Polarize might be 2019’s Word of the Year and publishing meme. Sitting to the right of my MacBook are recent books from two leading academic presses: Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America (Princeton) and Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford). What do we need to know? That polarization occurs when one side demands rapid social change and the other refuses to give in? When mass media ignore Biblical objectivity and celebrate subjectivity, that turns opponents into enemies? 

Brian Miller, former inspector general of the U.S. General Services Administration, is one of Those Who Dared: 30 Officials Who Stood Up for Our Country, according to a report from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Miller graduated from Temple University on a wrestling scholarship and from Westminster Theological Seminary and the University of Texas School of Law. He is now special assistant and senior counsel to President Donald Trump, but those doings are confidential.

Evangelicals and Immigration by Ruth Melkonian-Hoover and Lyman Kellstedt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) gives good historical perspective on varying Protestant responses to immigration: welcome, evangelism, settlement, and pushback.

Until this year, the first 20 pages of Witness by Whittaker Chambers (Random House, 1952) comprised the most brilliant preface or foreword I’d ever read. Chambers, who had crossed over from Communism to Christianity, explained that Communism is “man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’” And gods play to win, as Chambers goes on to show during the next 788 pages, which are good but not as good as the beginning.

P&R recently published my new book, Reforming Journalism. It’s available in English and in Chinese, with the goal of helping Christian reporters and news consumers in the United States and in China to think Christianly about journalism. Last month, we ran an excerpt from Chapter 3. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 4, “Navigating the Rapids.”

The Nov. 9 issue of WORLD includes editor in chief Marvin Olasky’s Q&A with John Peckham, the author of Theodicy of Love and professor of theology and Christian philosophy at Andrews University, discussing God’s goodness and the problem of evil. Here are more edited excerpts from that conversation, including questions from Patrick Henry College students.

Sweden, despite what you’ve heard from some Democratic presidential candidates, is not a socialist land. As even Wikipedia tells us, “The vast majority of Swedish enterprises are privately owned and market-oriented.”

Sweden is a vast welfare state, with income taxes up to 57 percent and a value-added tax of 25 percent on most purchases. That’s still not the same as socialism, where governments own all but the smallest enterprises and return to workers the food, lodging, and medical care that will enable them to show up to work the next day, and at some point retire.