When Abby Johnson quit her job in 2009, it became national news. Johnson was director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas and did not merely quit her job, but also changed sides in the abortion battle. Formerly an employee of the organization that performs more abortions than any other, she had come to believe that abortion was morally offensive. What was it that caused her to change sides? She witnessed an abortion. On the screen of an ultrasound machine, she witnessed human life being dismembered and destroyed, and in an instant she saw what she had denied for so long—what was being aborted was a baby, not just a potential baby or a blob of tissue. She had been an eyewitness to murder and not only that, but she had been complicit in countless other murders.

Unplanned tells Johnson’s story, from being recruited by Planned Parenthood while she was a college student, to rising through the ranks and eventually becoming the director of a clinic. She also tells of her own history of abortion and how she found forgiveness for the sins of her youth.

This book has several strengths to commend it—several reasons you may want to read it.

First, it comes from an insider’s perspective, clearly describing the arguments, verbiage and subtleties used by Planned Parenthood and similiar organizations as they promote their pro-choice agenda. They weigh every word and their every action represents a careful strategy. Johnson proves what pro-life advocates have been saying all along, that although Planned Parenthood does provide some valid and valuable services for women, it is at heart an abortion provider.

Twenty five years ago, when she was just twenty two, Maria Garriott and her husband moved to the inner city. Settling in a poverty-stricken area of Baltimore, the Garriotts set about beginning a church that would reach out to the multiracial neighborhoods around them. A Thousand Resurrections tells this story. The book’s subtitle, “An Urban Spiritual Journey,” is instructive. While it would be easy to see this book as the story of the building of a church, I think it is more accurate to see this as a book describing the spiritual journey of the author. Of course she does tell the story of the church and also tells the story of her husband and children, but the core of the book seems to be the author’s journey. And it is a fascinating journey.

In 1998 Bruce Bawer moved from America, his homeland, to Europe. Stunned by the accepting attitudes of Europeans, and dismayed by much of what he had experienced in the United States, he moved first to Holland and then to Norway. But all was not as it had seemed. “The main reason I’d been glad to leave America was Protestant fundamentalism. But Europe, I eventually saw, was falling prey to an even more alarming fundamentalism whose leaders made their American Protestant counterparts look like amateurs. Falwell was an unsavory creep, but he didn’t issue fatwas. James Dobson’s parenting advice was appalling, but he wasn’t telling people to murder their daughters…Pat Robertson just wanted to deny me [as a homosexual] marriage; the imams wanted to drop a wall on me. I wasn’t fond of the hypocritical conservative-Christian line about hating the sin and loving the sinner, but it was preferable to the forthright fundamental Muslim view that homosexuals merited death” (33).

Already more than a year has passed since Terri Schiavo died. Though her story is well known and was the subject of near-constant media coverage, I will repeat the most important points. In 1990, Schiavo, then 26, collapsed in her home and experienced both respiratory and cardiac arrest. She was in a coma for 10 weeks and was subsequently diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). Her husband Michael was determined to preserve her life and to seek therapy to increase her quality of life. But after successfully suing a doctor who had failed to properly diagnose bulimia before her collapse, he had a sudden change of heart. While he was awarded over a million dollars, most of which was for Terri’s medical care and therapy, he did very little for her. In 1998, once it became legal to do so, he petitioned a court to have Terri’s feeding tube removed. Terri’s family (the Schindlers) fought desperately to keep her alive.

“As Americans we’ve come to tolerate, embrace, and even champion many things that would have horrified our parent’s generation. Things like abortion-on-demand virtually up to the moment of birth, judges banning the Ten Commandments from public places, a national explosion of middle-school sex, the slow starvation of the disabled, thousands of homosexuals openly flouting the law and getting “married,” and online porn creating late-night sex addicts in millions of middle-class homes.”

It was the late, great Francis Shaeffer who spoke of a group of people “who have both feet firmly planted in mid-air.” This phrase brilliantly describes people in our society who adhere, as much as anyone can adhere to such a system, to moral relativism. For one can only be planted so firmly on a system that has no foundation. Relativism, written by Greg Koukl and Francis Beckwith, critiques moral relativism and explores the myriad inconsistencies inherent in this position.

The authors launch a five-pronged attack on relativism. In the first part they help the reader understand relativism and see the three different types: “society says,” “society does” and “I say” relativism. In the second part they critique relativism, exposing seven of its most fatal flaws before turning in the third part to an exposure of the impact of relativism on education. In the fourth part they examine relativism in public policy, and specifically its application to homosexual marriage, abortion and euthenasia - three of the pressing issues of our time. The final part provides some tools to refute relativism.