For this week’s Saturday Series, we excerpt, courtesy of Simon & Schuster, Anatomy of a Genocide, a book that needs a big “Caution: Brutality” warning on it. Omer Bartov’s masterpiece of ground-level history shows that for more than four centuries in the Eastern European border town of Buczacz (now in Western Ukraine), Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews mostly got along.

WORLD’s mission statement is “Biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.” That may sound strange on first hearing, because we often equate “objectivity” with neutrality, but a book of mine just published by P&R, Reforming Journalism, explains a Christian understanding that cuts against secular views. Here is an excerpt from Chapter 3. Look for an excerpt from Chapter 4 as part of our Saturday Series on Nov. 2.

John Erickson doesn’t write parables, but some of his stories about the cowboy life he once lived would work well in church. The Bible refers to us as sheep, sometimes without a shepherd, but we also act like cattle and anger the Owner of the ranch. In 1982, Erickson, the author of the popular Hank the Cowdog series of books, published a bunch of these stories in The Devil in Texas and Other Cowboy Tales.

Christian Smith likes science, which he calls “one fantastic way to know many things about ourselves and the world.” He dislikes the way atheists have turned it into “an imperialistic, exclusivist, totalizing source of any and all legitimate knowledge about everything.” In Atheist Overreach, Smith points out that atheism’s advocates advance crucial claims that are neither rational nor realistic, and that “deeply personal pseudoscientific commitments” drive claims that science proves atheism.

What precisely do the poor of Brazil and Bangladesh, or the reporters at The Milwaukee Journal who write about them—see my previous Saturday Series essay—need to be taught? I learned a lot at our Villars conference three decades ago, particularly from Udo Middelmann, president of the Francis A. Schaeffer Foundation. A number of understandings have remained with me all these years.

Matti Leisola was an upwardly mobile European bioscientist until he read a book questioning evolutionary theory. He started reading more in an attempt to defend Darwin. The more he learned, the more skeptical he became regarding “fossilized materialism.” The chapter titles of his book Heretic, written with Jonathan Witt, show Leisola’s ascent in knowledge and his descent in reputation: “Students Begin Listening … Professors and Presidents React … Publishers Hesitate.”

You may have heard that the materialist idea of everything arising from time plus chance is about as likely as a hurricane sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747. I like the analogies Hugh Ross provides in The Creator and the Cosmos even better.