With most secular publishers on the liberal side, and some conservative ones tending to scream, where’s a good place to go for thoughtful but not hysterical books on current events? One nominee: Encounter Books. For example, Abby Schachter’s No Child Left Alone: Getting the Government Out of Parenting (2016) shows how fathers and mothers who choose not to be helicopter parents often find a government helicopter flying overhead.

Another Encounter book, Naomi Schaefer Riley’s The New Trail of Tears (2016) shows that Marxist-leaning millennials don’t need reminding about the Soviet Union to realize how bad socialism is: They should just visit an Indian reservation. Land held in common goes untended. Entitlements kill entrepreneurial ambition. Windfalls distributed when a casino opens quickly disappear.

A little-known Christian publisher, P&R, puts out consistently thoughtful and generally readable books, while products from the better-known InterVarsity Press vary enormously. Ian Cron and Suzanne Stabile’s The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery (IVP, 2016) is a paint-by-numbers personality analysis book, but Derek Cooper’s Introduction to World Christian History (2016) is a good, tightly written history that shows the importance of Asia and Africa in Christianity’s first 14 centuries.

Another IVP book, Makoto Fujimura’s Silence and Beauty (2016) is an extended, poetic meditation on suffering and faith, prompted by a fiendish way of stamping out Japan’s growing Christian belief four centuries ago. The Shinto/Buddhist religious establishment created Christian martyrs but gave priority to pushing renunciations of Christian faith: Those who did not want to die had to stomp on a fumi-e, a portrait of Jesus or Mary, not just once but every New Year’s Day. They were, in a sense, recrucifying Christ each time.

Japan’s leaders stomped out any public profession of Christianity. We should pray that China’s leaders now will not make the same error. Os Guinness in another useful IVP book, Impossible People (2016), sees “What faith or ideology will replace Communism in China?” as one of the three questions crucial to the future peace of the world. (The other two: Will Islam modernize peacefully? Will the Western world sever or recover its roots?)

Guinness also decries “the casual twisting and discarding of Scripture by those who still claim to be faithful.” He points out that even the majority of homosexual scholars realize the Bible opposes their behavior, but “rottenness in the church” leaves some Christians adrift. One example of rottenness: Westminster John Knox Press is pushing Colby Martin’s UnClobber (2016), despite poor exegesis that makes the book unworthy of the great Westminster and Knox names. For instance, Martin argues that when Paul condemned homosexuality in Chapter 1 of Romans, he was just quoting the “nasty, judgmental attitude” others had: What Paul was really arguing is that opposition to homosexuality “does not reflect the truth of God.” Guffaw.

Bookmarks

Joe Rigney’s The Things of Earth (Crossway, 2014) shows how we should be grateful for all God’s gifts and generous in sharing them. Christians also should build alliances with reverent Jews and peaceful Muslims, as England’s Rabbi Jonathan Sacks elegantly recommends in Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence (Schocken, 2015). If you’re looking for a readable introduction to the life of Søren Kierkegaard, Stephen Backhouse’s Kierkegaard: A Single Life (Zondervan, 2016) will fit the bill.

Joseph Epstein’s Masters of the Games (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015) includes Epstein’s sparkling, Chicago-centric writing on sports: a good gift for Windy City denizens. Dads and sons with good baseball memories will enjoy Kevin Cook’s The Dad Report (Norton, 2016), which reports on father-son pairs like the Griffeys, Bondses, Boones, and Harens. —M.O.