Where have you gone, Dwight Eisenhower? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you. 

Mark Regnerus graduated from Trinity Christian College in 1993 and gained his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina in 2000. He is now a courageous sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Oxford University Press books on sex and marriage with a Biblical base and lively titles like Forbidden Fruit and Cheap Sex. 

John Bolton has served in each of the last Republican administrations, so his The Room Where It Happened (Simon & Schuster, 2020) provides valuable insights, even though he did bite the hand that fed him.

This is year 15 of WORLD’s Hope Awards for Effective Compassion, and the strangest. The 100-plus ministries our readers nominated had to adjust their programs in the face of COVID-19. We had to adjust our process of choosing winners. 

In this column over the past three decades I’ve mentioned five times a novel of warning, José Gironella’s The Cypresses Believe in God. Sadly, it’s out of print: Since my last recommendation I’ve learned the least expensive used copy you can buy costs $64, which is steep even for 997 pages. So, as a public service, here are key quotations from the book set in 1931-1936 Spain, as that country polarized its way to a civil war.

A church I was a member of 30 years ago published a daily Bible-reading schedule showing several chapters, along with a list of many more labeled “For the Hearty Ones.” I believe those of you who regularly read our Saturday Series are also hearty ones, so this is the place to extend an invitation to the World Journalism Institute’s annual mid-career course. The next course, No. 12, will meet Jan. 7–13, 2021.

The Jewish New Year begins the evening of Sept. 18, and Elliott Rabin’s The Biblical Hero: Portraits in Nobility & Fallibility (Jewish Publication Society, 2020) shows differences between Judaism and Christianity but also points of contact. 

The first Sunday after Labor Day is National Grandparents Day, which has its own official flower: the forget-me-not. If your grandparents are still alive, have you thanked them? If they’re deceased, do you honor them?