Deborah Rhode, in Character: What It Means and Why It Matters (Oxford, 2019), details the lack of character in many recent presidents and other leaders. She wants adults to “model and reward fairness, honesty, empathy, and mutual respect.” She wants each school to “have a plan for character education that stakeholders can help shape, support, and assess.” Rhode, though, ignores the most important factor of all—belief in God.

WORLD readers know it’s hard work to help those who have spi­raled into drugs, homelessness, and despair. That’s why many of them voted this summer for Watered Gardens in Joplin, Mo., as the 2019 grand prize winner of the Hope Awards for Effective Compassion. The ministry teaches residents to work for their room and board and eventually helps them transition to financial independence combined with dependence on God.

Myron Magnet’s Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution (Encounter, 2019) combines a biography of a brave Supreme Court justice with analysis of his most important decisions and dissents. Magnet portrays Thomas as not just a solid justice but a great one, “one of a handful of honest and brave iconoclasts who love liberty, especially the freedom to think for oneself.”

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year’s Day, begins this year the evening of Sept. 29. Some synagogues and temples will be crowded the way churches are on Easter, but most won’t have many worshippers on a typical Sabbath.

Do those who don’t know history repeat the errors of others? A book published 85 years ago—Jewish Theological Seminary professor Mordecai Kaplan’s Judaism as a Civilization—led many Jews away from Judaism. Books with similar themes today are undermining Biblical Christianity. 

What precisely do the poor of Brazil and Bangladesh, or the reporters at The Milwaukee Journal who write about them—see my previous Saturday Series essay—need to be taught? I learned a lot at our Villars conference three decades ago, particularly from Udo Middelmann, president of the Francis A. Schaeffer Foundation. A number of understandings have remained with me all these years.

I read the news today, oh boy / … I just had to laugh / I saw the photograph (the Beatles, 1967).  

British and American journalists since the 19th century have known August as “the silly season,” the time when both Parliament and Congress are out of session: less political news, more opportunity to fill pages with accounts of trivial or frivolous matters. So we’ve had photos of bare-chested Vladimir Putin, a dozen people squeezing into a phone booth, massive vegetables, escaped cows, and dogs on surfboards.

July was the hottest month ever recorded according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report. The scientists said July’s sizzling heat wave soared to an average global temperature 1.71 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average. The previous hottest month on record was July 2016.