I drove to the library for a book by Max Lucado that might help me with my puppet show. I asked the librarian if she had heard of him. She said yes. We walked together to the “L’s” and she went through the motions of looking, but no Lucado was to be found between the Longs and Ludvigs.

What I did spot was a large free-standing rack of children’s fare dedicated to LGBTQ topics. 

Matthew McCullough in Remember Death: The Surprising Path to Living Hope asks, “How can you enjoy anything about life if you know that, in the end, the more you love something the more it will hurt when you lose it?” Buddhists say the answer is non-attachment to anyone and anything. McCullough shows how Christians can see that bid for support and raise it through Christ’s promise of eternal life. I hope you’ll benefit from the following excerpt, courtesy of Crossway Books.

Christian historian Herbert Schlossberg, who chronicled the relationship between Western history and religion, died Friday of pancreatic cancer. He was 84.

“Herb lived a long and very satisfied life,” his wife, Terry, wrote from Virginia. “He accomplished what he set out to do, and more.”

Os Guinness for decades has spoken and written articulately. He brings to bear honed discernment in noting, “The present obsession with President Trump, whether supporting or opposing him, is a massively distorting factor for a simple reason: Donald Trump is the consequence of the crisis and not the cause. … The crisis created the president. … Trump’s election was like a giant wrecking ball that stopped America in its tracks, and it allows space for Americans on all sides to consider where they see the republic now, and where they think it should go.”

The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic

Jennifer Trafton

The Flame Imperishable: Tolkien, St. Thomas, and the Metaphysics of Faërie

Jonathan S. McIntosh

The gut-punching photographs and stories in Chris Arnade’s Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America (Penguin Random House, 2019) explain how Donald Trump won crucial Midwest states in 2016. Free trade has reduced the cost of many items but also led to many factory closures, and Arnade shows us some of the unemployed and despairing. It’s easy to say “move to places where jobs exist,” but many are neither readily mobile (for family reasons) or easily trainable for different occupations.