With a theological twist and cleaned-up language, Swedish author Jonas Karlsson’s The Invoice (Hogarth, 2016) would make a great Christian novel. The plot is simple: A ne’er-do-well receives an invoice for 5,700,150 kronor—more than $600,000—from a bureaucratic agency. He calls a hotline to find out why he owes so much and learns that he grew up with both parents, had a satisfactory childhood, has been in love, enjoyed beautiful summer days, and so on. He’s assumed the best things in life are free, but in this story they’re not—and he has no money to pay what he owes. The plot winds on from there.

You can imagine the Christianized story, I suspect: God gives us the gift of life and, most of the time, good vibrations outweigh the bad. Most religions demand payback, so the faithful pretend the bill is small and sacrifice animals, money, or spurting blood to pay it. Christianity presents the entire bill, which none of us can pay, and then offers the good news: Jesus has paid it. None of that is in Karlsson’s short novel, of course, but Christians who pick up The Invoice can do eisegesis—reading into the text—and enjoy it all the more.

We do take a lot for granted. Raúl Gallegos’ Crude Nation: How Oil Riches Ruined Venezuela (University of Nebraska Press, 2016) notes that given the enormous ocean of oil lurking beneath its soil, Venezuela should be a rich country—but Marxist mismanagement has created hyperinflation and impoverishment. Foolhardy economic policies have consequences. Those of us blessed to be in the United States should not be quick to say, “That can’t happen here,” because it could—and we should thank God every day it doesn’t.

We also take for granted “our guardians in the sky,” protectors that make life on Earth possible: magnetic field, Van Allen radiation belts, cold trap, ozone layer, plasmasphere, heliosphere, the moon. In Why Many Scientists Believe in God (Encouragement Ministries, 2016), Myron Loss shows how God protects us in so many ways: For example, without our big brother Jupiter, comets, meteors, asteroids, and other debris would hit Earth at least 2,000 times more frequently.

Sometimes we take health for granted. The Pox of Liberty by Werner Troesken (University of Chicago Press, 2015) examines the conflict that has sometimes arisen between the freedom to inoculate or not and the fight against infectious disease, particularly smallpox, typhoid, and yellow fever.

I mentioned in our Feb. 4 issue Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible (PublicAffairs, 2014), a book that colorfully profiles the oligarchs, surrealists, and crime bosses who prey on Russia today. The book shows what happened after Western consultants during the 1990s developed “logical framework matrices” to achieve “objectively verifiable indicators of democratization” but took for granted an underlying ethic of fair treatment for all. The consultants could check off protections on paper—elections, check; freedom of expression, check; private property, check—but without an underlying Biblical ethic, those positives produce new opportunities for exploitation.

BOOKMARKS

Thomas Piketty’s assault on inequality four years ago (Capital in the Twenty-First Century) became a hit, and Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler (Princeton, 2017) shares his concerns; but Scheidel’s closing sentence is, “Be careful what you wish for.” Scheidel says “the prospects for future leveling are poor,” and that’s not a bad thing, because large reductions in inequality have come about only in four ways: mass warfare, transformative revolution, utter government collapse, and pandemics. Huge disasters lower the wealth of the rich, but in such periods the poor become poorer.

Two gutsy guys last year published very readable -memoirs that display thankfulness: Novelist Andrew Klavan’s The Great Good Thing (Thomas Nelson, 2016) shows his movement from Judaism to agnosticism to Christ, and Joseph Scheidler’s Racketeer for Life (TAN Books, 2016) shows how a former Benedictine monk and journalism professor became a pro-life leader. —M.O.