With Christmas rapidly approaching, here is our annual list of gift recommendations for children and adults alike. Hopefully these suggestions will help with your last-minute Christmas shopping!

Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien (the initials stand for John Ronald Reuel) influenced millions through his popular writings of  fictional tales of a world called Middle-earth. His introduction to this world, “The Hobbit” (published in 1937), was later greatly expanded into an epic tale of war, courage, beauty, grace, and friendship called “The Lord of the Rings” (LOTR) trilogy, which consists of “The Fellowship of the Ring” (1953), “The Two Towers” (1954), and “The Return of the King” (1955). Many have read these works growing up; still more have been pleased by the cinematic rendition of these works by Peter Jackson.

Father Matthias Joseph Scheeben (1835–1888) was a German Catholic theological writer and mystic. The generations that followed Scheeben regarded him as one of the greatest minds of modern Catholic theology, but his writings have not always been available to the lay reader.

Sometimes, we Catholics get our heads stuck on a particular challenge in the church and don’t realize how it may be affecting other faith traditions. So it is with “The Great Dechurching” (Jim Davis and Michael Graham, Zondervan Press, 2023), a thoughtful and accurate depiction of the largest and fastest religious shift in U.S. history.

While as a deacon and a writer I tend to pray about the challenges that the Catholic Church faces (scandals, politics, programs, recovery from COVID, etc.), I completely missed the broader trends affecting virtually all Christian churches in America.