Canter Bridge

As an insatiable news junky and practicing Christian reader whose work takes me to many countries each year, I recently caved to my wife’s insistence and began to read the World subscription that a relative had given us.

Alongside the Economist, Fortune, Money, Christianity Today, First Things, and the the internet news, World has quickly become a staple of my reading disciplines.

This thin, edgy source of news and analysis intentionally views and argues the news from a biblically-informed world and life view. Any news—to say nothing of all data we process—comes to us through some default or chosen paradigm, so to make this observation is not to set World apart in nature from other magazines of its genre, just to be explicit about the lens its editors maneuver with a rather admirable sort of cunning and a voice that has coalesced and matured over the short years of the magazine’s existence.

For those who are somewhat familiar with the species and strains of Christian faith, it may help to note that World’s particular lens is common to ‘Reformed’ faith. Essential features of this kind of Christian commitment include the conviction that ‘all truth is God’s truth’. An outcome of this is a full engagement with culture in all or most of its printable manifestations.

So you’ll get movie and literature reviews as well as news and analysis. One tribute to this weekly is the comment that you won’t find pious prudishness, but rather a full frontal interaction with what Christians and others are reading, watching, thinking, and talking about.

For this reason, the editorial line tacks with the kind of ‘cultural conservatism’ often dismissed by wonks and talking heads, without the Southern-Fried Christianity that is too often considered to be its only generative motive.

Peek inside the credentials of its writers and opinion-makers and you’ll find Ivy League credentials, minus the kow-towing.

Don’t make it your only news source. But do read World.