WORLD members have said my American history reading recommendations in our Dec. 29 issue are useful, so here’s one more column of suggestions as we head into February, Black History Month. As a white person with African-American family members and friends, I may have some gnosis, knowledge, about parts of the black experience, but not epignosis, intimate knowledge from having lived it—so I’ve learned more by reading 30 books that show individual struggles in often-toxic environments.

I grew up in a Jewish household, went to six years of Hebrew school three days a week after public school, and chanted my way through a bar mitzvah service at age 13. I then started going evenings to a school for studying the Talmud, which is made up of ancient rabbinical debates. One edition runs 73 volumes.

The year of our Lord 2019 began with a declaration of war by 2012 Republicans against 2016 Republicans.

On Jan. 1 new U.S. Sen. (and 2012 presidential candidate) Mitt Romney declared in The Washington Post, “A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse. … With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable. And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.” 

William Inboden is a Christian with sterling establishment credentials. Educated at Stanford and Oxford, he gained a history Ph.D. at Yale, worked as a congressional staff member, and gained George W. Bush administration appointments: Department of State policy planner, senior director on the National Security Council.

One of our popular interviews last year was with Barbara Duguid, who grew up in the mission field and then earned a degree in medical technology that equipped her to head to 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. Some 1,200 words from the Q&A were in our Oct. 27 issue.

Here’s an abridged Chapter 1 of Freedom, Justice, and Hope: Toward a Strategy for the Poor and the Oppressed (Crossway, 1988). I wrote the full version a long time ago as a member of the Villars Committee, which led a partly successful drive to change thinking about international relief and development. The same old, same old still holds significant sway in practice, but some U.S. programs show understanding that person-to-person and church-to-church aid is usually far more effective than government-to-government grants.

Joel Beeke in Reformed Preaching (Crossway, 2018) shows how to preach to both minds and hearts, and illustrates his contentions with good analysis of preaching from the Reformation to Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Beeke criticizes sermons filled with subjective storytelling divorced from Biblical truth: Ideally, they should explain “how a sinner must be stripped of his self-righteousness, driven to Christ alone for salvation, and led to the joy of simple reliance on Christ.”