The past year has seen the publication of any number of books I've wanted to write about, but didn't. Here they are, as suggestions for Christmas gifts that will provoke thought and give pleasure throughout the new year.

---Michael Burleigh, "Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War" (HarperCollins). Beginning with his monumental study of German National Socialism, "The Third Reich: A New History," British historian Michael Burleigh has been restoring religious (and pseudo-religious) passions and convictions to their rightful place in the study of modern history.

"Earthly Powers" is a great, sprawling smorgasbord of a book, showing how the emergence of the modern state in Europe, and its displacement of religion from public life, opened the door to a variety of fanaticisms that laid the cultural foundations for the totalitarianisms of the 20th century (which Burleigh explores in depth in a follow-on volume, "Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics from the Great War to the War on Terror," to be published in the U.S. in March 2007). Demanding but richly rewarding reading, and likely to change the way reasonable people think about the past 200 years.

---Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), "Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures" (Ignatius Press). Here is the Pope's most succinct formulation of his proposal for a cultural renewal of the West: "Even the one who does not succeed in finding the path to accepting the existence of God ought nevertheless to try and direct his life...as if God did indeed exist."

Former Italian Senate president Marcello Pera, himself a nonbeliever, comments in a fine Introduction, "This proposal should be accepted, this challenge accepted, for one basic reason: because the one outside the Church who acts [as if God did indeed exist] becomes more responsible in moral terms. He will no longer say that an embryo is a 'thing' or a 'lump of cells' or 'genetic material.' He will no longer say that the elimination of an embryo or a fetus does not infringe any rights. He will no longer say that a desire that can be satisfied by some technical means is automatically a right that should be claimed and granted.... He will no longer act like half a man, one lacerated and divided."

Like the 2005 volume, "Without Roots" (Basic Books), the Ratzinger/Pera dialogue in "Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures" opens a window into one of the most important, and hopeful, conversations underway today.

---Mary Habeck, "Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror" (Yale University Press), and Lawrence Wright, "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11" ((Knopf). Habeck's book is the best single introduction to the ideas that drive jihadist Islam; Wright's is a brilliant piece of reportage, showing how the ideas Habeck analyzes shaped (and misshaped) the men who made 9/11 possible, ideologically and operationally.

If you don't understand how an Egyptian intellectual's unhappy experience of a church social in Greeley, Colorado, in the late 1940s eventually led to the deaths of some 3,000 people on September 11, 2001, you should: and Wright tells the story masterfully. Both books are must reads for any friends you have in government --- Habeck's, to explain precisely what it is we're fighting, conceptually; Wright's, as (among many other things) a chilling cautionary tale of governmental incapacity.

---Elizabeth Kantor, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature" (Regnery). Dr. Kantor takes no prisoners in this romp through the madnesses of contemporary literary theory --- which is, at the same time, a fine introduction to what we used to call the literary "canon." A couple of her characteristically bracing claims --- "most great literature was, in fact, written by dead while males" and "Jane Austen was a fan, not a critic, of 'patriarchy'" --- suggest why Elizabeth Kantor need not apply for a faculty position at most of U.S. News & World Report's top-tier colleges. But that's all the more reason to read and enjoy her book, and to give it to your favorite high school senior or college freshman.

George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.