John S. Dickerson’s Hope of Nations (Zondervan, 2018) sees persecution of Christians growing and wants us not to lose hope. He notes that Christians “cannot control what children are being taught by American society at large … cannot control the direction of cultural change in the U.S.

In the introduction to my interview with Eric Metaxas in the current issue of WORLD Magazine, I wrote that he defies my usual classification of people into either talkers or writers, because he is both—and so was Martin Luther, the latest subject for a Metaxas biography. Luther did not have his own talk show, but his dinner table was a talk show that, edited into Table Talk, is now freely available online.

What’s the Big Deal? 

Stan and Brenna Jones

Charlan Nemeth’s In Defense of Troublemakers (Basic, 2018) makes a good point—hearing diverse perspectives makes for better decisions—and makes it again and again, turning what would be a good article into a repetitive book that will have readers at first nodding, and then nodding off to sleep.

The Worship Pastor 

Zac Hicks

Protestants and Catholics for five centuries have debated the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith. In Long Before Luther: Tracing the Heart of the Gospel from Christ to the Reformation, Nathan Busenitz shows that theologians such as Origen, Augustine, Anselm, and Bernard of Clairvaux, who all preceded Martin Luther, understood that we are saved by God’s grace.

The hardest-to-understand book of the New Testament is superficially familiar not only to most Bible readers but to fans of the Left Behind series (more than 65 million copies sold) as well as The Book of Revelation for Dummies: four horsemen of the apocalypse, seven seals, plagues and disasters, Antichrist, Armageddon, Christ’s return, a new Jerusalem, wow! But Richard D.