Magazine, Past Issue
Jan/Feb 2026 issue
WHAT'S INSIDE: You can't fight screens with nothing
This time around we've got two contests, and the start of RP's Bucket List Book Club, where we can join together to make 2026 the year we start reading again.
And the theme of the issue is, "We are not trashcans," with five different pieces about learning to discern in our media consumption.
We have three options for you to read the magazine. First up is the flipbook edition, with its turning pages. Below that, you can click the cover to view the pdf in your browser, or click here to download the PDF (9 mb)
INDEX: RP Contest: Your Turn / Join RP's Bucket List Book Club / If grades are dropping should we drop grades? / Blessed are the Busy? Should we be trying to be less busy or be busy better? / You can save pre-born lives this summer / When God goes to war: holiness, judgement, and hope / We believe... 1,700 years ago - on the Council of Nicaea and the Nicaea Creed / Moth and Rust Resolutions / Created to create: a practical person's thoughts on creativity / Tidbits relevant and not so to Christian life / 12 free must-see documentaries for Christian families / Come + Explore: You might be eating candy for dinner and we're not talking about food / We are not trashcans: how to analyze stories / Do you realize what you're listening to? / Christian fantasy after Tolkien – a Top 10 / 8 errors parents make and how to avoid them / Crossword / The Lifelong Battle / Will AI replace reading? / Navigating failure / The evil of simplicity / More than a magazine / The "can you build it better? contest / E.D. Update: A home to grow in - introducing our new Real Talk studio
News
When reporting both sides is bias disguised
When Alberta's government began, last year, to respond to the problem of sexually-explicit materials on public school library shelves, it might have seemed to some that the media coverage was fair. After all, both sides were given space to have their say.
So, for example, when CBC ran the headline, "Alberta bans school library books it deems sexually explicit," it stated as fact that the government was banning books – how's that for politically-charged terminology? – but they did include, in a smaller sub-head, that the "Education minister says province's new standards aren't about banning books."
Not quite equal time, but... fair-ish, right?
In CBC reporter Emily Williams' piece "The Handmaid's Tale among more than 200 books to be pulled at Edmonton public schools" she shared the public schools' objection: "As a result of the ministerial order, several excellent books will be removed from our shelves this fall."
But Williams also included Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides' response that his government wasn't trying to ban The Handmaid's Tale, but was instead trying to get sexually-explicit sexual content off public school shelves.
So, both sides, right?
Well, as Christian journalist Ted Byfield noted, there's not just two sides to the story. And one of the sides the media didn't report on here is telling, and much more important than what they focused on.
Williams' article included the list of the more than 200 books the Edmonton Public School (EPS) system said they were going to have to pull of their shelves to comply with the government's mandate. This wasn't a list the government made; this was the list the EPS made and then used to characterize the government's efforts as book banning – going after famed and problematic classics like Brave New World, Atlas Shrugged and, yes, The Handmaid's Tale.
Still, EPS's list was there, available for anyone interested to peruse. And isn't that what reporters do? Peruse, investigate, uncover? Well, some perusing was done, but almost exclusively in one direction. CBC and other outlets reported on the aforementioned famous books that made the government look like book banners.
But what reporters didn't do is look into how much filth there actually was on the list. The press didn't look for books that'd confirm the need for winnowing. They didn't question why the public schools were being so negligent as to expose our children to pornography. They didn't highlight the outrageous examples of available comics that had pages of nudity, graphically depicted oral sex, showed a child being stripped for abuse, and showed another being sexually humiliated. Those details were made available by the Minister of Education, but they didn't show up in any of mainstream media accounts I read.
So I did some of the work they wouldn't, checking up on the list's first 25 books as they were presented alphabetically. I discovered that 15 were clearly and wildly inappropriate. These were all books that, had they been read aloud or shown at a public school board meeting, would likely have gotten the presenting parent booted. The 15 books were:
- 9 books from Kanoko Sakurakoji’s Black Bird manga series
- Kentarō Miura’s graphic novel Berserk, Vol. 3
- Talia Hibbert’s Act Your Age, Eve Brown
- Neil Gaiman‘s American Gods
- Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho
- Daria Snadowsky‘s Anatomy of a boyfriend
- Emily Henry‘s Beach Read
15 out of 25 amounts to 60%. And that's just the titles that were clearly crazy, with secular reviewers describing them as "rapey" and "sexually obsessed." The other 10 weren't necessarily good either; it was just that in my research it wasn't as clear that they were so blaringly bad.
The mainstream media made this about the 5 or 6 "classics" at risk. I don’t know if that 60% rate would have held up, but if so, then that would have amounted to more than 100 obscene books – 60% of 226 works out to 135– being pushed on kids via the province's public school libraries. Where were the "Edmonton Public Schools own up to being porn-peddlers" headlines?
While Christians should attempt to be fair – reporting on others as we would want to be covered ourselves (Matt. 7:12) – Reformed Perspective doesn't pretend to be unbiased. We have our bias firmly in place: the Earth is the Lord's, and everything in it. And with that bias comes a different sort of way of looking at the world, where teachers and schools entrusted with acting in loco parentis – acting in the place of parents – should, like a parent, be eager to protect the children in their care. That was the story here. And that was the story that was almost entirely missed by the mainstream media.
Today's Devotional
May 19 - Desire pure spiritual milk
“So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up to salvation - if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.” - 1 Peter 2:1-3
Scripture reading: 1 Peter 2:1-25
As we now come into chapter two, Peter gives us a >
Today's Manna Podcast
Thinking in Christ
Serving #1215 of Manna, prepared by D. VandeBurgt, is called "Thinking in Christ".
