In Union with Christ—a runner-up for WORLD’s 2016 Book of the Year in the Accessible Theology category—Los Angeles pastor Rankin Wilbourne doesn’t say Christ-bonding is easy, but he rightly insists that it’s essential and explains how tough times can produce great benefits. Imagine a storm blowing a sailboat so fast that all night long death seems moments away, but in the morning you’re hundreds of miles closer to your destination.

One week ago, a death in Charlottesville, Va., showed us the danger embedded in our current national divisiveness. We have great need for the transforming truth that the Bible brings to bear not just on personal questions but on how to live together in a providentially pluralistic country. 

Scott Allen, president of the Disciple Nations Alliance, has seen societies abroad wrecked when one group of humans considers itself superior, or more highly evolved, than another. 

In The Upside of Inequality, a runner-up for WORLD’s 2016 Book of the Year in the Understanding America category, Edward Conard attacks the notion that the richest 1 percent of Americans are causing slower or no wage growth among the rest. He shows how innovators or entertainers who achieve economywide success will multiply their money in comparison with teachers or bus drivers who can’t serve more people than they used to.

Editor’s note: The following is adapted from a series of articles originally published in a special issue of WORLD Magazine on March 2, 2002.

I’m often asked to summarize highlights and lowlights of Jewish history.

Here’s a short course, which begins with God not giving His chosen people some out-of-the-way venue. Instead, He placed them on a strip of West Asian ground that forms the land bridge any Egyptians, Babylonians, or Macedonians out to conquer the ancient world had to march through.

Timothy Sandefur begins The Permission Society—a runner-up for WORLD’s 2016 Book of the Year in the Understanding the World category—with this sentence: “Not having to ask for permission is one of the most essential parts of freedom.” His last chapter begins: “The basic principle of the Permission Society is that freedom is a privilege the government may give or take away as it sees fit.” In between, Sandefur shows how the United States has morphed from its founding ideal of inalienable rights to an oppo

Douglas Axe’s subtitle to Undeniable offers a shocking suggestion: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed.

When Michael Denton in 1985 wrote Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, he was a lonely Ph.D. holder in biochemistry crying out in the wilderness. Now, just about everyone who doesn’t have a monetary or professional stake in defending Darwinism is seeing the theory’s ability to explain small changes but its incompetence in explaining macroevolution—and the adaptive transitional forms Charles Darwin predicted we’d find are still absent without leave.