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Joshua Wong is a young Chinese human rights activist, recently sentenced to 13 and a half months in prison on the Orwellian charge of “incitement to knowingly take part in an unauthorized assembly” – meaning, in Chinese Newspeak, urging others to protest peacefully the tyranny now throttling Hong Kong.

How bad a year has it been? Let me not count the ways. Good books can hearten us in 2021 and beyond, though. Herewith, then, some suggestions for Christmastide book-giving: 

When I was a young boy growing up in a Catholic community, the catechesis of the time tried to inspire the hearts of the young with stories of martyrs, saints, and other people who lived out high ideals in terms of virtue and faith.

Advent is the season of waiting. And, yes, at the deepest level of my being, I wait for a new celebration of Jesus’s birth in Nazareth so many years ago and for an ever-deepening consciousness of the presence of the Cosmic Christ in our hearts and in our universe (John1:1- 8).

In his 2003 encyclical, "Ecclesia de Eucharistia" (The Church from the Eucharist), Pope St. John Paul II invited Catholics to regain a sense of “Eucharistic amazement.”