With the coronavirus, a presidential election, and racial tensions dominating the headlines in 2020, it is no surprise that stories related to those topics dominate the Top 25 countdown of the best read articles and columns on WORLD’s website this year.

Click the headline links below and take a trip back through the past 12 months of WORLD’s Biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

John R. Erickson, author of 70 Hank the Cowdog books and other ranch-based stories, knows his subject matter. He was a working cowboy and ranch manager in Texas and Oklahoma. A few weeks ago, he shared thoughts on some strange animal behaviors, including from buzzards. Here are two more essays from him as part of our Saturday Series. —Marvin Olasky

In this year of polarization and racial tension, Elizabeth Varon’s Armies of Deliverance shows how Northern leaders in 1861 didn’t believe that the United States was deeply polarized. They thought wealthy plantation owners were not only bossing slaves but bossing poor whites as well, and the Civil War would be “a crusade to deliver the Southern masses from slaveholder domination.”

We’re hearing lots of pessimistic talk about the state of media and public opinion in America, with the suggestion that we’re in worse shape now than ever before. Much of that concern is warranted, but I should point out that it’s nothing new. Walter Lippmann, one of the founders of The New Republic in 1914, was an influential journalist and columnist for more than half a century, with unofficial titles like “the father of modern journalism.”

Three decades ago wordsmith Philip Yancey turned theological reflections by Dr. Paul Brand, an innovator in treating leprosy, into two short books. Last year, InterVarsity Press combined the two into one book, Fearfully and Wonderfully. Brand brilliantly describes how human traits decried by evolutionists—why does God have us feel so much pain?—are actually lifesavers. Here’s part of Chapter 1, courtesy of InterVarsity Press and Hodder & Stoughton.

A few years ago, John R. Erickson shared some tales of puzzling behaviors he has observed in animals over his years as a rancher. He noted that British scientist Rupert Sheldrake, in his book Dogs that Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals, combined stories from many animal owners suggesting that there’s still much we don’t understand about the creatures who live alongside us—be they domestic or wild.

Some evangelicals go with David Barton’s contention that America’s 18th-century founders wanted an explicitly Christian nation. Others seize on Mark Noll’s skepticism. Mark David Hall’s Did America Have a Christian Founding? is in the middle: Hall views many founders as Christian and others not, but the Constitution and other early documents certainly emerged from a Biblical worldview. Here’s an excerpt that summarizes Hall’s perspective, courtesy of Thomas Nelson.