“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.

“Disappointing” is a continual refrain in Karen Johnson’s history of Catholic inter-racialism in Chicago from the 1930s to the 1960s. At every turn in her narrative, Catholic bishops, priests and laypeople — including women religious — come up short in their commitment to racial justice.

One of the many consequences of the conflicts we are living through in this country and also the church is that many hopeful, nourishing voices are getting lost in the din.

A Chicago Catholic newspaper at Christmas may not be the obvious place for a review of a science fiction story set in Africa in a future so distant they have no record of our present day.

Most biblical commentaries traffic in scriptural analysis dense to the point of being unreadable for the average Catholic, and also often irrelevant. It’s great to know the proper translation of this or that Greek word or the inside joke being made in the early chapters of Genesis, but when it comes right down to it, so what? Why should we care?