Christians know why Jesus had to die. Substitutionary atonement. Propitiation for sin. Payment for the debt we have incurred through willful disobedience.

Read just about any book of the New Testament and you’ll find plenty of Biblical backing for these concepts. For example, 1 Peter 2:24 tells us, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.”

I’m suggesting every couple of months reading lists for thoughtful WORLD readers. In our Dec. 29 issue I offered up books about American history, and in the Feb. 2 issue books for Black History Month.

WORLD periodically interviews George Friedman, founder of Geopolitical Futures and a leading forecaster of international developments based on demography, geography, military capabilities, and ideologies. We have run previous magazine articles featuring Friedman in issues dated Jan. 30, 2009; Jan.

An English poem originating around 1500, “Blowbol’s Test,” refers to “a March hare” acting erratically. Fast fact: During March, their major breeding month, hares attack other hares and leap vertically for no apparent reason. The “March Hare” is a major character in the tea party scene of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865). Kaiser Wilhelm in 1908 called the English “mad as March hares.”

John Adams once wrote, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.” In Why Culture Matters Most (Oxford, 2018) David Rose shows what happens when trust within a democracy evaporates. He notes the constitutional mandate for the federal government to “promote the general welfare,” and argues well that “the only way to promote the general welfare is never to promote the welfare of any individual or group.” Now that special interest welfare abounds, deficits in both dollars and trust surround us.

Our major political parties are like cracker boxes covered with as many endorsements as the shirts of NASCAR drivers. Democrats claim to be non-GMO and gluten-free. Republicans claim to be nutrient-dense and filled with protein. But both parties have “tells” like the ones poker players discern. Since some WORLD readers think I’ve been tough on President Trump, I’ll focus on two Democratic “tells” of the past two weeks. 

The observable universe contains more than 100 billion galaxies. Our galaxy alone, popularly known as the Milky Way, has more than 100 billion stars. Does that make you yearn for those days of yesteryear when many followed the thought of Aristotle and Ptolemy: Five planets plus the sun and the moon circling Earth? Was it easier to evangelize before people thought of Earth as a little sphere circling a fifth-rate star on a minor galaxy’s periphery—so why should God care about us?