Cities of refuge

The U.S. immigrant legacy and the welcome refugees receive in the United States offer relevant lessons in the debate over immigration reform and how to pave a way for foreign newcomers

Here to work

The passage of immigration reform may stumble on a path to citizenship that illegal immigrants don’t necessarily want

R-rated libraries

The U.S. library establishment is ideologically committed to providing inappropriate material to children, but citizens are not powerless to stop it

Powerful obscurity

Robert Doar may not be well-known, but he made welfare reform a reality in New York City

Automatic employment

Manufacturers say robots and automation, far from hurting workers, can save American jobs in the face of global competition

Voices

Andrée Seu Peterson

Our daily bread

P. has been out of prison for a year and is on parole. The Lord provided a temporary home on a lovely farm owned by an elderly couple, Don and Betty, for whom he cooks, cleans, paints, repairs the...

The Editors

Mailbag

‘Loaded questions’ Feb. 23 I agree that little in legislation so far proposed would stop the kind of violence that happened at Sandy Hook. “Gun-free” zones contribute to that kind, and...

Janie B. Cheaney

Peter's identity crisis

The Gospel of John is all about who Jesus is. That’s the burning question, asked directly by the Jews, debated among the people, demanded by Pilate: Who are you? Tell us plainly. He did tell them ...

Mindy Belz

Droning on

The U.S. decision to provide “non-lethal” aid to rebels in Syria is by most accounts a faint gesture, an offer coming—two years into Syria’s raging civil war—too little, too late. After U.S. Secre...

Joel Belz

Rough water ahead

If it seemed a bit too easy at the turn of the year to slip past that perilous fiscal cliff, and then a few weeks later to whisk unscathed through the smooth straits of sequestration, here’s fair ...

Marvin Olasky

Don't waste your stink bugs

Hatred served up hot. Here’s one from among thousands of internet murder tales: I don’t kill him at first. I torture him. I crush his legs one by one. Then I drown him. The object of...

Notebook

Lifestyle

Old lives, new life

Christopher Kincaid, 40, grew up in Las Cruces, N.M., as a Pentecostal Christian. He remembers being “freaked out” by sermons about the “end times.” He regularly witnessed people speaking in tongu...

Houses of God

Lutheran Church of the Reformation

Milo Waterfall, 3, of Alexandria, Va., explores the Lutheran Church of the Reformation, near the U.S. Capitol. The church was built in 1869. ...

Education

What billions buy

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the world’s largest philanthropy, and one with increasing influence on American K-12 education. It has heavily funded the Common Core, a national initiativ...

Sports

Lost in the Woods?

When the world’s No. 1 ranked golfer walked off the course during the second round of the Honda Classic March 1, critics pounced. Rory McIlroy had faced fevered international scrutiny before, espe...

Money

Pinch at the pump

Former NFL linebacker Nick Barnett is an automotive enthusiast, who regularly posts photos of his tricked-out vehicles on social media sites. His latest is a custom camouflage Ford F-650 with a 14...

Technology

Stop, frisk, and scroll

Suppose you were arrested—heaven forbid—for picketing an abortion center or absentmindedly bringing a pocketknife into a courtroom. If a police officer, after patting you down, began browsing priv...

Science

Raising the Dead Sea

Usually what’s dead can’t get any deader. The exception is the Dead Sea, a salty body of water lodged between Jordan, Israel, and the West Bank that has sunk over 100 feet in the past 8 decades an...

Religion

A choice and an echo

The conclave of Catholic cardinals chose Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, as the new pope, replacing the retired Benedict XVI. The cardinals selected Bergoglio, now Pope Fran...

Culture

Notable Books

Fatherless represents a new beginning for popular Christian author and radio host James Dobson. With the aid of best-selling novelist Kurt Bruner, Dobson’s first novel portrays a dystopian futur...

Movies & TV

Charming Croods

When it comes to computer-animated feature films, descriptions like “heartwarming” and “classic” have long been the domain of Pixar. Almost no one would think to apply them to DreamWorks, the stud...

Movies & TV

The Sapphires

The 1960s were a time of racial turmoil in America, but there was one medium that transcended class, culture, and race. That medium was music. Motown was in its glory day. Groups like the Supremes...

Movies & TV

Box Office Top 10

Cautions: Quantity of sexual (S), violent (V), and foul-language (L) content on a 0-10 scale, with 10 high, from kids-in-mind.com S ...

Q&A

The Technicolor life

Our April 6 cover date is Michele Bachmann’s 57th birthday. She is in her fourth term as a Republican member of the House of Representatives, representing a district adjacent to Minneapolis and St...

Music

Christian tapestry

“We went to a few churches,” singer-songwriter Christine Yvette told WORLD, describing her family’s attempt to find a place to worship upon moving to Sacramento, Calif., in the mid-1980s. “...

Books

Hardboiled fiction

Have you encountered two types of Christian readers and movie-goers? Christian No. 1 won’t read or watch a novel or film that contains any violence or especially any sex. Christian No. 2 will put ...

Movies & TV

Duck Dynasty

Deep in the duck blinds of Louisiana, there lives a clan of burly men and their devoted wives and children. Should you stumble upon them Wednesdays 10 p.m. Eastern on A&E (or in reruns of prev...

Movies & TV

The World According to Dick Cheney

The World According to Dick Cheney is not an examination of a polarizing former vice president. It is a history lesson molded by the perspective of the man whose history it aims to tell. Director ...

Notable CDs

Recorded before an enthusiastic Big Apple crowd and touching on eight different albums, this nearly three-hour, 13-song, three-disc, two-DVD document only scratches the surface of what the Ch...

Dispatches

News

GOP autopsy

A March 18 report by the Republican National Committee warns, “Unless something changes, it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another presidential election in the near future.”...

Human Race

Won Mitch Seavey, 53, became the oldest man to win Alaska’s Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Seavey, who won the competition in 2004, finished the 1,000-mile race on March 13 with a time of ni...

Looking Ahead

Easter Sunday Many Western Christians will celebrate the Easter holiday on March 31, and Pope Francis will on that day deliver his first Easter message in St. Peter’s Squar...

Quick Takes

Spreading the wealth Most people who win lotteries end up sending their money down the drain. Mark and Cindy Hill of Dearborn, Mo., are doing so in a different way: In March, they donated $...

Quotables

‘I feel highly responsible for his actions.’ Nathaniel Richmond, absentee father of one of two Ohio teens convicted of raping a 16-year-old girl. A judge sentenced high-school football play...

News

Southern strategy

For millions of Latin Americans, the selection of an Argentine cardinal as the newest pope of the Roman Catholic Church was an epic occasion. A celebrant outside the metropolitan cathedral ...

News

Silent treatment

Two separate incidents in Russia point to the growing trend of government-sanctioned persecution against religions not sponsored by the state. First, officers continue to hold a Presbyterian pasto...

News

Nihilists' America

AUSTIN, Texas—If an alien wanted to report to his home planet about life on Earth, he would be hard-pressed to find a place more data-rich than the March South by Southwest Conferences and Festiva...