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Podcast Pick of the Week: John J. Miller’s Great Books podcast this week features a conversation with Michael Ward (author of Planet Narnia) about The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis.

Kindle Deal: Jesus, the Final Days: What Really Happened by Craig Evans and N. T. Wright. $3.99. 

Seven of the best articles I came across this week:

1. Andrew Walker – Understanding Why Religious Conservatives Would Vote for Trump. Millions of religious conservatives will approach their votes with a political realism that requires balancing undesirable tensions and conflicting realities… Between Never Trump and Always Trump is a third category: Reluctant Trump. Voters in this category don’t get the fair hearing they deserve, since they defy the simple binary portrayal of religious conservatives as either offended by Trump or sold out to him.” 

2. Ross Douthat – The Age of Decadence. “We are aging, comfortable and stuck, cut off from the past and no longer optimistic about the future, spurning both memory and ambition while we await some saving innovation or revelation, growing old unhappily together in the light of tiny screens. The farther you get from that iPhone glow, the clearer it becomes: Our civilization has entered into decadence.”

3. New LifeWay Research – Mainline Pastors Drive Growth in Same-Sex Marriage Support. Today, as a decade ago, 8% of evangelical pastors say they have no issues with same-sex marriage. Among mainline pastors, however, support has jumped from a third to almost half (47%).

4. Daniel Burns – The Charitable-Giving Deduction Needs to Be Fixed. By unfairly privileging the charitable donations of the wealthy, our current charitable deduction also privileges the charitable causes favored by the wealthy, which turn out to be rather different from the causes favored by the rest of Americans.

5. Allie Morris in the Dallas Morning News – God and a Glock. A cottage industry is growing in Texas of security firms that train churchgoers with police-like tactics.

6. Justin Wax – Why 1917 Resonates With Us. My younger brother, Justin, is an Iraq War veteran and a military chaplain serving in South Korea. I enjoyed his reflections on the Golden Globe and Oscar award-winning film, 1917.

7. Aaron Wilson – 7 Details Christians Get Wrong about the Bible. Sometimes, in our enthusiasm to recall biblical stories, we entertain details that aren’t actually supported by the text.

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