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.

In Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, scholar Tom Holland notes that ancient Rome had no problem assigning divine status to victors, as measured by the power to crucify opponents—but to see a crucified man as God was anathema. He shows how the last-shall-be-first understanding has played out over two millennia throughout the West and then the whole world, as the cross became a symbol of courage amid adversity rather than disgrace.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that we lament on its Jan. 22 anniversary swept away the abortion laws of all 50 states. Those laws had not sprung up instantaneously. They were typically the product of decades of social development, discussion, and debate—and sometimes legislative wheeling and dealing as well.