In Richard Preston’s Crisis in the Red Zone, which made WORLD’s short list for the 2019 Book of the Year in the Understanding the World category, we get a page-turning account of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. With the current spread of the novel coronavirus, it’s a good time to read his authoritative account of a new virus strain that invaded the world.

Ten years ago, I felt honored to write a chapter in a book edited by John Piper and David Mathis, With Calvin in the Theater of God. Many of our readers have read John Calvin and are deeply aware of his theological brilliance, but here’s a slightly adapted part of the chapter in which I looked at 10 ways Calvin challenged his era’s conventional wisdom concerning government and economics. In this election year, as the full fury and superficiality of half-blind 2020 politics assaults us, let’s spend a few minutes looking deeper.

Let’s conclude Black History Month with an excerpt from a sad saga, Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise. Tisby shows how even George Whitefield, the great 18th-century preacher, took time off from evangelism to advocate slavery. Without it, he said, “Georgia can never be a flourishing province.” U.S. Constitution writers, Tisby rightly notes, “used black lives as bargaining chips to preserve the union of states.”

I wrote the following letter in response to a teacher recommending a novel written by John Green to ninth graders at my daughter’s school. Green is best known for The Fault in Our Stars, a bestseller that later became a popular but troubling movie.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision led to the legalization of abortion nationwide, the pro-life movement has grown and developed in several directions: political and legal groups, pregnancy care centers that serve abortion-vulnerable women and babies, and direct action such as sit-ins and blockades at abortion centers.

As WORLD’s Effective Compassion podcast series continues, this Wall Street Journal article by David Skeel from December asks the question: Do forgiveness and mercy have a place in our law? Skeel is a Christian, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, and a member of WORLD News Group’s board of directors. The two books he reviews sound interesting, but this is one of those reviews that’s valuable even if you never touch the books under discussion. —Marvin Olasky

As WORLD’s Effective Compassion podcast continues in its weekly installments, I’d like to take us back 20 years to a time when “compassionate conservatism” was getting huge attention due to presidential candidate George W. Bush’s embrace of it, but widespread confusion remained about what this new idea was all about.