Fifth and final in a series on the legalization of marijuana

In Greek mythology, Antaeus is the son of Gaea (Mother Earth) and Poseidon, the sea god. People thought he was invincible, but that’s because he kept his feet on the ground: Hercules discerned that secret and beat him by lifting him up so his feet never touched earth.

Barbara Duguid was an MK, a missionary kid born in Nigeria who grew up partly in South America. She earned a degree in medical technology that equipped her to head a mission hospital in Liberia. She’s the author of Extravagant Grace: God’s Glory Displayed in Our Weakness and Streams of Mercy: Prayers of Confession and Celebration. She’s also married to a fine theologian, Iain Duguid. Here are edited excerpts of our interview in front of Patrick Henry College students.

Sojourners and other Christian left groups like to think of themselves as cutting edge, but “Christian socialism” in America goes back the late 19th century. Professor Richard Ely, who founded the American Economic Association in 1885, strove to apply principles enunciated by Horace Greeley to all of American society and tried to meld the Bible and forced redistribution. He demanded that all unite behind the “coercive philanthropy … of governments, either local, state, or national.”

Saturday, Oct. 13, is the 30th anniversary of the most controversial questions ever asked at a presidential debate. CNN’s Bernard Shaw asked Massachusetts governor and Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”

This year, while editing many stories about sexual abuse accusations (see “Crouching at every door,” Sept. 15), I’ve gained a lot more sympathy for the women bringing charges. Before running an investigative story, I put reporters through an excruciating process of line-by-line questioning: How do we know this? Are you sure? Do we have the testimony of two or more witnesses regarding who, what, when, where, and—sometimes—why? 

Our surveys show WORLD members are great readers, so we’ve now regularized our review process: Three pages of reviews every issue, and four times a year additional articles on children’s books (late winter), fiction (early summer), history (early fall), and Books of the Year (late fall).

Since my feature in this issue is on history books worth reading, I’ll use this space to note three that aren’t. Let’s start with Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Tower (Penguin, 2017): Parts are fun to read, but I don’t trust its 560 gossipy pages that take us from the Freemasons to Facebook, touching on Chinese revolts, European plagues, the economic and educational consequences of the Reformation, the interactions of the European royal house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and the financial House of Rothschild, and much more.