Mother’s Day in May and Father’s Day in June are major card-selling and gift-giving holidays, but National Grandparents Day in September is virtually ignored. That’s too bad, because without grandparents we wouldn’t have those holidays to celebrate.

Here’s a humble proposal: Why not move Grandparents Day to April so the commemorations would be in proper genealogical order? Here’s WORLD’s contribution to that effort: John R. Erickson, author of 70 beloved Hank the Cowdog books, writes here about his grandparents Mabel and Buck. —Marvin Olasky

J. Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire is a good book to give to a Darwinist who is just starting to wonder whether he’s pledged allegiance to the modern version of the geocentric solar system: “Hmm, the new data undermine it, but add an epicycle here, a few fixes there, and some tweaks on the fixes, maybe that will work.” Turner raises deep questions with a measured tone that will entice scientific materialists to look in the mirror and wonder what they’re missing.

Two years ago, as part of WORLD Digital’s Saturday Series, we published statements I made in 2008 during a debate with Christopher Hitchens at The University of Texas at Austin (Part 1 and Part 2). Hitchens claimed nothing good came out of Christianity.

Thomas A. Robinson’s Who Were the First Christians? Dismantling the Urban Thesis critiques the now-common understanding that early Christianity had an urban basis and from city strongholds went out into the countryside. Robinson shows how we have only guestimates about the overall population of the Roman Empire as well as how many Christians and Jews there were, so we should be wary of all demographic claims.

Editor’s note: WORLD editor in chief Marvin Olasky gave this talk at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., on March 29.

Thanks for inviting me. In the next 20 minutes I want to give you five understandings that defined compassionate conservatism in the early 1990s. Then, five promising events and trends in the late 1990s. Third, five problems that killed compassionate conservatism in the early 2000s. I’ll conclude by noting what it will take to revive it. But I want to start with a tribute to one mostly forgotten Washingtonian.

David Gibson’s Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End—WORLD’s 2017 Book of the Year in the Accessible Theology category—reminds us how we should act at funerals. Instead of racing away to resume our normal activities, we should linger, realize it will all too soon be our turn, and ask ourselves, “What will my life have been worth?” This excerpt, courtesy of Crossway, points out the difference between wisdom and escapism.