Voting for the winner of the 2018 Hope Awards for Effective Compassion has one week to go. If you haven’t already read about the regional winners and voted, please visit our Hope Awards page by Sept. 8 and vote for whichever of the Final Five moves you the most.

To warm you up more for that effort, here is a transcript of a talk about helping the poor I gave four years ago at a national conference of philanthropists.

Warning: This special report contains disturbing information about alleged ministerial abuse.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled publication plan to bring you a special report on sexual abuse within Protestant churches.

F.H. Buckley’s The Republican Workers Party (Encounter, 2018) is the best explanation of Trumpism that I’ve seen. President Trump himself used that “Workers Party” term at the 2017 CPAC conference to describe what he wanted the GOP to be, and Buckley (who has written speeches for Trump) doesn’t shy away from its Marxist sound—except that he calls himself a “right-wing Marxist” and says, “I see public policy questions through an economic prism.”

“He knew from at least June 23, 2013, that McCarrick was a serial predator. … Pope Francis must be the first to set a good example for cardinals and bishops who covered up McCarrick’s abuses and resign along with all of them.”

Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, begins the evening of Sept. 9. This is the 70th year of Israel’s existence, which owes much to the support various camps of U.S. Christians have given it—for various reasons.

Some Christians are supersessionists who say Christians have replaced Israelites as God’s people. Most still cheer for Israel because it is a David amid Goliaths. Others, dispensationalists, say the spiritual sons of Abraham have not replaced the physical sons, so the land of Israel is still the Jewish inheritance.

Aaron Rhodes begins The Debasement of Human Rights (Encounter, 2018) with a strong sentence: “The international community’s concept of human rights lacks intellectual and moral integrity.” He shows that expansion of “human rights” from an emphasis on liberty to include government provision of food, housing, and healthcare kills the term’s essential meaning and moral power, and even becomes “moral justification for strong states to restrict freedom in return for security.”

The Pacific, contrary to its name, has violent waves, but the smoothest boat ride I ever had was crossing that ocean to Japan on a freighter loaded with Canadian timber. That’s because the ship had “bottom,” as 18th-century mariners would say, with all that wooden ballast keeping it steady even during high winds and waves. Journalists back then applied the same word to leaders like George Washington who showed steadfastness amid adversity.