Rosaria Butterfield’s third post-conversion book, The Gospel Comes with a House Key (Crossway, 2018), rightly challenges our natural tendency “to build the walls higher” and turn our homes into castles that exclude unbelieving neighbors.

David Gibson’s Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End—WORLD’s 2017 Book of the Year in the Accessible Theology category—reminds us how we should act at funerals. Instead of racing away to resume our normal activities, we should linger, realize it will all too soon be our turn, and ask ourselves, “What will my life have been worth?” This excerpt, courtesy of Crossway, points out the difference between wisdom and escapism.

Brett McCracken begins Uncomfortable with a hilarious send-up of many millennials’ dream church: architecturally contemporary and environmentally sustainable, organic garden, concert venue, fully equipped fitness center with CrossFit and personal training, and so forth.

A Boy Called Dickens 

Deborah Hopkinson

iGen: Why today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing up Less Rebellious, more tolerant, less happy—and completely unprepared for adulthood …

Jean M. Twenge

I dislike the term “must reading” when used about anything other than the Bible, but if you are wealthy and creating a foundation, here’s an almost-must: Martin Morse Wooster’s How Great Philanthropists Failed and You Can Succeed at Protecting Your Legacy (Capital Research Center, 2017). Spoiler alert: Neither you nor your money will live forever, and by the third generation your dollars may be used for purposes antithetical to your beliefs, so create term limits.

The Lost Girl of Astor Street

Stephanie Morrill