Today is the fourth and final Saturday of Black History Month, which the United States and Canada celebrate in February, and the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the Netherlands celebrate in October. Eleven years ago, I attended a conference in Ethiopia on Africa’s Christian history.

John R. Erickson, well known as the author of the great Hank the Cowdog series of children’s books, knows cowdogs because he was first a cowboy. He worked on ranches in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles for eight years, and in 1986 wrote a book titled Cowboy Country based on his experiences along the Beaver River in 1978 and 1979. I’ve put excerpts from that book into four baskets labeled spring, summer, fall, and winter. We plan to publish in our Saturday Series a “season” a month from now through May. Here’s the first.

In today’s politically charged climate, some advocates of racial reconciliation lump together that great need with controversial political policies and positions. On Feb. 1, though, the first day of Black History Month, I ran across two gospel-centric articles that explain how Christians, both pastors and lay people, can help to heal America’s racial wounds for the sake of the gospel—without the political baggage.

Materialist historians see economic conditions as the main instigators of innovation, but the Bible emphasizes the significance of individuals. Judges, for example, is mostly a series of capsule biographies, not a chart of how many plows the Israelites had.

Alan Noble’s Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age was on WORLD’s short list for 2018 Book of the Year in the Accessible Theology category. Noble notes that the sower in Jesus’ parable found some good soil not by chance but because he or others had cultivated it—and we need to do the same in a culture where the gospel is one of thousands of options, and buffered selves intensely adopt stances after seeing compelling viral images on Facebook.

In 2009, Maverick Books published John R. Erickson’s Story Craft: Reflections of Faith, Culture and Writing from the Author of Hank of the Cowdog. With permission from the publisher, we’ve posted in our Saturday Series a chapter a month since August.

Today’s social justice debate in the evangelical church feels eerily similar to the debate that led to division in the Protestant church in the early 20th century. Then, the debate didn’t center on social justice but the social gospel.