Last summer I praised Richard Scarry’s children’s books for showing how everyone in Busytown—Stitches the Tailor, Farmer Alfalfa, Blacksmith Fox, and others—could work and contribute. That contrasted with the chance-emphasizing Candy Land game.

This summer my entering-kindergarten granddaughter graduated to The Game of Life. Created in 1960, it has a lot going for it. Everyone gets married. Most have children, represented as blue or pink pegs. Players also learn that it’s good to buy auto and fire insurance.

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, an author whose novels explored the experiences of African American women throughout U.S. history, has died after a brief illness. She was 88.

Skyward

Brandon Sanderson

Letters to a Romantic: On Engagement

Sean Perron & Spencer Harmon

Kevin Williamson’s just-published The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics (Regnery) includes excellent insights. Williamson recognizes that social media are primarily “a means of seeking human connection, not communication but communion.” He sees that those who have absorbed Darwinism need to distract themselves from their “eternal insignificance.” 

Just about every college student now learns that natural science is the supreme intellectual authority, while theology depends on blind faith, emotion, and cultural upbringing. In Scientism and Secularism, philosophy professor J.P. Moreland points out that such scientism—making science supreme—is not “a friend of science but rather its enemy.” Humble science tells us what is testable, but believers in scientism pretend to know about past and present what they can’t possibly know.

John Erickson doesn’t write parables, but some of his stories about the cowboy life he once lived would work well in church. The Bible refers to us as sheep, sometimes without a shepherd, but we also act like cattle and anger the Owner of the ranch.