On Nov. 30, writing team Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, who go by the single pen name James S.A. Corey, released the ninth and final volume of their gritty space opera “The Expanse,” which, for the past 10 years, has offered one of the most realistic-seeming depictions of what human life amongst the planets might someday be like.

On Nov. 26, Stephen Sondheim, considered by many to be America’s greatest musical theater composer, passed away at age 91. Since his death there has been an outpouring of love and commentary on his life and body of work, which includes “Sweeney Todd,” “Into the Woods,” “West Side Story” and “Gypsy.”

In late 2019, America Magazine’s national correspondent Michael O’Loughlin released a nine-part podcast, “Plague,” that dug into the Catholic Church’s responses to the AIDS crisis. It detailed extraordinary, previously unknown stories of nuns who worked with the sick; of the staff at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village, which served the gay community of New York with a level of care and respect not afforded them elsewhere; of William Hart McNichols, a gay priest who offered pastoral care to hundreds of men as they died; and others.

What if believers are responsible for secularism? That is the provocative question raised by “Secular Surge,” where, unlike practically every other argument you ever have heard about secularism, the authors actually bring empirical data.

“Suffering is inevitable, but not necessary,” writes Thomas Hora in the epigraph of this useful new book. And Hora presents the dilemma that has perplexed mankind since the beginning of recorded history: How can we find value in human pain and sorrow?

One of the great subgenres in pop culture of recent years has been “Hidden Figures,” stories of people whose lives have made a great difference in our world but who have been forgotten, misunderstood or overlooked, usually as a result of their race, gender, age or orientation.

There are two ways of thinking about pandemic-related pop culture right now. Some people have no desire to add the nightmares of a fictionalized medical catastrophe to our current life experience, perhaps don’t even want to watch television shows in which our own reality is acknowledged. Others I know have been binging every post-apocalyptic movie they can find on Netflix.

No book has helped my own relationships with people more in the last 10 years than “Awareness,” a transcript of a preached retreat given by well-known spiritual director Jesuit Father Tony DeMello. Presented in chapters of just a couple of pages each, “Awareness” proposes that each of us is so caught up in our own desires, expectations of others and personal history that we rarely see the people around us for who they actually are.

When British journalist and papal biographer Austen Ivereigh published a wide-ranging interview with Pope Francis at the start of Holy Week, the conversation attracted more media attention than any interview the pope has given since the early days of his papacy in 2013.

Pope Francis’ papacy was not yet a year old in January 2014 when the Roman street artist Maupal depicted the pontiff as a superhero in a graffito in the Borgo Pio neighborhood near the Vatican. The image was quickly scrubbed away by local authorities (if only they cleared the Eternal City’s trash as efficiently), but not before it went viral. It was the perfect illustration of that heady time of great expectations for the Catholic Church, fueled by Francis’ soaring popularity, which in turn stemmed from his accessible approach and easygoing, pastoral style.