“What’s troubling about so many of the boys I see in my practice, or the boys I hear about from parents and teachers, is that they don’t have much passion for any real-world activity,” writes Leonard Sax, a family physician and author. Sax is also a researcher who is very concerned about the way that boys are falling behind in school and in so many other arenas of life.

I would not normally list my own writings here, but my new book, Culture Shift: Engaging Current Issues with Timeless Truth, is released today by Multnomah Books. The book deals with the big landscape of Christian cultural engagement and looks at several of the most controversial and difficult issues of the era.

The twentieth century has rightly been described as the century of “mega-death” — death on a scale unprecedented in human history. The century was also an era of “mega-murderers,” with tyrants such as Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot perfecting the machinery of death. Tyrants in the past may have had similar visions of massive murder, but the machinery of modernity made death on this scale possible in the last century.

Just yesterday, a pastor told me of a candidate for ordination to the Gospel ministry who told the examining council that he had never shared the Gospel with another person one-on-one. That was shocking enough. But the real shock came when the pastor reported that the ordination council nevertheless recommended the man for ordination — to the Gospel ministry, no less.

Sen. Barack Obama has quickly emerged as a major political force in America, and if predictions and polling projections hold, he will emerge the big winner of today’s New Hampshire primary. This means that many Americans are trying to understand this man and the meaning of his candidacy. Few persons can match Shelby Steele in terms of cultural analysis. A research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Steele is one of the nation’s most insightful analysts on a host of issues, including race. His earlier book, The Content of our Character: A New Vision of Race in America is one of the most significant works on race to emerge in this generation. That book was brave, insightful, and deservedly influential.

Bret Lott, a Charleston-based author of best-selling novels, has edited a wonderful collection of Christian fiction in Eyes to See [Thomas Nelson]. Lott has chosen stories from masters such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Flannery O’Connor — joined by eleven other writers whose stories will make the Christian think and reflect . . . and enjoy reading.

Years ago, Walter Ong argued that our civilization is returning to a condition of “orality” in which the text gives way to the tongue. Specifically, Ong argued that this condition is actually a form of “secondary orality” since the culture had once been literate — but willingly gave up reading. The great civilizational achievement of literacy was being surrendered to a new non-literate age, fueled by television and mass electronic culture.

The release of The Golden Compass as a major motion picture represents a new challenge for Christians — especially parents. The release of a popular film with major actors that presents a message directly subversive of Christianity is something new. It is not likely to be the last.