Protestants and Catholics for five centuries have debated the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith. In Long Before Luther: Tracing the Heart of the Gospel from Christ to the Reformation, Nathan Busenitz shows that theologians such as Origen, Augustine, Anselm, and Bernard of Clairvaux, who all preceded Martin Luther, understood that we are saved by God’s grace.

The hardest-to-understand book of the New Testament is superficially familiar not only to most Bible readers but to fans of the Left Behind series (more than 65 million copies sold) as well as The Book of Revelation for Dummies: four horsemen of the apocalypse, seven seals, plagues and disasters, Antichrist, Armageddon, Christ’s return, a new Jerusalem, wow! But Richard D.

We will celebrate this coming Wednesday the work of a brilliant writer, Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson. Here’s what’s less known: Jefferson worked hard at writing because he was a lousy speaker. I’ll discuss that, then note his way of neutralizing Christian opponents, then look at his small government principles and his pacifism in regard to Britain—and how that worked out. He’s a fascinating figure.

John F. Cogan’s history of federal entitlement programs, The High Cost of Good Intentions, warns us that the ice we skate on has grown thinner decade-by-decade. Both Democrats and Republicans are now kicking the can down the road, apparently uncaring that the iceman soon cometh. Cogan provides useful case studies of measures that were sensible, self-limiting, and freedom-enhancing, like the GI Bill, and current ones that grow as each benefit expansion leads to future entitlements that leave worthy original goals no longer recognizable.

The cover story in WORLD’s June 30, 2018 issue shows how a bill to ban “conversion therapy” (sometimes called “reparative therapy”) in California, even for consenting adults, is in a pipeline to passage. Since press coverage has been biased in favor of the bill, here are a few voices of opposition from testimony before the California Assembly’s Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee.

In Darwin’s House of Cards, Tom Bethell gives us a gusty and gutsy look at a dogma edging beyond its sell-by date. He notes that today’s progressives aren’t progressive—they are defending mid-19th century scientific understanding. As Bethell writes, “Darwin and his contemporaries had no way of knowing just how complex a cell is. Today it is sometimes compared to a high-tech factory. But a cell is far more complex than that. For one thing, factories can’t replicate themselves.”