This year, the Rite of Election may have been done differently than in years past. However, it is a powerful reminder that faith is a dialogue. It begins with a human heart seeking truth and concludes with a divine invitation.

Angelo Gugel, the Papal Chamber Assistant to Popes John Paul I, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI, died at the age of 90 on Jan. 15.

The “Melian Dialogue,” from Thucydides’ classic “History of the Peloponnesian War,” is the foundational text of the Realist school of international relations theory.

Although he is no longer the archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, in good health and full of energy, is by no means at the end of his ministry or influence.

P.D. James’ detective novels, featuring Inspector Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard, are every bit as gripping as those penned by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Edith Pargeter (who wrote as Ellis Peters when creating the “Cadfael Chronicles”), and Ann Cleeves. Yet my favorite work by the woman who was honored with a life peerage and died in 2014 as Baroness James of Holland Park is her dystopian look into a world of global infertility, “The Children of Men.

Back in the day, when the New Yorker set the standard for literary elegance among serious American journals, writers were driven to distraction by the fanatical fact-checking characteristic of the magazine’s gimlet-eyed editors. But the old New Yorker ain’t what she used to be.

In a 1974 address to a group of lay Catholics, Pope Paul VI noted that “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses” — an acute observation he later reiterated in his spiritual testament, the 1975 apostolic exhortation “Evangelii nuntiandi” (“Announcing the Gospel”).

Having recently lamented in this space that book reading is on life support in these United States, I find myself in the awkward position of recommending a made-for-television series as good preparation for the nation’s 250th birthday.