Polarize might be 2019’s Word of the Year and publishing meme. Sitting to the right of my MacBook are recent books from two leading academic presses: Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America (Princeton) and Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford). What do we need to know? That polarization occurs when one side demands rapid social change and the other refuses to give in? When mass media ignore Biblical objectivity and celebrate subjectivity, that turns opponents into enemies? 

Until this year, the first 20 pages of Witness by Whittaker Chambers (Random House, 1952) comprised the most brilliant preface or foreword I’d ever read. Chambers, who had crossed over from Communism to Christianity, explained that Communism is “man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’” And gods play to win, as Chambers goes on to show during the next 788 pages, which are good but not as good as the beginning.

Sweden, despite what you’ve heard from some Democratic presidential candidates, is not a socialist land. As even Wikipedia tells us, “The vast majority of Swedish enterprises are privately owned and market-oriented.”

Sweden is a vast welfare state, with income taxes up to 57 percent and a value-added tax of 25 percent on most purchases. That’s still not the same as socialism, where governments own all but the smallest enterprises and return to workers the food, lodging, and medical care that will enable them to show up to work the next day, and at some point retire. 

Nigeria’s Cross River state is one of the country’s prime tourist destinations, with its lush green trees, dew-covered hills, and cool tropical climate.

Located on Nigeria’s southern coast, Cross River is home to multiple resorts and attractions. In Calabar, the state capital, a bronze statue of a fisherman with his hook in the mouth of a fish symbolizes the vibrancy of the port city.

But the waterways also speak to a dark history. The Calabar River served as a transit point during the transatlantic slave trade that began early in the 15th century.

The accumulation of 20-plus years in the same house can be intimidating—not so much from the plastic bins stacked on garage shelves, but from the little stuff, the mementos that weep when you think about pitching them. Do you have boxes of old photographs under the bed or in the closet? Vacation pics from the Grand Canyon or that collection passed down from Great-Aunt Susan that never got labeled (who are these people)? As I was sorting through my last box of photos, and categorizing them to put in another box, it struck me that none of them were more recent than 2008.

On a Tuesday morning, a loud bell echoed across Mary Slessor Academy in Calabar, the capital city of Cross River state in southern Nigeria. Students wearing navy blue and green uniforms scurried to line up for morning devotions and announcements.

On the fenced property sat different classroom blocks for nursery to high-school students. In front of the high-school block, students sang praise songs and hymns. One teacher led a Scripture reading and shared words of encouragement.

Needing escape from the disappointing escapism of midsummer 2019 Philadelphia Phillies baseball, I read of happier times two hours north as obligingly recorded by the pitcher for the pennant-winning turn-of-the-20th-century New York Giants.