Dear Reader,

I have a confession to make: I’m a recovering news junkie. Ever since middle school when I subscribed the The Miami Herald—yes, I was that kid who used his allowance money to subscribe to the local paper—I’ve had a voracious desire to be in the know. In the months after 9/11, I recall going next door in our apartment complex to watch the evening news with my 84-year-old Jewish neighbor, Dorothy. From listening to NPR to reading The New York Times, I’ve always maintained a regular rhythm of news intake. While I think the shift from TV to print has been better for my soul, I can’t say all that exposure has made me a wiser person. To adapt my colleague Matt Smethurst’s line, news makes us aware of everything and wise about nothing.

Which is one reason I appreciated reading Jeffrey Bilbro’s Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News (IVP Academic, 2021). With the advent of social media, where seemingly everyone has become their own pundit and reality TV star, we’re all drowning in triviality. We need help understanding the kinds of practices that shape us—like news that along with informing us is also forming us. I’ll commend Mindy Belz’s (senior editor World News Group) review of Bilbro’s book along with Tim Keller’s review of a book about social-media polarization. As he summarizes, “Social media drive extremism and mute moderates. They magnify and empower the voices of those at the political and cultural extremes of left and right while stifling the voices of those in the middle.”

Books, at their incisive best, illumine our times without falling prey to polemical histrionics and exaggeration that plagues so much of today’s media.

Happy reading!

Ivan Mesa

Editorial Director