This is WORLD’s 23rd year of choosing a Dan of the Year, which began as a way to honor someone very different from the power-graspers Time used to celebrate as Man of the Year (now Person of the Year). Our honorees have included persecuted Christians in China and Syria, 21 Christians martyred by ISIS on a Libyan beach, and American teen believers forced to consider a question: “What would you say if someone put a gun to your head and asked, ‘Do you believe in God?’”

Daniel Vaca’s Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America (Harvard University Press, 2019) shows how some evangelical publishers that lived by bestsellers died by bestsellers. 

I’ve put together this Saturday Series piece before knowing the election results, but no matter what happens we’ll see lots of teeth-gnashing. That’s why I’ve moved up to now what I first planned as a December pre-Christmas special: Even though Christmas is still almost seven weeks away, we need to pay attention to what’s crucial rather than what’s ephemeral. So here are four columns—from 2002, 2005, 2007, and 2010—that may help us to concentrate our mind and spirit.

Which of my columns this year led to the most reader response? Was it a column about (a) Donald Trump, (b) Black Lives Matter, (c) COVID-19, or (d) dog teeth? 

ElShaddai Refugee Learning Centre in Klang, Malaysia, received the most votes out of nearly 9,000 cast in our 2020 Hope Awards for Effective Compassion contest. El Shaddai will receive $10,000. Our other finalists—The Dream Center in Easley, S.C., Gilgal in Atlanta, Overflow Café in Maryland, and Refugee Hope Partners in Raleigh, N.C.—will gain $2,000 each.

Canadian author and painter Michael O’Brien, 72, wrote Father Elijah and six other novels in a “Children of the Last Days” series. Seven other novels include Theophilos (set in Gospel times), Voyage to Alpha Centauri (sci-fi), and the magnificent (with occasional violence) Island of the World. O’Brien leaned toward atheism as a teenager and became a Catholic at age 21. For years he struggled to make a living as a painter, mostly on religious subjects in a neo-­Byzantine style. He became a published author in his late 40s, after many rejections.

Most of the reviews I offer on this page are positive, since in this limited space I want to suggest books worth reading rather than those deserving complaints. But once a year it’s worth pointing out the way so many contemporary novels display the hatred of family, marriage, and men that’s fashionable in some European and American circles. This year’s example: Inès Bayard’s This Little Family (Other Press, 2020) begins with a portrait of protagonist Marie’s almost-perfect life.