Last January our committee of seven started on a hunt to find a picture book worthy of being WORLD’s Picture Book of the Year for 2018. Our mission: to find a book beautiful to look at, appealing to children, and full of wisdom.

In Sweep: The Story of a Girl and Her Monster by Jonathan Auxier (Amulet, ages 10-14), Nan Sparrow’s first memories are of the gentle, quiet man who adopted her as an abandoned infant and taught her his trade. The Sweep added love and imagination to a life that, for most 19th-century chimney climbers, was unrelievedly grim. But now he’s gone, his only legacy a lump of charcoal that Nan can’t bring herself to toss away. Maybe it’s good luck, and she needs all the luck she can get working for Wilkie Crudd, the most heartless master in London. 

Few “Christian heroes” attract the admiration of the modern age more than Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His courage in standing up to an obvious evil like Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, his devotion to his family, and his musical and literary gifts are all virtues anyone, secular or religious, can appreciate. But our nonfiction winner presents a figure few secular readers can grasp: a man smitten by God from an early age. Perhaps the most sensitive treatment of this life can only come from an author or illustrator with similar leanings.

“One remarkable feature of Donald Trump’s constantly surprising tenure,” reported Publishers Weekly last May, “is this: he is a professed nonreader whose presidency just might launch a thousand books.”

Indeed, shortly after the election of 2016, the publishing world rose up with cries of “Resist!” Dozens of children’s authors expressed their dismay, followed shortly by determination to push back against this new wave of supposed racism, sexism, and xenophobia. Within months, books aimed at encouraging teen activism were rolling off the presses.

Illustrator John Hendrix’s picture book Miracle Man: The Story of Jesus gathered rave reviews three years ago. This year, The Faithful Spy, an unabashedly Christian take on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, has attracted even more attention. Hendrix, a Presbyterian Church in America elder, has a secular publisher that has never made an issue of his spiritual themes. “Christians are a market, and my editor recognizes that,” he says.

Many Bible-readers know Proverbs 22:6, which reads, “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” So do many publishers of children’s books, and they may not have the best interests of your child at heart.

Afghanistan 99.7 percent, Iran 99.4 percent, Algeria 99 percent, Somalia 99 percent, Niger 98 percent, Azerbaijan 97 percent, Libya 97 percent, Saudi Arabia 97 percent, Djibouti 97 percent, Sudan 97 percent, Senegal 96 percent, Gambia 95 percent, Mali 95 percent.

Those statistics display country-by-country adherence to Islam, according to surveys by the Pew Research Center and other organizations. If such high percentages of inhabitants have those beliefs, they are likely to be right, yes? How could so many people be wrong?