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Never Alone In Lone Survivor, a memoir of life as a Navy SEAL, Marcus Luttrell explains one of the central tenets of SEAL team conduct: never leave a man behind. “It’s a sacred promise to us from our high command,” he writes. “That’s why it gets drummed into us from the very first day . . . you are not going to be alone. Ever.” The work of...

Israel: The Unfaithful Bride In 1993, scientists began to work with Eugene Pauly—or “E.P.” as the medical literature referred to him. Suffering from viral encephalitis, Pauly had lain in a life-threatening coma for ten days. Though he survived, Pauly lost memory from the previous three decades of his life as well as the ability to form new...

Yahweh: The Prosecutor When U.S. Army soldier Bowe Bergdahl walked away from his post in Afghanistan, he claimed that he wanted to report on misconduct in his unit. Instead, he was captured by the Taliban and tortured for five years. When he was finally released and eventually tried for desertion, the judge in his court-martial sentenced...

Plague and Promise In his book Surprised by Hope, N. T. Wright explores the surprising good news of God’s judgment. “We have judged apartheid and found it wanting. We judge child abusers and find them guilty. We judge genocide and find it outrageous. We have rediscovered what the Psalmists knew: that for God to judge the world meant that...

The Covenant Is Breached On September 30, 2007, four prominent atheists—Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett—met for a two-hour discussion, which was recorded and titled “The Four Horsemen.” In their conversation, the four discuss “the tough questions about religion that face the world today.” All four men...

Religious Ritual Is Rejected On August 28, 1963, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed more than 250,000 people from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. “I have a dream,” he intoned, calling on the crowd to imagine an America where racial injustice no longer oppressed people. Part of his text that day was taken from Amos 5:24: “Let...

A Prophet’s Anger—and the Pity of God John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden was published in September 1952; by November, it had skyrocketed to the top of the fiction best-seller list and has never gone out of print. The novel follows three generations of two families, including two brothers whose story parallels the biblical story of Cain...

See: The Faithfulness of the Lord In 2016, British citizens were riveted by a political drama worthy of Shakespeare. Prime Minister David Cameron resigned, leaving his Conservative Party in need of choosing his successor. Cameron’s antagonist Boris Johnson was considered a frontrunner for the post, with influential supporters including Justice...

The Day of the Lord On November 21, 2017, after a week of house arrest, Robert Mugabe, age 93, resigned as president of Zimbabwe. He had held the position since the country’s independence from Great Britain in 1980. Military leaders acted to remove Mugabe from power when it became clear that he was positioning his wife, Grace Mugabe, 52,...

A Jealous God Many parents have had a version of this conversation with their children: “If you don’t clean your room, you can’t have a friend over to play,” or “If you don’t return the car with a full tank of gas, you may not borrow it next weekend.” The child does not clean her room or return the car filled with gas—and then acts shocked...