By Cathy Lynn Grossman | Dec 11, 2020 Most titles slated for publication in 2021 were written before the Covid-19 pandemic, the divisive presidential election, and the traumas that brought more urgency than ever to racial and social justice issues in 2020. Yet their authors address faith, family, and society in ways that are relevant in any year. They can even point toward joy. It’s not a superficial “ephemeral, cliché-ridden kind of joy,” says David Bratt, executive editor for Eerdmans, for which he acquired Angela Gorrell’s The Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found (Mar.). Gorrell was studying Christian ideas of joy for the Yale Center for Faith and Culture when confronted by the sudden deaths of three close family members from suicide, addiction, and a previously undetected medical condition. “She found that authentic, lasting joy has ‘a mysterious capacity to be felt alongside of sorrow and even—sometimes most especially—in the midst of suffering,’ ” Bratt notes. “This hard-won form of joy will be the only joy that can really get us to look to the future with hope, even as we mourn those whom and that which we have lost in 2020.”