Two years ago, as part of WORLD Digital’s Saturday Series, we published statements I made in 2008 during a debate with Christopher Hitchens at The University of Texas at Austin (Part 1 and Part 2). Hitchens claimed nothing good came out of Christianity.

Thomas A. Robinson’s Who Were the First Christians? Dismantling the Urban Thesis critiques the now-common understanding that early Christianity had an urban basis and from city strongholds went out into the countryside. Robinson shows how we have only guestimates about the overall population of the Roman Empire as well as how many Christians and Jews there were, so we should be wary of all demographic claims.

Editor’s note: WORLD editor in chief Marvin Olasky gave this talk at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., on March 29.

Thanks for inviting me. In the next 20 minutes I want to give you five understandings that defined compassionate conservatism in the early 1990s. Then, five promising events and trends in the late 1990s. Third, five problems that killed compassionate conservatism in the early 2000s. I’ll conclude by noting what it will take to revive it. But I want to start with a tribute to one mostly forgotten Washingtonian.

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.

Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique is a 962-page destruction of the well-funded BioLogos campaign to sell macroevolution to Christians. Thoughtful chapters by scholars and scientists show that neo-Darwinism fails scientifically, with neither the fossil record nor genetics undermining the first two chapters of Genesis. Transitional ape-to-human fossils remain conspicuous by their absence, and humans and chimpanzees are not similar at the genetic level. We cannot worship both God and current science dogma.