Emma Green covers religion and other spheres for The Atlantic, a venerable magazine that’s probably America’s best center-left publication. Here are edited and tightened excerpts of a Q&A that she and I had in April before students at Patrick Henry College.

On June 1, 1977, two people closed their eyes to the existence of babies. I’m thankful for the wink of one and still saddened by the blindness of another.

Quick story: My wife Susan and I, wed for a year, were nine months pregnant. I had a new job that required us to move 100 miles north from San Diego to Long Beach. We had a hospital to go to near Long Beach, so we decided to move before our baby was born. (Susan’s willingness was additional evidence that I married up.)

How China Sees the World, by John Friend and Bradley Thayer (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), stresses the troubling growth of Chinese racism, which first emerged as pushback against dominance by European nations and Japan. Then Chinese intellectuals channeled Darwin and argued racial groups were “either superior or inferior, modern or primitive, with the yellow and white races more advanced and civilized and the brown, black, and red much less so.”

If you haven’t taken a science course since high school or college decades ago, here’s some news: We know a lot less now about the basic makeup of the universe than we thought we did then.

Several decades ago scientists knew the universe was expanding. They believed the expansion had to slow down. No astronomer had observed such slowing but it had to happen because the universe is full of matter, matter has gravity, and gravity pulls things together.

Editor’s note: Marvin Olasky continues his monthly biographical series on key individuals from late 19th and early 20th century American history. In February and March, we looked at the life of John D. Rockefeller. This month we present Part 1 on the life of Grover Cleveland.

Christians know why Jesus had to die. Substitutionary atonement. Propitiation for sin. Payment for the debt we have incurred through willful disobedience.

Read just about any book of the New Testament and you’ll find plenty of Biblical backing for these concepts. For example, 1 Peter 2:24 tells us, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.”

I’m suggesting every couple of months reading lists for thoughtful WORLD readers. In our Dec. 29 issue I offered up books about American history, and in the Feb. 2 issue books for Black History Month.