The editors of WORLD have put together another great issue, and it’s now available online. Here are some highlights:

Cover story: Mark Bergin, Jamie Dean, and Lynn Vincent on how soaring foreclosure rates are devastating some communities and raising questions about how much imprudent lenders and borrowers should lose, how much taxpayers should pay, and what churches can do to help.

Campaign 2008 Special Report: Warren Cole Smith on the inability of the religious right’s leaders to unite behind a GOP candidate, and how they face a wilderness road to the White House. Plus, Jamie Dean and Marvin Olasky take a look at Barack Obama’s historic speech, which has not silenced all critics or lifted all polls.

Religion: Richard N. Ostling on the unending debate over gays, as mainline denominations prepare for a new round of potential standoffs and more dissatisfaction on all sides.

Entertainment: Megan Basham on how filmmaker Tyler Perry is taking Hollywood with loud themes of redemption.

Thoughts: Insightful columns by Joel Belz, Gene Edward Veith, Janie B. Cheaney, Mindy Belz, Andrée Seu, Marvin Olasky, and Andy Obrochta, who writes on obeying God from prison.

For all you non-subscribers out there, we’d love to have you join our family of readers and not miss out on all WORLD has to offer. Click here for more info. (Subscriptions make great gifts, too!)

If you’re not a subscriber of WORLD — or if you are one and just can’t wait until it arrives in your mailbox — head on over to WORLDMag.com to check out the March 22/29 issue, hot off the server. Here’s just a mere sampling of what you’ll find in this HUGE 100-page issue:

Cover story: Marvin Olasky asks: What is campaign ’08 revealing about American culture? Plus a sidebar on Barack Obama’s church.

Abortion: WoW’s Alisa Harris on how faith is the motivating factor for pro-life volunteers.

Environment: Mark Bergin discusses the double standard in global-warming alarmism.

Military: Former hostage Kurt Muse shares with Lynn Vincent the story of the faith that lit the fire that freed the nation of Panama.

Thoughts: Insightful columns by Joel Belz, Gene Edward Veith, Janie B. Cheaney, Mindy Belz, Andrée Seu, and Marvin Olasky.

For all you non-subscribers out there, we’d love to have you join our family of readers and not miss out on all this magazine has to offer. Click here for more info. (And subscriptions make great gifts!)

Andree Seu this week has been thinking about faces….

I have been thinking about faces. When I walk the dog, a face is the first thing-and in most cases the only thing-a person will see of me. If I get to thinking about the number of people who are lost, and the shortness of the time, I feel sad about all those ships passing without a gospel word.

And yet the face does pour forth speech. I remember the first time I saw Marge Magnuson’s face. I was 23 and hippie-grungy and plopped on her doorstep, some unknown vagabond accompanying her “adopted son.” She opened the door and looked at me-and beamed. That was my introduction to Christianity.

What does your face say to those you meet?

I’m not imagining it. It is confirmed that children have more allergies today than before. And now there is a theory: we are too clean for our own good. Newsweek, Nov.5, 2007: “The immune system is designed to battle dangerous foreign invaders like parasites and viruses and infections. But clean water, antibiotics, and vaccines have eliminated some of our most toxic challenges.”

It is hypothesized that we have so laudably eliminated exposure to physiological harm that we are not strong enough to fight off the meekest microbial invaders: “Without hard-core adversaries…the immune system starts battling the innocuous — egg or wheat — instead….Children who grow up on farms, where they are in constant contact with dirt and animals, are less likely to develop allergies.”

I am wondering if it’s not the same on the spiritual plane. Are we forever wishing and praying away the very suffering and “hard-core adversaries” in our lives that the Lord has meant for our spiritual strengthening? Might we not be better off (and on better biblical grounds) praying for endurance in trials rather than always the removal of them?

For allergies, many scientists now recommend “controlled exposure” to harmful stimuli. Isn’t that exactly what God does?

This morning I was thanking God for the privilege of writing these little blog notes. I asked Him to let me take dictation from Him every day. I wanted my writing to be all of God and none of me. But immediately I realized that this is not God’s way. Even the prophets, who wrote and spoke as men “carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet.1:21), did not for the most part produce their utterances by a passive transmission from the Spirit.

God so accords his creatures dignity that He deigns to make us authentic coauthors with Him in His endeavors. He does not emasculate us to use us, but enlists the very personalities and experiences He gave to allow us genuine creativity. So Scripture is “God-breathed” (2 Tim.3:16) but it is man-breathed too, in a seamless operation.

I heard a preacher pray before his sermon, “Lord, get me out of the way of your Holy Spirit.” I appreciate that petition, but I hope he meant to request that God get his sin out of the way, and not his manhood. Likewise, God insists on using our agency to send out the gospel appeal, making flawed men ambassadors of salvation. Seems pretty risky to me, but somehow the job gets done.

It’s fall, and in the new upscale German Tudor “Keswick Village” a few blocks from my house, with faux gas lights and flower-festooned traffic circle, I drove smack into the effigies of men hanging on crosses. I counted at least four filler-stuffed figures with droopy heads lifted up on stakes, their arms tied horizontal to crude crossbars. The scene was surreal.

This being 21^st century Pennsylvania and not Sicily at Easter time, I recognized at once that this was not the “via cruces,” and there would be no throngs in the streets commemorating the Passion of the Lord. Such a thing could never be. The city’s sensibilities would not abide the cramming down our throats of a message of sacrificial death to save us from our sins. There would be an uproar, I can hear it now.

The city’s sensibilities would, however, abide a grisly display of wanton death reminiscent of the Klan’s work, or of Sennecharib’s impaled trophies on ancient Assyria’s walls. Bring on the ghouls of autumn, and don’t scare the children with your Jesus stories.

Andree Seu recalls her first experience with the Korean shoe custom. She thought some mystical Oriental tradition compelled Koreans to take their shoes off before entering a home. Only after she’d stomped fully shod into a Korean friend’s home did she learn it was to keep the rugs clean. In this week’s WORLD, Andree looks at how lots of mysteries and traditions look more attractive, more mysterious from the outside in.