In the early days of WORLD Magazine we struggled to stay alive. We knew the lifeblood of most successful magazines was advertising revenue. We had learned that magazines like Time, People, and Better Homes & Gardens typically secured two-thirds of their revenue from ads, with loyal subscribers providing the rest.

If I’ve asked just a dozen people, I must have asked 100. What’s the worst part about this pandemic? If you could change just one thing about this miserable year-old plague, what would it be? The overwhelming winner is: the masks! 

In this marvelous high-tech age, where we call on a little device no bigger than a box of crayons to do just about anything we ask, are we really reduced to balancing a scrap of fabric across the lower half of our faces in the hope of staving off what we’re told is the most threatening health evil of our lifetime? 

We can do better.

My father-in-law, William C. Jackson, didn’t live long enough to compare notes with our new president, Joe Biden. In fact, both men were born and raised in Scranton, Pa., with mostly World War II blue-collar values. But both of them ultimately left. 

The staggering numbers so typically associated these days with the coronavirus are bad indeed. But it’s hard to know how accurate all the numbers are. They may be high. They may be low. But journalists should not pretend that they’re precise. 

Editor’s Note: As Joel Belz recovers from a broken femur, we’re reprinting this column, a version of which originally published on Jan. 15, 2000.

The order for a classified ad in this issue of WORLD arrived promptly the morning of Jan. 1. It read:

WILL SELL AT LOSS: Semi-automatic pistol, attractive “fish” logo. Also 500 rounds 99 mm expanding point ammo. After April 1, 2000.

A few years ago, I wrote that WORLD Magazine was a journalistic offering that faced the tension of being sometimes wide and sometimes deep. A biweekly newsmagazine—with the resources God had given us—could not cover the entire scope of reality or staff bureaus in every major city around the globe. So I wrote that we as journalists had to make judgments about how deep, or how wide, we would go in each article of each issue.

Editor’s note: As Joel Belz recovers from a broken hip, we’re republishing this column, which originally appeared on Dec. 20, 1997.

Heading toward Christmas, there’s no better time to remind ourselves there are two crucial parts to this thing we call a Biblical worldview: the talking part and the doing part.