reports what he heard, so WORLD ing book of reporting we read Law School. He loves his extended members who do not want to read raw Hlast year. With poignant writ- family but vividly describes its pattern of words should not pick up this book. ing, realistic descriptions, and thought- personal and financial irresponsibility. Crude language is a problem that provoking reflections, J.D. Vance takes Happily, a handful of people inspired reflects the bigger problems of misedu- us into lives and places many readers Vance to love learning, and his work in a cation and bad theology, and Hillbilly do not know or understand. The book grocery store—and seeing taxes from his Elegy throws a spotlight on them. has hard-to-forget scenes, such as small salary going to people who gamed Another problem is the breakdown when a mother’s rage terrifies young the welfare system—turned him into a of marriage, which is most evident Vance, or when a 13-year-old girl writes social critic who scolds both left and among the poor. Even though it’s a on her boyfriend-rotating mother’s right for letting individuals off the hook. history book, Ellen Wayland-Smith’s Facebook page, “Just stop. I just want Vance writes that churches help, Oneida also made the short list in our you and this to stop.” but attendance of poor whites is low, Understanding America category. She Vance shows us proud, dignified and at a church he attended he “heard documents the way heretical Christian people who have given up; neglected more about the gay lobby and the war beliefs led a group of “perfectionists” kids victimized by their parents’ mis- on Christmas than about any particular to pursue free love as a way to establish takes and vices; generational dysfunc- character trait a Christian should God’s kingdom on earth. John tion that spirals all the way to the soul; aspire to have.” Vance shows how Humphrey Noyes established the and lonely, fellowship-deprived “faith” young men who choose to work fewer Oneida commune in detached from gospel transformation. than 20 hours per week or get fired for 1848. Members put The people he describes don’t repre- coming in late or stealing merchandise to the test his sent all Appalachians, but we glimpse blame others for their failure, even teaching that an alienated, ignored group of fellow though they don’t walk the values they “sexual love is Americans—and Vance does not praise in the abstract. not naturally absolve his subjects of personal One caveat: Vance when growing up restricted to responsibility and human sin. heard lots of obscenity and profanity, pairs.” Vance grew up amid family chaos in sometimes from people—like his After a few southern Ohio but joined the Marines grandma—who saved his life. He years of sexual anarchy that led to some Oneidans assaulting Vance at age 10 others, Noyes took charge and with his Mamaw began deciding who could sleep with whom, ostensibly as part of a “selective breeding” program. LIBRARY UNIVERSITY SYRACUSE • NOYES: HANDOUT VANCE: (Noyes made sure that he could have a “joyful act of fellowship” with any woman he fancied, including 13-year-olds.) Eventually, Oneidans rebelled and the commune disintegrated, as dozens of other communes in American history have done. Wayland-Smith does not write from a Christian worldview, but the story she tells can warn us about increased cultural carnage to come if polygamy and eugenics become the new old thing. A
36 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 S H ORT LIST
ONEIDA Ellen Wayland-Smith (Picador) Wayland-Smith, a descendant of Oneida commune founder John Humphrey Noyes, describes vividly the theory and prac- tice of “Bible Communism” pioneered in Oneida, N.Y., begin- ning in 1848. Residents established community ownership of both property and bodies, but neither approach proved suc- cessful: Some people didn’t work very hard, and many people fell prey to “sticky love,” the desire to pair off permanently: They then had to go before a “Criticism Committee” for confession and correction. From anarchy to dictatorship to demise: That’s the repeated pattern not only politically but socially. At least some of the Oneidans eventually made good BOOK OF THE YEAR silverware. —Marvin Olasky HILLBILLY ELEGY J.D. Vance (Harper) THE UPSIDE OF INEQUALITY Edward Conard (Portfolio) J.D. Vance’s engrossing mem- Conard attacks the notion that the richest 1 percent of oir/popular sociology offers an Americans are causing slower or no wage growth among the insider’s view into Appalachian rest. He shows how innovators or entertainers who achieve communities struggling with economywide success will multiply their money in comparison factory and mine closures, with teachers or bus drivers who can’t serve more people than unemployment, addiction, they used to. Knowledge-based startups with little need for family breakdown, and prema- capital have become all-or-nothing lotteries. Poor education ture death. The book tells how holds down many, and low-skilled immigration slows wage Vance’s grandparents and the growth. Mitigating inequality is not the solution: “The single military saved him from the biggest improvement America could make to grade school destructive path of many education is firing incompetent teachers. To make improve- relatives and friends. Poor ments, we simply have to run schools on behalf of students, public schools have certainly and not teachers.” —M.O. contributed to the mess, yet one beleaguered teacher says: THE PERMISSION SOCIETY “They want us to be shepherds Timothy Sandefur (Encounter) to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many Sandefur begins with this sentence: “Not having to ask for of them are raised by wolves.” permission is one of the most essential parts of freedom.” His Vance last chapter begins: “The basic principle of the Permission doesn’t hide Society is that freedom is a privilege the government may give gritty epi- or take away as it sees fit.” In between, Sandefur shows how sodes behind the United States has morphed from its founding ideal of a spotless inalienable rights to an opposite understanding. In chapters on prior restraint and speech, prior restraint and business, and veneer: He the competitor’s veto, he shows how a Permission Society quotes his favors those with power and connections and raises costs for tough but those trying to exercise their freedoms. —S.O. foulmouthed grandmother using lan-
COLLOCH HOW SHOULD WE TREAT DETAINEES? c guage that J. Porter Harlow (P&R) will make the book off-limits for Harlow offers a convincing and convicting brief against the some. Others will appreciate U.S. armed forces’ use of torture. Citing the experience of King Vance’s first-person foray into a Hezekiah, Harlow argues that “Christian leaders should take world desperately in need of righteous actions to fight wars and terrorism while rejecting gospel hope: Vance himself evil and while hoping that the Lord may choose to bless their discarded Christian faith, but righteous and just actions with effectiveness.” Harlow opposes he writes that he is now re- waterboarding, as well as the use of torture even in “ticking exploring it. —Susan Olasky time bomb” situations, calling them “oversimplified intellectual
BOOK: JEFF WALES • VANCE: NAOMI M fraud.” —M.O.
March 18, 2017 • WORLD Magazine 37 BOOKS
astute look at where Christianity and Islam intersect, and how they dramati- cally part ways. Post-Christian publish- Understanding ing needs more Biblically grounded and well-written works of nonfiction. The Great Commission call to make the world disciples of “all nations” historically has pushed Christians into the farthest reaches of the inhabited globe. In the As our vision expands, so does process of understanding the world, we our appreciation by Mindy Belz come to appreciate our own place in it. A
Qureshi y the time I applied for my first Through them we see China’s soaring passport, I’d already traveled the economic growth, and those who’ve Bcontinents. Books like been left in its wake. We learn about the Kidnapped, The Flame Trees of Thika, country’s education systems, migration and Through Gates of Splendor carried flows, collectivist policies, and corrup- me to foreign lands. I learned the wilds tion. Most of all, we come away want- of East Africa could become an adven- ing to be a good neighbor like Schmitz. turous home for a British girl like You may ask whether the strange Elspeth Huxley, and maybe a girl like and exotic is integral to knowing our me. I saw how an orphan like David own place in the world. You really have Balfour could find his courage in a no need to look further than to flight through the Scottish Highlands Christian history. Moses received a heather. I learned about the high cost pharaoh’s education, and of following Christ through the martyr- with it led God’s people dom of Jim Elliot and his companions across the Sinai and into on a remote beach in Ecuador. the strange lands of Books launch some of us out into Canaan. The Apostle Paul the world, to the places we first visited was a Roman citizen who on a page. Thomas Friedman’s From found himself in the wide Beirut to Jerusalem, his 1989 memoir deserts of Arabia after his that captured the everyday of a war- conversion. Augustine torn land, grounded my own reporting was the son of a Berber in a changing Middle East starting a who spoke Latin with an decade later. African accent. And what
Besides expanding our knowledge of those English HANDOUT •QURESHI: PHILIP SHANGHAI: GOSTELOW/ANZENBERGER/REDUX base, good books on faraway lands grow Separatists, French our imagination. Our Understanding Huguenots, and Dutch the World category will take you to Reformers who sailed an China, Russia, Japan, and into the heart ocean to settle a New of Islamic State territory and the world World? of Islam, all without taking your shoes Regrettably, our and belt off to pass airport security. short-list picks take little We chose books that are global in explicit note of Christians’ kind but local in scope. Reporter Rob roles in the gripping Schmitz’s genius was to craft a picture topics of our day—save of rapidly transforming China by tell- Nabeel Qureshi’s latest ing the stories of one potholed street in work, No God but One, a Shanghai. There’s the homeless Old timely and theologically Kang, the flower shop owner Zhao, millennial CK—an accordion factory profiteer turned sandwich shop Shoppers on Changle Lu, the “Street of Eternal owner—and Uncle Feng, who makes by Happiness” in Shanghai that hand 180 scallion pancakes every day. Rob Schmitz wrote about.
38 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 BOOK: JEFF WALES • SCHMITZ: JULIAN HAUTECLOCQUE HOWE like theget-rich-quick scams. take parishioners’ money just ity gospel, usingcharismato church preaches theprosper only example ofahouse trends inChina,it’s sadhis does agreat jobhumanizing of abetter life. WhileSchmitz their children behindinhopes and migrant workers leaving meaning thanmakingmoney, lennials searching for deeper up inpyramid schemes, mil land grabs, theelderlyswept ual lives: families displaced in change hasaffected individ rapid economic andpolitical paints apicture ofhow China’s “Eternal Happiness.” Schmitz Shanghai street named this by zooming inonlife on a Marketplace American Public Media’s Schmitz 21st-century China? complex andimmense as How doyou tackle atopic as ETERNAL HAPPINESS ETERNAL HAPPINESS BOOK OF THE OF THE BOOK Rob SchmitzRob STREET OF OF STREET , areporter for , accomplishes (Crown) Rob Rob —Angela Lu Y E
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can express itself inahostileculture. has muchto offer 21st-century Christianswhoponderhow faith the Shusakunovel, whichFujimura summarizes inanappendix.He tion into Japan’s 16th-century hiddenChristians—the subject of and Beauty and thenew film by MartinScorsese based onthebook. culture inlight oftheresurgent novel ideograms alphabet used for foreign objects) rather thantraditional- Japanese write theirwordthat for Christianityin Japanese-American artist-author Makoto Fujimura pointsout BEAUTY AND SILENCE aspects. destination anddelves deeply into many other theological the relationship ofholywar toshows Islamicbeliefinpre justified itsinfamous, burningofaJordanian brutal pilot. He orthodox Sunni sect—would oppose ISIS. Heexplains how ISIS helpful. Heshows where classical theorists ofSalafi—the strictly useless, butMaher’s, whileacademic, would beextraordinarily hands andadesire to debate theology, those bookswould be Christian were heldhostage by ISISleaders withtimeontheir followers ISIS into tickingtime-bombscarryingbombs.Ifa rushing outsuperficial bookspurporting to explain what made Many publishers reacted to thesudden emergence ofISISby Shiraz Maher IDEA AN OF HISTORY THE SALAFI-JIHADISM: sympathizers. for before task a vital us:learning to engage Muslims, andtheir offers permission to killthem. Christ commands Hisfollowers to love theirenemies,andAllah shows that MuslimsandChristiansdonot worship thesameGod: the evidence forwhy Christianityoverwhelms that for Islam.He but converted to Christianityin2005,comprehensively shows Pakistani-American medicaldoctor whogrew upadevout Muslim enhances hissharpintellect andapologetics. Qureshi, a The warmth andcandorNabeel Qureshi brings to each work Nabeel Qureshi JESUS? OR ALLAH ONE: BUT GOD NO State’s religious core. particularly Yazidis andChristiansinIraq, hedoessee theIslamic largely skipsby thesuffering ISIShasinflicted onitsinfidelvictims, will not cease to exist untilyou embrace Islam.” Although Wood overall ISISmessage isclear: “Ourprimaryreason for hating you translating jihadistscreeds into English from Raqqa, Syria. The Staff: Yahya AbuHassan, once JohnGeorgelas, isincharge of believer from Texas whose father worked for theJointChiefs of ideological core. Healso tracks onlineaformer Greek Orthodox in Tokyo, Melbourne,London, andelsewhere, examines its terrorism. Graeme Wood, after meeting influentialISISadherents Many booksabouttheIslamicState (ISIS)focus onthegroup’s Graeme Wood WAYTHE STRANGERS THE OF S H —Marvin Olasky ORT LIST kanji ispartmemoir, partcultural treatise, and partexpedi —M.B. . Hethenoffers anoutside-insidelook at Japanese (Oxford University Press) (Random House) (Random (Zondervan) —Mindy Belz No God butOne Makoto Fujimura
—M.B. Silence
(by ShusakuEndo) is an important tool isanimportant katakana
(IVP) Silence (the (the March 18, 2017 18, March - • WORLD Magazine WORLD 39 BOOKS
Science, math, and worldviews Darwinism heads toward senility by Marvin Olasky
n 1985 biologist Michael Denton of paleontology.” He wrote: “Can we complete harmony with the universal noted—in Evolution: A Theory in invent a reasonable sequence of inter- design intuition.” ICrisis—that Darwinism was cruis- mediate forms—that is, viable, func- Fred Hoyle, a late 20th-century ing for a bruising. Now he’s back with tional organisms—between ancestors astronomer and mathematician, but not Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis, and descendants in major structural a religious person, calculated the prob- which shows—with three decades of transitions? ... The answer is no.” Gould ability of randomly drawing a specific new research—that Darwin’s theory compared Darwin’s writing to Rudyard atom from the entire universe is 1 in 10 needs hip replacements, for “there is Kipling’s Just So Stories, such as “How with only 80 zeros. By comparison, the now a growing chorus of dissent within the Leopard Got His Spots.” probability of enzymes producing a mainstream evolutionary biology.” Darwinists continue to scoff at sci- single amoeba is 1 in 10 followed by He’s right. Darwin himself wrote, entists who point out the implausibility 40,000 zeros. Other scholars have con- “If it could be demonstrated that any of materialism, but can the scoffers firmed that math. Another comparison: complex organ existed which could not take ridicule? Tom Wolfe, at age 86 still Poland’s Michael Chaberek says the possibly have been formed by numer- America’s best and funniest nonfiction odds of winning the Polish national ous successive slight modifications, my writer, is ready to push Darwin off his lottery are 1 in 14 million, and the odds theory would absolutely break down.” pedestal. He follows Gould in comparing of originating the enzymes in the It has broken down, as advances in Darwin to Kipling, but notes: “Kipling’s simplest cell are the same as winning paleontology, genomics, and develop- intention from the outset was to enter- the lottery 6,000 times in a row. mental biology show. tain children. Darwin’s intention, on the Some desperate scientists are now For example, mainstream research- other hand, was dead serious. ... Neither pushing the notion of billions of uni- ers Douglas Erwin and Eric Davidson had any evidence to back up his tale.” verses, because that’s the only way that have noted that “classic evolutionary Gould proposed big jumps, not little one of those universes, ours, could have theory, based on selection of small ones: “punctuated equilibrium,” now generated something out of nothing. We
incremental changes,” is clearly inade- called “punk eek”—but his theory also shouldn’t rule that out, but multiverse WORKS IMAGE HISTORY/THE FROM PICTURES quate. Günter Wagner in Homology, lacks evidence. Research in recent proponents should acknowledge that Genes, and Evolutionary Innovation years has pointed out a key Darwinian they have no evidence and are merely writes, “Adaptive modifications often flaw that Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries engaged in a desperate attempt to avoid involve only the modification of exist- noted even in 1904: “Natural selection admitting that the existence of a Creator ing cis-regulatory elements,” but truly may explain the survival of the fittest, is the most likely explanation for the new developments “require large-scale but it cannot explain the arrival of the existence of the universe, life, and human reorganizations of the gene regulatory fittest.” In the beginning, when there life. Since science is an attempt to learn network.” was little to reorganize, how could more about the nature of reality, they A generation ago Harvard’s Stephen things have begun, apart from God? should also not rule out anything that Gould acknowledged that the lack of Douglas Axe, author of Undeniable, might contribute to our understanding— transitional forms was “the trade secret writes, “The scientific facts are in including the possibility of a Creator. A
40 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 BOOK: JEFF WALES • AXE: DISCOVERY INSTITUTE evolution can’t. shows how we have learned that can mate onlyifwe know evolution life forms isscientifically legiti proteins, cell types,organs, and claim that evolution didinvent accident.” Heshows how “the ble. Invention can’t happenby and therefore physically impossi invention fantastically improbable coherence makes accidental example to show that “functional evolved asDarwin theorized. improbability that life has argument showing theincredible because it’s alargely nontechnical is ourscience bookoftheyear that matter to them.” pants inthescientific debates Ph.D.s [can] become full partici that “people whowillnever earn he writes guild when the scientism treason to he commits cation, but journal publi and record of education elite science Axe Designed Is Confirms OurIntuitionThatLife suggestion: Axe’s subtitle offers ashocking Axe offers example after Douglas Axe Axe Douglas invent these things.” Hethen has an hasan BOOK OF THE OF THE BOOK UNDENIABLE . How Biology - —Marvin Olasky (HarperOne) Undeniable Y E
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faithful individuals. Christian commitment through thestories ofthelives of abstract arguments to concrete examples ofthepower of makes sense ofhumanity’s situation. Hethenmoves from possibly more satisfying argument that Christianitysimply and thehistoricity of Christianity, aswell asthesimplerand apologetics arguments aboutthefine-tuningof universe serving, andthenrelies ondecision theory andcommon addresses thecriticismthat such acommitment isself- because there’s muchto begained andlittleto lose. Rota philosopher Blaise Pascal that faith inChristisreasonable Rota defends theidea of17th-century mathematician/ TAKING PASCAL’S WAGER language, andsome rabbit trails onminordetails. millions ofdollars, orindividualstheirlives. Note: some foul the likelihood ofmakingamistake that could cost acompany research ofDaniel Kahneman andAmosTversky to reduce government officials, doctors, and others now use the make seemingly drysubject matter compelling. Executives, harrowing stories Lewis includesinhiswell-crafted narrative dissertation thananenjoyable read. Yet, thehumorand brilliant Israeli psychologists—seems more for suitable a The UndoingProject Michael Lewis PROJECT UNDOING THE Tom Wolfe SPEECH OF KINGDOM THE bat’s wing,abranched bipinnate feather, etc. chance puttogether complex structures like adiaphragm, a biology have threatened thefaith that macromutations by knowledge ofgenetics, paleontology, anddevelopmental still absent withoutleave. Denton shows how advances inour adaptive transitional forms Darwin predicted we’d findare incompetence inexplaining macroevolution—and the seeing thetheory’s abilityto explain smallchanges butits orprofessionalmonetary stake indefending Darwinism is wilderness. Now, justabouteveryone whodoesn’t have a was alonelyPh.D. holderinbiochemistrycryingoutthe When Denton in1985 wrote Michael Denton CRISIS IN ATHEORY STILL EVOLUTION: nothing.”) us how something, i.e., thewholeworld, was created outof ‘scientific’—big bangtheory, whichwithastraight face tells “the original version ofthecurrent solemnly accepted—i.e., that became earth, sun, moon,andstars. (Wolfe callsthat with aball ofdirtfrom began whichascorpion pulledstrands about asreliable astheApache beliefthat theuniverse Alfred Russel Wallace, andevolution asafable for atheists, Brit beaten to thepunchonnatural selection by thelowly Wolfe sees Darwin asanambitiousbutfearful upper-class Tom Wolfe hasfun withDarwinism andthenlinguistic theory. S H —M.O. ORT LIST (Little, Brown) (Little, (W.W. Norton) (W.W. (Discovery Institute) —Laura Hendrickson ’s subject—theories developed by two Evolution: ATheory inCrisis
Michael Rota
—M.O. —Ray Hacke (IVP) , he , he March 18, 2017 18, March • WORLD Magazine WORLD 41 BOOKS Topping the Top 50 Christian leaders offer better reading options than last year’s Christian bestsellers by Jamie Dean
hat do five adult coloring emphasis on the power of positive doesn’t turn out the way one expects. books, three titles by Joel thinking to bring health, wealth, and Samuel Rodriguez chose Philip Yancey’s WOsteen, and two volumes success. What’s So Amazing about Grace? full of jokes for kids have in common? I wondered: Is harmless, fluffy, and Some suggested books with contem- They’re all in the Top 50 best-selling troubling the best we can do? porary themes. Thomas Kidd—a profes- Christian books of 2016. For some alternative suggestions, I sor of history at Baylor University—chose When the Evangelical Christian asked a handful of Christian pastors, Fundamentalism and American Culture Publishers Association released the rank- authors, and leaders: What is one book by George Marsden. The Southern ings in January, Christian author Jared you’d like to see on a list of books most Baptist Theological Seminary professor Wilson called the list “an indictment.” read by Christians? Jarvis Williams pointed to Removing It’s worth noting some books in the Carl Trueman of Westminster the Stain of Racism from the Southern Top 50 were solid titles, including The Theological Seminary nixed fluffy for Baptist Convention: Diverse African Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd- Augustine’s Confessions, with its American and White Perspectives, a Jones and The Broken Way by Ann famous prayer: “You stir us to take book he co-authored with Kevin Jones. Voskamp. pleasure in praising you, because you Pastor Thabiti Anyabwile chose Others offered light reading about have made us for yourself, and our Conscience, a 2016 book by Andrew popular Christians: Chip and Joanna heart is restless until it rests in you.” David Naselli and J.D. Crowley that Gaines, hosts of a home-renovation Instead of demanding health and includes a timely chapter on how television show, landed at No. 1 with wealth, pastors Terry Johnson and Christians can relate to each other their book The Magnolia Story. Athlete John Piper both picked J.I. Packer’s when their consciences disagree. Tim Tebow’s book Shaken placed Knowing God, with Packer’s reminder Others stuck with the Puritans. eighth. Some offered harmless fun: the Bible doesn’t teach God will “shield Author and blogger Melissa Kruger sug- Laugh-Out-Loud Jokes for Kids (No. 7 his loved ones from trouble when he gested Voices from the Past, a devotional on the list) gained praise from some knows that they need trouble to further collection of Puritan writings with Christian booksellers for offering clean their sanctification.” Speaking of sanc- selections by pastors like John Owen: humor. tification, pastor Kevin DeYoung “be killing sin or it will be killing you.” Other titles were problematic: Five picked J.C. Ryle’s Holiness. Author Rosaria Butterfield suggested versions of Sarah Young’s Jesus Calling Joni Eareckson Tada underscored The Letters of Samuel Rutherford. The made the Top 50. Christian blogger the need for Biblical preparation for correspondence of the Scottish Tim Challies pointed out the most seri- suffering, and suggested last year’s title Presbyterian pastor offers an important ous problem with the title first released When Trouble Comes by Philip Ryken. reminder not to rely on books alone for in 2004: The author claimed to record Christian author Carolyn McCulley growth in Christ, as he notes some “talk thoughts God gave directly to her. chose Paul David Tripp’s Lost in the of Christ by the book and the tongue, Three titles by megachurch pastor Middle, with its helpful teaching on and no more; but to come to Christ … Joel Osteen hit the Top 50, with an trusting and obeying God when life and embrace him is another thing.” A
42 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 BOOK: JEFF WALES • WILSON FAMILY: HANDOUT goodness ofGod.” include thegrace, blessing, and unknowns “thefuture will hope that intheface of many theologically richandfull of waiting, andwitnessing. It’s cycles ofweeping, worshipping, carries thereader through the light ofChrist.Thebook they make sense oftheirlives in children. Andthey show how picture ofdifficult yet delightful on theirmarriage. They paint a their exhaustion, andthestrains the messy reality oftheirlives, The Wilsons invite readers into normal things that children do. time theirabilityto dothe regressive autism, losingover normal at birth,whodeveloped are two children, apparently bly wrong.” Theirsomethings ally whensomething goes horri surviving, andthriving, spiritu ing way: “Thisisabookabout but powerful bookinanarrest The Wilsons begin theirshort Andrew &Rachel Wilson BOOK OF THE OF THE BOOK NEVER EXPECTED THE LIFE WE WE LIFE THE (Crossway) The Wilson family —Susan Olasky Y E
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- - - give away theirbroken hearts, asChristgave His. and deep sighs, asVoskamp challenges readers to share and memoirs, meant to bestirred andsavored withlongpauses writing isaslow-cooked stew oftheology, poetry, and bearing thewounds from ourown bloodybattles.” Her pungent brokenness—because “there isn’t oneofusnot senses assheinvites Christandherreaders into herraw, tortured,tad Voskamp’s introspection penetrates soul and strand: “How doyou live withyour broken heart?” Though a beauty, AnnVoskamp stripsonequestionbare strand by With hertypicalwritingstyleofwonder, vulnerability, and WAY BROKEN THE argument enders. they’re couched inawinsome argument, rather thangiven as Bible verses don’t usually work onmodernskeptics unless in Ecclesiastes andRomans butquotes Scripture sparingly: preacher Keller inManhattan. uses Biblicalwisdomsteeped skeptics heencounters mostoften asasuperb pastor- materialism andsecular humanismofthecontemporary often-unchallenged assumptions. Keller focuses onthe gallery (internet comment boards) anddeconstructs their and even ahandful ofvoices from themodern-day peanut from theirown camps.Hequotes authors, thinkers, bloggers, ments andabarrage ofcarefully chosen citations—often skeptics, andthenassaults theirlogic withimpeccable argu Keller withaninviting tone respects theGod-given dignity of GOD OF SENSE MAKING learn that’s thebiggest andbestofall. much aboutourown story that we enter into God’s story, we joy willcome inthemorning. And,whenwe stop thinkingso because we’re masochists butbecause adeeper andsweeter closer to your destination. We canrejoice amidsuffering not moments away, butinthemorningyou’re hundreds ofmiles blowing asailboat so fast that allnight longdeath seems tough timescanproduce great benefits:Imagine astorm easy, butherightly insiststhat it’s essential andexplains how Los Angeles pastor Wilbournedoesn’t say Christ-bonding is Rankin Wilbourne CHRIST WITH UNION that hedesperately needs ithimself.” “No parent gives mercy better thanonewhoisconvinced and offers many specific examples alongwithBiblicalwisdom: identity inyour children.” Tripp writes asapastor, not ascold, resting asaparent inyour identityinChrist,you willlookfor 15 principlesandwarns fathers andmothers, “If you are not With lavish reminders ofgrace, Tripp guides readers through are “histool for theforming ofthesouls ofyour children.” lays outthebig picture ofourGod-given parenting We task: are owners ofourchildren orambassadors to them? Thenhe Paul Tripp begins withadiagnostic test: Dowe believe we PARENTING S H ORT LIST Paul Tripp David —Tom Pfingsten (David C. Cook) C. (David Ann Voskamp
Timothy Keller (Crossway) —S.O. —Marvin Olasky (Zondervan) —Sophia Lee (Viking) March 18, 2017 18, March - • WORLD Magazine WORLD 43 BOOKS
you had never been born. … Evil Paris pretty-boy, girl-crazy, con man.” Meanwhile, polytheistic gods Zeus and Reaching back Hera are locked in a bad eternal marriage: Hera mocks him—“Who, my clever fellow, have you been making Three novels from the past offer deals with?”—and “Zeus, who assem- bles the clouds” responds with invec- insights into the political battles tive: “Shut up and sit down! Obey my by Marvin Olasky word, or all the gods in Olympus will of today do you no good as I close in and lay upon you my powerful hands.” This energetic translation of The e do not have a Novel of the like Republican candidates insulting Iliad does have bits of bad language Year for 2016. Our commit- each other during debates. along with many explicit depictions of W tee looked for superbly For example, Agamemnon attacks battlefield deaths—and that note leads written stories with engaging charac- the media: “Prophet of evil, never have me to a second book, Jose Gironella’s ters set in a fallen world, clean (or you said a word pleasing to me.” He The Cypresses Believe in God, a novel almost-clean) language, and a redemp- tells his chief adversary among the about the five years (1931-1936) that led tive flavor without preachiness. That’s Greeks, Achilles, to get lost: “There are to the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) a tall order these days: We list five good plenty who will honor me, and Zeus and 1 million battlefield deaths. ones on the next page, but none really above all, whose wisdom is great. You Gironella sautéed his country’s
stands out. are most hateful to me of all the god- major political and social movements— GIRONELLA: PACO ELVIRA/COVER/GETTY IMAGES Instead of reading a new work of reared chieftains. … I don’t like you. I in alphabetical order, anarchist, fiction, you might try three published don’t care if you are angry.” Achilles Catholic, communist, existentialist, in past years that are oddly relevant to fires his verbal torpedoes: “Shameless fascist, royalist—while telling the poi- our own time. First is the oldest of the fool! Greedy, how now can your speech gnant story of two parents who want oldies but goodies: Homer’s The Iliad, gladly persuade any of the Achaeans peace and cannot sustain it, and two in a new translation by Barry Powell either to go on an ambush or to fight in sons: one phlegmatic, one saintly. Other (Oxford, 2014). Forced in college to the hand-to-hand?” memorable characters include young read this eighth-century-B.C. epic in a Remember Donald Trump’s sneers fanatics on opposite sides, a cynical translation that made Greco-Trojan at “Little Marco” Rubio? Here’s Trojan chief of police, a hate-filled anarchist, a wrestlers sound like British lords, I was hero Hector reproaching his younger middle-class Communist intellectual bored—but Powell’s vibrant work brother: “Little Paris, nice to look at, who becomes a mass murderer, and makes the ancient belligerents sound mad for women, seducer boy—I wish two hippie socialist teachers.
Gironella
44 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 MANTEL: KAREN ROBINSON/CAMERA PRESS/REDUX osn everything. poisons God-ignoring ideology chloride rather thansalt: made upofsodiumand egos insist thatacountryis what happenswhenour Desmoulins—also show Robespierre, Danton, and Revolution protagonists— language). Her three French time (andwithlotsofbad death relevant toourown fictional work oflifeand published in1993, isathird Greater Safety Hilary Mantel’s needed.” many coffinsbe are going to sion!’ you askyourself how ‘Long live ourhistoric mis that whenaleader“shouts One ofthesocialists learns awarningin 1955—is tous: and translated intoEnglish novel—published in1953 are different now, butthe of thepoliticalmovements shoes theywear. Thenames onby theshirtsand they’re people indicatewhichside unravels tothepointwhere showed how acountry moderate whodiedin2003, Distinguished author Distinguished author Gironella, apolitical , originally , originally A Place of A Mantel - his college-age daughter andformer-district-attorney girlfriend.He suspect. Vega becomes atarget for those wary of“killer cops,” including Jimmy Vega responds to a911 callandthenchases andkillsanunarmed The contemporary topic makes thisaneducational read: Police officer MOON THE BUT WITNESS NO but aneducational oneaboutlife underintellectual tyranny. adults andchildren alike—fearful.” Italso makes for adepressing book, all disproportionate, andlacking inhumanscale. … Itmadeeveryone— very basiclevel …withtheresult that theHouse ofCommunism was built Shostakovich eventually conclude that Soviet architects “hadfailed at a bullies whiletryingto retain at least ashred ofintegrity. Barnes has in the1930s andsmallerSoviet terrors later by appeasing Communist composer DmitriShostakovich, whosurvived Josef Stalin’s Great Terror In thisliterary novel, Barnes triesto get insidethehead ofRussian TIME OF NOISE THE today? evil oftheNaziregime? Knowing itshistory, how shouldwe confront evil seven”? Were we in Paul’s place, would we have donemore to resist the questions: Placed inEmil’s shoes,could we indeed forgive “seventy times Plot twistsandtightly written prose gently bringto theforefront hard onship chess,whilePaul, anSS administrator, questionshisown beliefs. tance. Emil, aJewish watchmaker from France, survives through champi Donoghue’s characters learn aboutvocation, forgiveness, andrepen In Auschwitz duringtheHolocaust andinAmsterdam two decades later, John Donoghue CLUB CHESS HEAD DEATH’S THE drivel?” us? ISISisnot Islamic.ISISisthejayvee team. … Doeshetrulybelieve this “Madness, absolute madness …what doestheAmericanpresident tell pages use expletives, andoneagent comments onObamaforeign policy: warning: Suicide bombers bringviolence, characters five timesin 500 intelligence agency Mossad,andaperson willingto take onISIS. Asmall a superb restorer is ofclassicpaintings, anagent/leader oftheIsraeli thoughtful spy novels featuring Gabriel Allonasthemaincharacter: He The Black Widow WIDOW BLACK THE socialist idealists such asJohn Reed isamusing. thantheirassertions ofmanliness.Groom’simportant bitingtake on and both become more manlyasthey come to view theirfamily asmore Pancho Villa:Arthurdevelops courage, hisfather gains abitofhumility, his son isn’t as“manly”heis.Both grow incharacter while chasing adoptive family headed by anextravagant Rough Riderdisappointed that Arthur, thecentral character, isanorphanwhogrew upinawealthy with big personalities whosometimes act more like chest-thumping boys. Largely set innorthernMexico acentury ago, PASO EL novel weaves hertwo mainthreads withrealism andinsight. unhinged, thestory wraps uptoo nicely; butChazinthrough mostofthe of shootings andwhy others fear them.After Vega almostbecomes brutality, givingreaders insight into how policeaftermath struggle inthe confronts bigotry, fame, hypocrisy, hismother’s unsolved murder, and S H —Charles Horton —Marvin Olasky ORT LIST Winston Groom Groom Winston isthelatest inaseries ofcleverly plotted andethically (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Straus (Farrar, Julian Barnes Daniel Silva Daniel (Liveright) Suzanne Chazin Suzanne Chazin (Harper) (Knopf)
El Paso —Sophia Lee ischock-full ofmen —M.O. (Kensington) —Ron Friedman March 18, 2017 18, March - - • WORLD Magazine WORLD 45 TRUTH IN PUBLIC: A CAMP FOR CHRISTIAN POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT. LEARN CHRISTIAN WORLDVIEW. ENGAGE THE CULTURE. GET TRAINED BY EVANGELICAL LEADERS.
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Spanning the globe At Harding University we don’t just talk about global experiences, we provide them. At seven international study abroad programs spanning five continents, Harding students spend a semester studying outside the realm of a traditional classroom encountering different cultures, historic sites, foreign languages and amazing architecture. Nearly 50 percent of students in each graduating class have attended one or more of the international programs, which provide a Christian worldview.
A community of mission
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The charred interior of the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Qaraqosh (this page) and other scenes from Qaraqosh, Mosul, and Bartella Iraq’s grisly liberation Areas freed from the Islamic State’s grip display the depth of the terror group’s war crimes. As Iraqi forces continue that fight, American aid groups are staking out front-line positions, too BY MINDY BELZ in Mosul, Iraq
n the Nineveh Plains cities destroyed by ISIS, lived. Every street, every doorway, every wall in some way is the devil lies in the details. In Qaraqosh, the marred or destroyed. A run of metal fencing, even, stands largest such town, ISIS militants left behind twisted, deformed, melted. Militants tunneled passageways cooking pots and vacuum cleaners wired with running 30 feet deep beneath houses, leaving the dirt piled high explosives. Piles of rubble concealed pressure inside bedrooms, where it reached above the curtains. They plates made of metal tape measures, wired to punched large doorways through houses so they could pass detonate when even a child stepped on them. house to house undetected by U.S. reconnaissance aircraft. Piles The destruction also is comprehensive. of rubble replace furniture, and debris substitutes for artwork One photo, or two or three, can’t fully cap- and signage, anything that made everyday life beautiful and ture the wrecking ball that was Islamic State meaningful. In a church cemetery in Bartella, militants uncov- occupation over the last two years, especially ered and desecrated nearly every gravesite, even prying open in areas where Christians historically have caskets, then leaving bodies exposed but still wrapped inside.
PHOTOS BY MINDY BELZ EXCEPT TOP RIGHT (MUHAMMAD HAMED/REUTERS/NEWSCOM) AND BOTTOM RIGHT (JOSEPH GALANAKIS/NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES) March 18, 2017 • WORLD Magazine 49 At first look the upheaval appears chaotic, as though an weeks a jihadist emerged from the tunnel system ISIS built earthquake has struck. But on closer examination the destruc- beneath Qaraqosh. Army members shot and killed the fighter, tion proves to be grimly systematic, the work of a sick but then discovered he was a 13-year-old boy. highly organized bureaucracy—a manquake. The Islamic State “perpetrated crimes against humanity, he air was cold but the sun shone bright on the recent ethnic cleansing, and war crimes against Christian, Yezidi, February morning when I walked through devastated Turkmen, Shabak, Sabaean-Mandaean, and Kaka’i people in Qaraqosh. The last time I visited the city, also called [Nineveh] province between June and August 2014,” declared THamdaniyah, was in 2008, when a boisterous parade of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in a 2015 report. What Christians, mostly Assyrians and Chaldeans, filled the streets to you see along the streets of Qaraqosh—and dozens of other protest an election law. A noisy crowd carried banners, local TV towns—is evidence of those war crimes and more. crews followed, men stood on corners chain-smoking, and Besides forcing those people groups from their homes en delicious aromas rose from open-air bakeries churning out flat- masse, looting or destroying all their possessions, killing and bread and kebab stands sizzling with lamb and beef. Afterward enslaving thousands of them, ISIS made its daily vocation over a my driver bought a whole roasted chicken cooked with onions two-year period to desecrate or reduce to rubble their resi- and peppers, and we ate it, picnic-style, in the open sunshine. dences, shops, and churches. They brought in earthmovers and This time the same streets were silent as graves. Once a city bulldozers to do what chisels and explosives could not. Their of more than 60,000 residents, a near-empty Qaraqosh was lib- goal, in short, was to eliminate for these non-Muslims their erated last November. ISIS cut electricity and running water, and past, present, and perhaps their future. that along with the ongoing dangers—IEDs, tunneling, and stray As fighting against ISIS enters a fifth grueling month in Iraq, centered just 20 miles from Qaraqosh in Mosul, the Islamic State’s brand of war crimes hasn’t ended. ISIS in recent weeks began using armed ISIS adores death. Anything drones, dropping grenades and homemade explosives on civilian and military targets in they did not burn was only Mosul. The jihadists, too, aren’t entirely vanquished from liberated areas. In recent because they used it.
50 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 Rubble and a makeshift shooting range outside the Church of St. Mary al-Tahira (left) and the bomb-making workshop at St. George’s Church (right) in Qaraqosh.
Islamic State fighters—was still keeping residents away. Occasionally a car passed, former residents touring the damage. A soldier bicycled by, almost noiselessly. The only real sound was my own feet crunching into rubble outside St. George’s Church. St. George’s faces a roundabout in a once-busy market area. The shops across the street where soda, cigarettes, and children’s clothing had once been sold were now black holes. Metal doors had been twisted from their hinges and the walls spray-painted with black ISIS inscriptions. The acrid odor of burnt metal, oil fumes, and decom- posing fleshlingered. Dead electrical lines lay across sidewalks, but glass, all blown from upper story windows, had been swept away. Beneath the soaring entryway leading into the church were three guards, all soldiers from Qaraqosh attached to the Nineveh Plain Protection Units, a Christian militia incorporated into Iraqi army regiments at the start of the cam- paign that began last October to liberate Iraq from ISIS. “ISIS adores death,” said Martin Bassam from the militia. “Anything they did not burn was only because they used it.” Unlike other churches I saw, where militants sprayed walls with oil then torched them until they charred black, St. George’s sanctuary was intact: ISIS had Monitor. “They told him that if he loved Jesus that much, he used it as a cache to store missiles. would die like Jesus.” In a classroom building across a rubble-filled courtyard, ISIS “There were killings and horrible things happening in the had set up a bomb-making factory. Much of it still remained as church courtyards,” said Bassam. His own family members were ISIS left it, because church leaders and local officials awaited forced out and are living in Iraqi Kurdistan about 30 miles away. some official inquiry. After all, these were the scenes of war His brother, a monk at Mar Behnam Monastery about 10 miles crimes. Sacks of open fertilizer and barrels of sugar sat on the south, barely escaped execution when ISIS took over the site, a floor alongside makeshift detonators. On a table were strewn fourth-century monastery built by Assyrian King Sencharib. kitchen scales, mixing bowls, and a measuring scoop, along with ISIS blew up and destroyed parts of the site in March 2015. a coil of wire and a notebook on concocting lethal IEDs. In a Such catastrophic losses haven’t dimmed Bassam’s family’s corner was a pile of screws and empty shell casings used to hopes of returning. “They will all be coming back for sure,” he pack suicide vests. The army caught some of the bomb-makers said. inside tunnels beneath the church, Bassam said. But months Not everyone is optimistic Christians will be allowed to return now of holding the city can’t erase years of violence. to their homes or will want to. “Security is the most critical need When ISIS, also known as Daesh, seized Iraqi territory in we have,” Chaldean Archbishop Bashar Warda told Catholic 2014, the extremists gave Christians four options—leave, News Service. “We want to first build houses for our people so convert to Islam, pay a jizya tax, or be killed. Nearly all the they can live with dignity, and we need infrastructure in the Christians, an estimated 120,000, fled. Those left behind were villages. But all this is only possible if we can have security.” tortured and subjected to sexual abuse and forced conversion. Emanuel Youkhana, an Assyrian Church of the East priest At least a dozen Christian women and girls disappeared from who heads Christian Aid Program Northern Iraq, said he’s no Qaraqosh, all believed enslaved by ISIS fighters. Esam, a refugee longer sure there is a future for Christians in Mosul. Besides living in Jordan, said ISIS crucified his brother-in-law in destroying Christian landmarks and homes, ISIS eliminated Qaraqosh: “He was crucified and tortured in front of his wife public records, making legal claims over contested property
LEFT: MACIEJ MOSKWA/NURPHOTO/SIPA USA VIA AP • RIGHT: MINDY BELZ and children, who were forced to watch,” he told World Watch difficult. When Youkhana visited Mosul in late January, he
March 18, 2017 • WORLD Magazine 51 visited two damaged churches used as warehouses by ISIS. Already one of them had been turned over to a contractor, who was dismantling the building until the Iraqi army intervened. “We will hear nice statements, but it will be impossible to get some of this property restored,” said Youkhana. “On the ground Daesh is defeated, but we are the losers.” Complicating the situation are the competing armed forces currently fighting ISIS in and around Mosul. Besides the Iraqi army and the U.S.-led coalition supporting it, Kurdish peshmerga hold territory east of Mosul toward the semiautonomous Kurdistan region, separate Kurdish militias from Syria and Turkey hold territory in the west, and Iranian-backed Shiite militias fight alongside the Iraqi army in Mosul. They also control some of the territory in Nineveh, including once- Christian towns like Bartella. For Christians hoping to return, knowing who will control their hometowns and whether they can be trusted is the challenge. “I notice discouragement most with Christians. They are finished,” said Darrell Yoder of Christian Aid Mission (CAM), a Virginia-based nonprofit. “They have seen Saddam; they have seen ISIS; they have seen enough.”
oder, who has directed CAM aid projects in Iraq for a decade, is among a number of Christian workers not running from the challengesY of the ISIS conflict. Remarkably, as fighting has intensified and Iraq again has become a war zone, some aid groups are pressing toward the front lines. CAM has been partnering with other organi- zations to provide food, blankets, kerosene, and necessities to residents who’ve been surviving ISIS occupation, particularly in Mosul. At casu- alty collection points run by military commanders during fighting, CAM provided blankets and water under armed escort. Yoder, a Mennonite, avoids using weapons himself but isn’t averse to the danger. “It’s been our opportunity to be in the middle of the storytelling, usually featuring Bible stories, plus games and difficulty, because that’s where we see the gap.” T-shirts for school-age children. One of the partner groups Yoder has helped supply is Free Mortar rounds and gunfire sounded from West Mosul as the Burma Rangers (FBR), an American-led aid group with 20 FBR team led children in a round of “duck, duck, goose” in East years’ experience providing help to war victims—though thou- Mosul in February. The approximately 1,000 people living in sands of miles from Mosul in Burma. Director David Eubank, a the suburb of Shahrazad, mostly Muslims and Turkmen, sur- former U.S. Army Special Forces officer, got a call to help in Iraq vived two years of ISIS control plus its fight with the Iraqi army and Syria in 2015, and by November 2016 he was handing out in December. ISIS dug mortar pits in the school playground badly needed supplies to civilians caught in combat. where FBR held its program, and surrounding buildings are “Over and over we’d hear this part of Mosul was clear of pockmarked with bullet holes. Earthen berms surround the civilians, nobody was living there, and when the bullets stopped area. flying people would pop up from their houses by the hundreds. As children played on playground equipment erected by They were desperate for help,” said Eubank. FBR, Haiman Abdulkadem said Mosul residents were just glad
Besides material help, FBR also offers spiritual teaching and to be outdoors: “We had to burn our furniture to cook and stay BELZ MINDY neighborly kindness. Eubank’s team—which includes his wife warm during ISIS occupation.” Karen and three children—hosts “Good Neighbor Clubs” in the He himself was held for seven days by ISIS, he said, tortured areas where they work. These include mornings of singing and alongside Yazidi and Christian prisoners in central Mosul. “We
52 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 need the love and forgiveness of Jesus. town 10 miles east of Mosul. The 54-bed unit has two operating What’s wrong with my people is we rooms beneath tents, plus its own blood bank and pharmacy. It love chaos. In chaos we can do as we sits on cleared ground behind two rings of blast walls, with both want.” internal security and a cordon of protection provided by the Eubank has been caught in the Iraqi army. crossfire. His team was pinned down The facility treats only trauma victims, who include civilian alongside Iraq’s 36th Brigade during casualties from bombings and combat, Iraqi military personnel, several days’ fighting at Al-Salam and those treated as enemy combatants, such as ISIS fighters. Hospital, one of Mosul’s largest Nearly all arrive from Mosul, where bombed-out bridges and medical facilities. Soldiers advanced medical facilities make on-site trauma care impossible. quickly into the area then became In its first month of operation, medical personnel at the field surrounded by ISIS fighters, who hospital performed more than 260 surgeries. On the day I visited, called for reinforcements from the women and children’s ward had 11 patients in recovery, throughout the city. ISIS deployed including a 10-month-old girl who had lost both feet in an IED suicide bombers, destroying half a explosion. A boy of about 10 years old was exiting surgery, dozen tanks and killing about 20 sol- having had a rod inserted in his leg following shrapnel injuries. diers, before U.S. airstrikes successfully To keep pace with the steady stream of urgent care, the targeted the ISIS positions. hospital has a steady rotation of mostly American trauma Mosul’s Al-Salam Hospital The airstrikes left the hospital in veterans. And each day begins with group devotions. (above) and New Armenian ruin, but three weeks after the battle Edwin Carns, hospital director, likes to say he’s “not a sur- Church (left) lie in ruins; the surrounding area was coming back geon,” but the 77-year-old emergency physician spent most of Cooper operates at the Samaritan’s Purse field to life. Merchants opened shops dis- his career in the U.S. Army and earned a Distinguished Service hospital in Bartella. playing mannequins dressed in colorful Medal in Vietnam. More recently he’s managed crisis care in Haiti and in Liberia during the Ebola outbreak. “It’s either calm or chaos, there’s no middle ground here, and the largest influx of casualties usually stacks up at the end of the day,” said Carns. “There’s also a palpable sense of God’s presence, and everyone pitches in. It’s not unusual to see the IT guy holding a kid who is dying.” Trauma surgeon Warren Cooper has worked in Sudan and now is based in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “I’m always in a place that’s in chronic disaster,” he said. For many of the professionals here, it’s their first exposure to mass casualties that include many children. Cooper said “a lot of emotion comes” with trying to treat whole families of wounded. The field hospital seemingly came into being overnight, much of the facility flown here aboard a DC-8 jet as part of joint effort with the World Health Organization and Iraqi officials. But it’s also the fruit of two decades of work in Iraq providing emergency relief and housing, said Samaritan’s Purse vice presi- gowns—all forbidden under ISIS. Taxis again were running, and dent of programs Ken Isaacs: “This is the same dynamic we children walked debris-strewn streets. “We’re no longer needed have used before, getting right behind the front line and helping here,” said Eubank, who only weeks before had ferried battle to address acute needs, but it’s not possible without contacts casualties across the same roads. “Our main purpose is helping and experience on the ground.” the people in greatest need, and that means continuing to the Isaacs resists “a growing movement for political actors to put next front alongside the army.” humanitarian pressure on political problems. It’s not going to work. If people want to talk about durable solutions in Iraq, let’s he most prominent U.S.-led aid work at the battlefront start by treating the people where they are and helping them to with ISIS is the newly constructed emergency field live, period. As followers of Christ we have that obligation.” hospital set up by North Carolina–based Samaritan’s The presence of a clean, up-to-date hospital in so littered a TPurse in January. The hospital sits on a heavily fortified 5-acre scene of destruction suggests at least the possibility of restoration
SAMARITAN’S PURSE SAMARITAN’S plot across the highway from Bartella, the devastated Christian and a future for war-ravaged Iraqis. A
[email protected] @mcbelz March 18, 2017 • WORLD Magazine 53 FEATURES A HEART FOR THE BROKENHEARTED Grant Funk has lived the traumatic childhood he now sees every day among young people in Alaska
by SOPHIA LEE photos by Judy Patrick/Genesis
oments before the wedding, Grant hours, his mother sought escape in her heavy-duty lupus Funk turned to his bride and said, medications. “I don’t know if I love you, but I As a teenager, Funk worked at a warehouse until 2 a.m. know God wants us to get married.” each day to help pay the bills. Often he returned home to It was a rocky start to a marriage learn his mother was missing, so he would drive out search- that after 35 years is going strong— ing for her, usually finding her high and suicidal on prescrip- and a reflection of Funk’s growing tion drugs. He says he sometimes had to break open a locked pains from a traumatized kid who didn’t know love to a door because he spotted her attempting to slice her wrist Mpastor who loves on the traumatized Alaska Native youth. with a kitchen knife. One day, he became so fed up that he sat Once a broken-spirited Southern boy, Funk now stands on beside his overdosed mother with a magazine and waited for the shoulders of many individuals who took a chance on her finally to die (she didn’t) instead of calling for help. him—most of all his wife Lenna, a lifelong optimist who While one sister reacted against the family situation by married him despite the red flags. sleeping around and getting pregnant at age 14, Funk stuffed Grant Funk grew up with his parents and three sisters in it all in and bore each day with his head down. Not even his a 19th-century, 12-by-16-foot log cabin with no running water best friend knew what was happening because Funk was too in Fairview, N.C., a mountainous, rural town near Asheville. ashamed to tell anyone. At age 21, he finally cracked: He His father earned meager wages at a textile mill, but those stopped communicating beyond answering basic “yes” and early years were the closest to a normal childhood for Funk. “no” questions and became like a zombie, feeling no emotion They had a regular church life, where Funk memorized but deadness. Scriptures, professed Christ at age 8, and was baptized. But God also placed certain men—all strong believers— Then debt started stacking up, and the family spiraled into into his life. His best friend’s father let him dine at their table dysfunction. While Funk’s father withdrew from his family when he didn’t want to go home, which was often. A carpen- by seeing other women and slumping before the TV for ter and his son gave him a carpentry apprenticeship that
54 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 A HEART FOR THE BROKENHEARTED
Funk at the airport in McGrath, where he lives and ministers to Alaskans. boosted both self-confidence and skills to start his own suddenly snapped in a harsh tone to his wife, “I’m not going remodeling business. That carpenter didn’t talk much, but he to be a pastor!” Taken aback, Lenna exclaimed, “I didn’t say demonstrated to Funk what a godly, self-sacrificial man looks anything!” Funk muttered, “Well, I’m not!” His bewildered like. Later, Funk would credit these men for turning his life wife consulted another church lady, who said, “Oh, honey, around: “I was a statistic waiting to happen, but I was res- don’t worry. It’s the Holy Spirit working in him. Just pretend cued by God and others who stepped into my life.” nothing happened, and God will do it.” So Lenna kept quiet, One day, while remodeling a cabin in Tennessee, alone and soon after, the Funks were back in Alaska to do ministry— with his thoughts and the sounds of his tools, a 22-year-old with no money, no job, no house. Funk started remembering the old Sunday school stories he Since then, they’ve managed an apartment full of prosti- used to cherish. He wondered what had happened since: tutes and trigger-happy drunks in the Wild West of
‘This is a devastated youth generation. At best, all we can do is take two pieces together and pour a drop of love into it.’ —Grant Funk
Where was he heading in life? Was Christ part of his life at Fairbanks, learned wilderness survival in Anaktuvuk Pass (a all? Convicted, Funk plunged a stake into the ground behind village of 200 above the Arctic Circle), and pastored various the cabin with his hammer and prayed, “I don’t know if I villages throughout western Alaska, including 15 years in belong to you, Jesus, but from this day forward, it’s no Hooper Bay, a coastal, predominantly Catholic village of turning back. I’m all for you.” Instantly, an inexplicable joy about 1,000 Yupik Eskimos. At one point, Funk was juggling burbled within him—for the first time in years he felt “all several part-time jobs, pastoring two churches, and taking bubbly.” Charged with a desire to know God more, Funk soon seminary classes all at once. applied to a summer mission project in Alaska. Finances were always tight, but the Funks’ children didn’t realize how tight because God always provided. One morning n the summer of 1980, Funk arrived in Glennallen, after breakfast, the Funks realized they didn’t have anything Alaska, to spend the summer with a mission agency now left for lunch, so the whole family prayed together. Iknown as SEND North. Other than the agonizing prom- Immediately after the “amen,” a stranger knocked on their ise to abstain from tobacco (which he once considered door with a white pickup truck loaded with canned goods. “native food” and “nourishment” to North Carolinians), The Funk children never enjoyed as many sweet treats as the Funk thought he had landed in heaven: pretty Christian girls; native children did, but they always had enough. wholesome, fun fellowship with Christian men; beautiful However, everywhere they went, the Funks met people snow-draped mountains; and best of all, solid Bible teaching. starving for God but foraging in all the wrong places. The He developed such thirst for spiritual nourishment that he Funks’ hearts broke and rebroke as young men and women, also met an older man every morning for one-on-one disci- once burning with fire for Jesus, one by one fell into abusive pleship. “I was like a sponge for God’s Word,” Funk recalled. relationships, destructive addictions, and suicide. One family “I was so dry, and suddenly there’s moisture, and I was just Funk visited in Hooper Bay had five children who committed soaking it in all the time. I was ecstatic!” suicide—a case that’s sadly not too shocking in some com When the summer was over, Funk stayed an extra month munities. Funk said these young people are like precious to continue helping with the mission project. Because he “love cups” chipped down by years of trauma and spiritual lived in a tiny trailer parked at a mission hospital, he liked darkness—no matter how much love the Funks pour into hanging out at the hospital waiting room to read magazines. them, it seems to leak out through the cracks of loneliness, Soon, he was visiting every evening to chat up a sweet young desperation, and despair. “It’s a long process,” he said. “This nurse called Lenna Weaver. Funk started setting his alarm is a devastated youth generation. At best, all we can do is take clock for midnight so he could pick her up at the end of her two pieces together and pour a drop of love into it.” shift and take her for a three-hour walk before he went to work. They married five months later. hat drop of love must have somehow seeped in, God continued to work in Funk. The newlyweds joined a because the children love the Funks and call them church in Asheville that included many missionaries. Two of T“mom” and “dad.” Funk’s oldest daughter, Sarah them, a 90-year-old missionary couple who served under Stewart, said friends would frequently visit her house only to Hudson Taylor, took special interest in the Funks and taught cling around her parents, so starved were they for parental them about missions and Chinese food. One day, Funk love. Everyone—even the adults who gave the Funks trouble—
56 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 home—they can’t!” From then on, every morning a limp, snoring tangle of brown arms and legs greeted Funk on his way to the kitchen. In 2007, thanks to a million-dollar contribution from Samaritan’s Purse, Funk built a teen center so that the Hooper Bay youth had another safe place for wholesome activities such as pingpong, board games, and foosball. The teen center also doubled as a job-training site that ran a weekly all-you-can-eat restaurant. For $8.50, villagers could feast on pizza, roast beef, hamburgers, and “the world’s best” milkshakes—all under the operation of 20 local teenagers and the Funks. The restaurant business turned out to be a valuable bonding and character-training experi- ence: The Funks taught the teenagers how to host, serve, cook, show up on time, and resolve conflicts in a healthy way, while the young staff had no problem calling the Funks out on their own mistakes. Many said, “This is like the family I never had.”
oday Funk, 60, and his wife Lenna, 61, live in McGrath, a rural Athabaskan Indian Tvillage of 350 people. They have no plans to retire and are in the worst financial state of their lives, having transitioned out of missionary support for a teaching job that Funk later lost due to budget cuts. Funk also used all his funds to launch an online educational program called Av-STEM, which blends aviation courses with science, technology, engineering, and math to get teenagers excited about learning again. The couple has five grown children and 17 grandkids— not all biological—and is currently fostering three: two in their early teens and one 5-year-old, all Alaska Natives. Every summer, the Funks still rent an RV and invite a select group of Alaska Native young adults on a 10-day road trip across America. For most of these teenagers, it’s the only opportunity they get to visit the Lower 48 states. For the Funks, it’s a knew their home was a safe place. When a crisis hit the village, chance to reach each individual on a deeper level. Funk was usually the first person to receive a call, and the Something about the intimacy of sharing a mobile home first to respond. in a strange land breaks down all sorts of barriers—the RV Domestic, sexual, and substance abuse haunt many house- erupts with tears and laughter, conflicts and resolutions, holds, so children feared going home. That meant the Funks resistance and breakthroughs. By the end of the trip, every- shared their 700-square-foot living space with a dozen teenag- one is emotionally exhausted yet oddly renewed. “Every year ers who ate their food and dominated their couch all day. you want to give up, and each year God gives you the Come bedtime, Funk had to drag these visitors physically out strength to do it again,” Lenna Funk said. the door and bolt it. But when he peered out the window, he After 31 years of ministry, there are still times when the saw several still loitering outside. Sometimes the kids would Funks feel so overwhelmed by the bleak circumstances of sneak into the house through the back window, and the whole these children that they fall on their knees begging God for huff-and-puff wrestling match would replay itself. hope and endurance to carry on. Funk described the ministry Then one evening, the Funks and their young guests were as one marked with “excruciating pain”—one that even his hanging out in the living room when one teenage boy blurted deep empathy would not have endured were it not for the out, “My parents are drinking again.” That’s when Funk flipped prayer that he engraves daily into his heart: “Go ahead, God, on a revelatory switch: “Oh, it’s not that these kids won’t go break my heart for the people you love.” A
[email protected] @SophiaLeeHyan March 18, 2017 • WORLD Magazine 57 New from John MacArthur
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59 NOTEBOOK Lifestyle
may not go outside, wash promotes mothers’ health, outside only a few times to both baby and mother. their hair, take showers, others have linked the inac- the stores below her apart- Kong’s friend Sophia Tsai, drink cold water, pick up tivity to cardiovascular ment, and even then she 36, stayed at one of the heavy items (including problems and postpartum had to bundle up in a hat high-end centers in Taipei their children), or use air depression. and coat. She ate pig after her second daughter, conditioning. The belief is Still, for 31-year-old knuckle and peanut soup, Catherine, was born. Tsai that after childbirth a Kong, there was no ques- as well as dishes seasoned paid $400 per day for a woman is in a weakened tion whether she would with sesame oil, ginger, and room equivalent to that of a state, and any chill or gust adhere to the practice. other Chinese herbs meant five-star hotel, complete of wind could get her sick. “Every mother tells you to restore the body and with a massage chair. Mothers must also follow a that you need to zuo yuezi,” stimulate milk production. Flouting the stricter rules, strict diet. According to she said. “If you don’t do it Contrary to tradition, center attendants washed traditional Chinese medi- right, then you’ll have Kong showered and kept and blow-dried mothers’ cine, during childbirth the aches and pains.” After the the air conditioning on hair for them, and mothers mother’s body loses blood births of both of her daugh- after Christie’s birth during could choose whether to containing the “chi” life ters, Kong stayed in a hos- a hot and humid Taiwanese keep their newborn at their force, so the body is ren- pital a few days, then came summer. At night, she and side or in a supervised dered cold (yin). To keep home to a yuezi nanny who her husband tended to the nursery. Nurses wheeled in illness at bay, she must eat spent eight hours a day baby’s cries themselves, five meals a day full of tra- foods that are hot (yang), caring for her and her new- then waited in anticipation ditional yuezi dishes and such as ginger, chicken, born. The nanny cooked for the nanny to ring the taught new mothers how to various soups, and teas. meals for the family, doorbell each morning. care for their newborn. At Research on zuo yuezi has cleaned the apartment, and Relatives also helped night, Tsai could ask the mixed results—while changed the baby’s diaper. grocery shop and helped nurses not to disturb her some studies have shown Kong felt restless lying watch Abigail. between 8 p.m. and 9 a.m. the long recovery time inside all day. But when she In the past decade, more and to feed the baby during tried to help wash the and more Asian women are those hours with pumped dishes, the nanny scolded spending their first month breast milk. Sophia Tsai (right) with her and told her to stay after childbirth in special- Tsai knew that once her daughter Catherine and Agnes Kong (left) with daughters away from cold water. In a ized yuezi centers, which month was up, she’d not Abigail and Christie. month’s time Kong went provide 24-hour care to have such peaceful sleep or so much time for rest. “After you leave the center, the baby is by your side all night, and she’ll be acting either like a devil or an angel,” Tsai said. She believes her time resting gave her more energy to care for her two daugh- ters and prevented aches and pains. Kong, who spent her month at home, said that if she had a third child, she’d want to go to a yuezi center like Tsai, as it provides one of the main bene- fits ofzuo yuezi— reduced stress. “The focus is on eating ANGELA LU well, sleeping well, resting. That is what’s important.” A
60 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 Give the gift of clarity: wng.org/clarity NOTEBOOK Money
members—ages currently range from 24 to roughly 35—send donations to the National Christian Foundation (NCF), which administers the club’s donor-advised fund. AC members may give all types of assets into the account, including cash, stocks, and real estate, and receive an income tax deduction. While charitable “investment clubs” abound, stewardship groups like AC are harder to come by. Debbie Ledoux, a former attorney in San Antonio, started her own Christian giving organization, The Sister Project, through NCF six years ago. Today, the all-female, 97-member group supports Christian nonprofits that “make known the gospel to women and children.” Ledoux only knows of one other such Christian women’s stewardship club. Outside financial experts say groups like AC have to avoid two kinds of problems. One is lack of clarity about mission. Financial author Ethan Pope says having a statement that defines terms like “faith-based organi- zation” and “gospel” is important: “Are we talking about a universal, social, works-based gospel or a Christ- Giving by group centered gospel?” YOUNG PROFESSIONALS CLUB FOCUSES ON Another problem occurs when a BIBLICAL FINANCIAL STEWARDSHIP by Katie Gaultney group uses its money as a means of control. Former church finance direc- tor Caleb Dean says members have to Six years ago Dallas residents and around the world. In 2016, with check their motives: “In some cases, it R Stephen Reiff and David Luttrell, the help of matching gifts, 28 members becomes almost like having a board two recent college grads with steady gave $113,541. seat [in the nonprofit], and any large jobs and incomes, found they both had Last year’s funds supported a donation is like a business transaction, the same question: “How would God Christian microfinance organization as opposed to saying, ‘God is sovereign, have us steward His money?” Out of in South Sudan and gospel outreach he cares about this ministry more than their conversation came an idea: Why groups in Paris and Spain. Locally, AC I do, so I’m going to give what I believe not form a group of young professionals supported a pro-life group, a group is the right allocation of resources with a heart for Biblical stewardship helping homeless families out of the while encouraging my friends to learn of resources? cycle of poverty, and a Christian and give as well.’” Soon, the Ambassadors Club (AC)— school in a poor neighborhood. Reiff, 29, says AC has also organized a nod to 2 Corinthians 5:20, “we are Similar organizations often require “fireside chats,” educational talks by ambassadors for Christ”—started a set annual donation from members— seasoned Christian professionals on meeting. Reiff, a business management say, $1,000 that goes into a pot to be topics ranging from political donations consultant, calls it “a stock-picking allocated to worthy nonprofits. In to how to be a leader in the home in club, except instead of sitting around contrast, AC members submit “giving the area of financial stewardship. in a circle talking about what stocks to narratives,” which adhere to strict Co-founder David Luttrell, an MBA invest in, we talk about what charities criteria inspired by the book When candidate at Stanford, talks about the to invest in.” Since 2011, AC members Helping Hurts. After the group identi- joy in being part of what God’s doing: have put nearly $400,000 to work fies a cause, a three-week period of “It’s all His; we just get to be the
MARCUS BUTT/GETTY IMAGES BUTT/GETTY MARCUS with Christian organizations in Dallas fundraising begins. Individual money manager.” A
Visit WORLD Digital: wng.org March 18, 2017 • WORLD Magazine 61 NOTEBOOK Medicine
patient, who can make an with it led to the birth of informed decision about twin genetically modified whether to proceed. macaque monkeys. Much more powerful— Restrictions on human and controversial—is embryo research are com- heritable gene editing, also mon. Germany’s law, the 1991 called germ line gene edit- Embryonenschutzgesetz ing. These edits would (embryo protection law), is happen at the embryonic among the most stringent, stage, meaning that they effectively banning any use would affect every cell of a of human embryos for patient’s body and pass to research. The country’s subsequent generations like past shaped its attitude: any gene. The studies of this John Robertson of The technique require human University of Texas School embryos, which researchers of Law wrote in the destroy at the end of each Columbia Journal of experiment. One source, Transnational Law that according to England’s “revulsion to … the cruel Francis Crick Institute: medical experiments that “Those left over from inspired the Nuremberg patients’ fertility treatment Code for human experi- and donated by patients. mentation” led to the law. They will be surplus to the Human genome editing A fresh pair patients’ treatment or and the creation of human- family-building needs.” animal hybrids in Germany of genes? Advocates of caution both carry penalties of up point out that we do not to five years in jail. GENE EDITING COULD ALTER HUMAN understand much of the Elsewhere, attitudes are EMBRYOS FOR LIFE by Charles Horton human genome and can’t more lenient: In 2015, accurately predict what researchers at China’s Sun effect a change would have. Yat-sen University edited Do genes equal des- inspired technique merely Some of what we know the genomes of human R tiny? Anatomically guides treatment: The from human nature also embryos with CRISPR. The speaking, yes: A child with treatment does not modify discourages here: In a Wall experiment did not lead to two X chromosomes will a patient’s DNA. Street Journal opinion pregnancy, but laid a tech- be a girl, and a child with What if a treatment piece, Marcy Darnovsky of nical groundwork for future one X and one Y will be a does? That’s gene editing, the Center for Genetics and attempts. A second Chinese boy. Genes help determine an attempt to change DNA Society argues that “a few team published its attempts everything from height and in living patients. Since all advocates of gene editing to engineer embryos’ hair color to whether a cancers and many other for reproduction are openly genomes for HIV resis- person will enjoy certain diseases are caused by enthusiastic about ‘enhanc- tance in 2016, intensifying flavors. They can also act genetic mutations, success- ing’ future generations. … debate and leading to calls like mosquitoes and ticks, ful treatments might lessen It’s all too easy to imagine for a worldwide embargo transmitting disease. much human suffering. We fertility clinics offering on embryo research. Research on the genome may not know the side ‘offspring upgrades’ to As gene editing tools is inspiring ideas for effects of a given attempt, affluent parents.” gain power, ethical dilem- genetics-based treatments. but for the kind of dreaded Science fiction writers mas multiply. When, if Already, surgeons often diseases attracting research have long contemplated ever, is it acceptable to use send tissue samples from attention—Huntington’s, such a thing, but life may powerful tools with poorly malignant tumors for muscular dystrophy, sickle soon imitate art: CRISPR, a understood effects? As genetic analysis, so that they cell anemia—a patient technology used to edit geneticist J. Craig Venter can customize a patient’s might reasonably want to DNA sequences, has become noted in Time, “the tech- KRIEG BARRIE chemotherapy to target his take a chance. Moreover, as routine for genetic research niques have become easier cancer’s specific genetic with surgery, any benefit or in mice and other small ani- to perform, [but] the ethical mutation. This genetics- harm is limited to that one mals. In 2014, experiments issues are not easier.” A
62 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 NOTEBOOK Technology Stronger on cyber RUSSIAN HACKS HIGHLIGHT NEED FOR ROBUST U.S. CYBER STRATEGY by Michael Cochrane
The Russian hacking of records of 22.1 million federal workers R Democratic National Committee were stolen, an attack against the servers during the recent U.S. presi- healthcare company Anthem that dential campaign was an opportunistic compromised the health records of 80 act. That’s the conclusion of cyberse- million people, and attacks by suspected curity expert Christopher Cleary, a Russian-government-sponsored former U.S. naval officer with experi- hackers against the State ence at U.S. Cyber Command. Cleary Department and the White House. Rogers addresses the Cybersecurity believes the hack came about largely The senior cyber defense official Technology Summit at the Capitol Hilton. because the United States has not had has also spoken of how the lack of a a credible cyber deterrence strategy— strong response to hacks only encour- ence the election, an unlawful inter- and he’s among those calling for ages further attacks. vention into a country’s internal clearer consequences for cyberattacks. “We’ve got to get to an idea of affairs. If Russia did violate interna- “I personally think … that the deterrence,” said Adm. Mike Rogers, tional law by its actions, U.S. counter- Russians took that opportunity to poke head of U.S. Cyber Command, at a measures would be lawful as long as us in the eye,” said Cleary, now the head 2015 cybersecurity conference at they did not cause death or injury, of federal cyber programs at Tenable Fordham University. “Because when I Schmitt told the Post. Network Security. “What the Russians look around the world right now, my Such countermeasures, possibly did is saw an ability to destabilize our conclusion is that nation-states, including retaliatory cyberattacks, election, and they took a run at it.” groups, and individuals seem to have would likely be delivered by U.S. Cleary noted that every time the come in large measure to the conclu- Cybercom’s Cyber National Mission United States fails to respond to a sion that there is little price to pay Force, which began full operations last cyberattack, adversaries become when engaging in these behaviors.” October. The overarching Cyber emboldened to probe our vulnerabili- The U.S. Strategic Command, Mission Force—5,000 individuals ties until they bump up against our which oversees the Defense across 133 teams—has not only a defen- public “red line,” or the point at which Department’s cyber forces, did not sive mission, to protect the Defense U.S. officials will retaliate. return a request for comment. Department and critical national net- “I don’t think that we as a country Michael Schmitt, chairman of the works, but an offensive mission as well. have come up with a good enough U.S. Naval War College’s international Even if the U.S. red line remains deterrence policy to say, this is what a law department, told The Washington vague, Cleary said, the creation of U.S. red line is,” Cleary told me. Post that hacking DNC email servers Cybercom and other defense measures Major cyberattacks in recent years itself was not a breach of international might help send the message that the include China’s hack of the U.S. Office law—but the dump of those emails to United States is serious about deterring of Personnel Management in which WikiLeaks reflected an intent to influ- cyberattacks.
CANCER CAMERA Soon, your smartphone might be able to identify common skin cancers and deadly melanomas. Using a database of about 130,000 images of skin lesions representing more than 2,000 diseases, computer scientists from Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory trained a Google- developed algorithm to distinguish between benign and malignant growths. During testing, the algorithm matched the performance of 21 board-certified dermatologists in correctly diagnosing benign and malignant lesions. The researchers hope to pair it with a smartphone app that would identify cancer using the phone’s camera. —M.C. ROGERS: CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES • SKIN CANCER: CHESIIRECAT/ISTOCK
Visit WORLD Digital: wng.org March 18, 2017 • WORLD Magazine 63
VOICES Mailbag
‘Room with a viewpoint’ FEB. 4 Marvin Olasky notes the irony of an “inclusive” policy resulting in his and Susan’s excommunication from the Church of Airbnb because of a thought crime. This is a perfect example of progressives using illiberal methods to enforce “virtue,” as author Kim Holmes noted (“Progressive regression,” Feb. 4): Either agree with the leftist agenda, or they will hurt you. —DON STUART / Nashville, Ind.
Airbnb’s policy is not surprising and I’m a millennial evangelical who is articles on student loans and college might be challenged legally. Airbnb, in heartened every time I see a “Hate tuition. The true issue is Americans’ essence, has stated, “Only secular Has No Home Here” sign. I recognize attitudes toward debt. If enough stu- progressive humanists may use this the left-leaning message encoded, but dents refused to take out loans, then service.” the signs strike me as hugs of hope, a colleges would have to lower tuition or —ROBERT CILLEY / Hershey, Pa. small promise of solidarity and affec- lose too many students to stay in tion for those feeling dismayed or business. After enjoying a stay through Airbnb, I personally threatened by Trump’s —EMILY ANN METCALF / Bon Aqua, Tenn. got the email asking me to affirm its election. It grieves me to see fellow inclusive statement. I did not sign. I Christians narrowing their eyes at Blogger/professor Glenn Reynolds has thought about opening our home to shows of human solidarity. suggested making colleges put some Airbnb travelers, but now I’ll have to —ANGELA TOWNSEND / Flemington, N.J. skin in the game by shouldering some look for another hospitality network. of the repayment risk. He also points Too bad. These signs are another example of out that much of the additional tuition —RACHEL JAMIESON / Harrisville, Mich. the left redefining words and then pays for more administrative staff assuming that everyone will accept rather than teaching faculty. ‘No home here’ their new meanings. The fact that I —PHIL HAWKINS on wng.org FEB. 4 Thank you to Andrée Seu Peterson don’t want babies to be murdered and for her column about the “Hate Has think all children should have the ‘Future imperfect’ No Home Here” placards. We are to advantages of a mother and a father FEB. 4 What a privilege to trust God as hate what is evil and cling to what is doesn’t mean I hate. the Author and Finisher of all of world good, but those who preach tolerance —MARY ANN LAMB on wng.org history as well as each moment, day, have no foundation for saying what is month, year, and era. It’s understand- good or evil, defining them according ‘College loan conundrum’ able that those without this trust will to the shifting tides of political cor- FEB. 4 David Skeel concluded that try to direct history on their own. rectness and public opinion. I’m so “there is no great solution to the stu- —NEIL EVANS on wng.org glad we have God’s Word. dent loan mess.” Might I suggest that —ESTHER TALBERT / Travelers Rest, S.C. the government get out of the business ‘Human rights for all’ of student loans entirely? In the 1960s FEB. 4 This column about American When God declares particular things my private college tuition was very efforts to promote a sexual agenda hateful, He is protecting what He affordable; even though many jobs for internationally under the guise of loves. This modern campaign against students paid little over $1 an hour, it “human rights” made me literally sick hate is popular because it appears to was relatively easy to pay for school. to my stomach. be righteous, but that is a pretense. And then another Great Society pro- —ARLENE DEANS / Mission Viejo, Calif. Righteousness requires standing gram ruined the system. upright against what God hates as —BOB SHILLINGSTAD / Hayden, Idaho ‘Up from idolatry’ much as standing up for what God FEB. 4 This article about Nomura loves. As a senior in high school facing col- Takuyuki and his Christian testimony —DONALD WOOLERY / Rockford, Ill. lege decisions, I appreciated your as a doctor in Japan blessed me so
Visit WORLD Digital: wng.org March 18, 2017 • WORLD Magazine 65 VOICES Mailbag
much. I loved the photos too. Now I stories do not get reported. Thank you “extra” embryos are the inevitable have a new brother in Christ whom I for shining a light where no one else result, and the risks are just too great feel connected to and can pray for. does. for the children created in God’s Thanks, WORLD. —TIM MISKIMEN / Chiang Mai, Thailand image. —DAYNA ROBINSON / Clifton, Texas —RALPH W. DAVIS / Sterling, Va. ‘Bitter pills’ ‘Through a glass, darkly’ JAN. 21 Thank you for opening my eyes Correction FEB. 4 Thank you for such an encour to chemical abortion. It is insidious President Richard Nixon started the aging article. And praise God that because for guilt-ridden mothers it’s process of re-establishing ties to China someday Don and Karen Winget will less invasive and noticeable. But let’s in 1972 (“No longer shunned?,” Feb. 18, be in the multitude who from the new not sugarcoat this pill: It’s baby poison. 2017). earth will have a view of the universe Here is yet another way America is that we can’t even imagine right now. leading the way in child sacrifice to Read more Mailbag letters at wng.org I can hardly wait! the idol of convenience. —FRANK BROWN / Port Republic, N.J. —TODD FINCH on wng.org LETTERS and COMMENTS By the Numbers ‘Life on ice’ Email: [email protected] JAN. 21 I shared with a Jew I met your JAN. 21 This article is chilling in more Mail: WORLD Mailbag, PO Box 20002, statistic that since 1948 Israelis have ways than one. The fact that evangeli- Asheville, NC 28802-9998 Website: wng.org killed twice as many children in cals have not spoken out about the Facebook: facebook.com/WORLD.magazine Israel by abortion than Hitler killed immorality of in vitro fertilization is Twitter: @WORLD_mag during the Holocaust. After a pause, shameful. In messing around with the Please include full name and address. Letters he commented that those kinds of very beginning of human life itself, may be edited to yield brevity and clarity. VOICES Andrée Seu Peterson
why wouldn’t we? Everyone we know is a worrier. Experience becomes normative. Someone has filled us with the notion that we have no free will to change this, but that our wills are still in bondage as before we got saved. This is a lie of the devil. The last thing he wants us to know is that we are able to wake up on any Tuesday morning and choose joy—and A choice to rejoice keep choosing it all day long as often as the WE DON’T HAVE TO LIVE IN BONDAGE buzzards of worry start to gather overhead. It may not be easy at first, due to force of habit. TO WORRIES But we’re called to warfare, to fighting the good fight. What else can When you wake up in the morning, the this mean but to R first thing you try to think of is what day it talk to yourself is. “It’s Tuesday,” you say to yourself. It means rather than listen- you’re not going to church because it isn’t ing to yourself? Sunday, and you don’t have the day off because Choosing joy is it isn’t Saturday. It will be the regular Tuesday what God com- routine plus the errands on your list. All this mands. “Rejoice in cogitation takes place in the space of a moment. the Lord always; The second thing you think of is what it is again I will say, that’s bothering you about your life—who hates rejoice” you these days; what talents you lack; how you (Philippians 4:4), have messed up your children’s lives. There is a He says twice, for compulsive need to know—right away—what it emphasis. He tells is you should be worrying about, so that you the exile returnees: can pick up where you left off last night in one “This day is holy to uninterrupted stream of worry. “Anxieties all the Lord your God; present and accounted for? Good, now I can get do not mourn or on with the day.” weep. … Go your Do not envision a conscious and assiduous way. Eat the fat and worry, but more of a back-burner flickering drink sweet wine, flame of unpeace whose fuel is a finite set of … for the joy of the specific regrets and longings. Lord is your There is a feeling of safety in this. If you strength” (Nehemiah woke up and didn’t remember what your 8:9-10). problems were, you would be uneasy till you Just because If God commands it, we can do it. Just did remember. Now you are relieved because because you have never done it before is no you can “manage” them. The boogeyman can’t you have proof that you cannot do it starting today. Just jump out of the dark at you if you know he’s never done it because you don’t know anyone who seems there. So you are happy. Well, not happy. But before is no joyful is no proof that it’s not possible. Be the this is all you know. first on your block. “Let God be true though What if it didn’t have to be like this? What if proof that every man a liar.” you could choose joy when you woke up every you cannot Someone has told you that God must work day, regardless of the circumstances? do it starting joy in you and that you cannot exert effort I ransacked my old photo albums looking toward it. Tell that person what God said to for a photo for my neighbor’s funeral. When I today. Cain—that sin desires to have you, but you must came across pictures of myself—in a crowd, at a master it (Genesis 4:7). Tell that person about party, at the beach—I thought, “I know what I David’s firm resolution: “I will walk with integ- was thinking when this picture was taken.” I rity of heart within my house” (Psalm 101:2). was worrying. I wasn’t trusting God. I wasn’t It may take a while to get the hang of it but “in the moment.” Real life was being consumed you will succeed, because you have more on the altar of past and future phantoms. power than you thought. After all, “Do you not Somewhere we got the idea that this is the know that … God’s Spirit dwells in you?”
KRIEG BARRIE KRIEG human condition, even for a Christian. And (1 Corinthians 3:16). A
[email protected] March 18, 2017 • WORLD Magazine 67 VOICES Marvin Olasky
loved him even more, sad thoughts filled his head: What if the cancer comes back? Why is God doing this to me? What’s the next bad thing to come along? Lord, give me a sign. Instead of a clear sign from God, he encoun- tered more confusion from the university gods. Last year the provost emphasized the need to keep a distance from students. This year the dean Benevolent cancer of students spoke of the need for closer relation- A TWIST OF PROVIDENCE ships and more mentoring opportunities. Larry was conflicted. He knew that Jesus talked to the Samaritan Sixth in a once-a-quarter series of short woman at the well and left R short fiction … Himself open to charges of Larry had been a hospital patient only when inappropriate behavior. As a he was 17 and had his tonsils removed. Now a Christian, he wanted to distinguished professor at 57, he knew prostate show care for all his students. cancer was common and not a herald of immi- He worried about communi- nent death—but when his doctor on April 1 told cating fear by telling a young him surgery was essential, Larry thought the woman to leave the door words at first were part of a tasteless April open when she came into his Fools’ Day joke. office, or opening it if she did The operation was “picture perfect,” and the close it. pathology report said “cancer-free.” But day So, for the last meeting of after day over the next month, Larry still felt his graduate seminar, Larry imperfect: Nothing was gnawing at his body, Sad thoughts took the students out to eat at a restaurant off but he missed feeling one flesh with his wife. campus. Afterward, it was raining, so Larry He read a purportedly uplifting book by filled Larry’s offered to drop off one student at her home. It Stuart Scott, the ESPN announcer surprised by head: What if was dark and the downpour intensified, so he disease who wrote: “Cancer wants to take con- the cancer held his umbrella over Barbara’s head as he trol from you. You’ve got to very purposefully walked her to the front door. No one else was stand your ground. That’s what going to the comes back? around, but he didn’t think that was a problem gym is to me. I decide, cancer. That’s what going Why is God until … suddenly it was. to work is. I decide, cancer.” Sure, Larry doing this The campus newspaper later that week thought: Scott died of cancer at age 49. Who headlined the story: Larry, former defender of decided? to me? students against sexual harassment, faced a Larry had thought his faith in God would rape charge. Talk shows latched on to a man- bulwark him through recovery, but he felt God bites-dog story. First came a formal university had let him down. For years he had attended a hearing, and the trial itself would be even vibrant megachurch, Optimal, and heard worse. Larry wondered: First the prostate sermons about how God wants us rich and surgery, now this libel. Why, Lord, why? healthy: “Name it, claim it by faith, and it is The dean of students walked Barbara yours!” through her testimony. Even Larry’s wife At the university Larry had been a hero to thought he was in deep trouble as the trembling feminists as he led the battle against colleagues student spun a tale of clothes ripped off. Then who took sexual advantage of students. He had Barbara dramatically added more and more also seen that sometimes such an accusation is detail, graphically describing her professor’s a potent weapon in the hands of a young person sexual vigor. After a minute, Larry and his wife who wants to smear a professor. With his own caught each other’s eyes and began laughing, students he kept the office door open through- very inappropriately. The dean’s face reddened: out office hours and steered conversation away “Do you think this is funny, professor?” from personal subjects. “No,” Larry responded as he thought, Thank When Larry published a pro-life book, you, God, for preserving me. “Not funny at all, KRIEG BARRIE though, some of his former fans turned hostile. but a clear case of false witness. As my wife will That was depressing, and even though he knew tell you, as my doctor will tell you, the prostate most of his students loved him and his wife surgery left me unable to commit this crime.” A
68 WORLD Magazine • March 18, 2017 [email protected] @MarvinOlasky Be equipped for more faithful ministry. Gain experience through Southern’s Doctoral Studies that is both academically challenging and can be practically applied to your area of ministry. For more information, visit sbts.edu/worldmag. Come preview the experience.
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