Books are more than just gifts; they're blessings in the form of words. This holiday season, give a gift that keeps on giving long after the holidays are over. Scroll for our recommendations of book-ish gifts that offer inspiration, healing, and nourishment through explorations into meditation, prayer, Indigenous wisdom, mysticism, and hope.
Winter is quieter than other seasons, sometimes lonelier, and it opens us to pay attention. Award-winning writer Marilyn McEntyre invites us into winter—when stars assume heightened significance and the ambient quiet of snowscapes (or fogscapes or rainscapes) stills us. In poems and life-affirming reflections on freedom, growth, quietude, and keenly felt hope, we learn to live in simple contentment. Without being saccharine, Midwinter Light guides us to seek and find what we need, right where we are.
Pray and meditate along with saints through this luminous collection of one hundred block prints by artist Kreg Yingst, curator of the Instagram account @psalmprayers. Mystics like Teresa of Ávila, Howard Thurman, Black Elk, and Fannie Lou Hamer come alive. Everything Could Be a Prayer is a rich resource for private prayer and communal reflection.
Ordinary Blessings for the Christmas Season
For so many of us, the season leading up to Christmas is a time of huge expectations, huge busyness, and often huge grief. Ordinary Blessings for the Christmas Season is a collection of prayers, poems, and meditations to help us recognize the holy beneath the hustle and hibernation of the season. The book includes blessings for all the ordinary and not-so-ordinary moments of the season, like addressing Christmas cards, setting boundaries with family, shoveling snow, and the first Christmas without a loved one. Also included are blessings dedicated to beloved nativity characters, blessings for each of the twelve days of Christmas, and a collection of sacred-word-inspired blessings that you can use as daily Advent readings. Let this beautiful little book be a reminder that the holy can be found in the routine and the ritual of the holiday season.
Ordinary Blessings for Parents
Those of us who care for children know how hard and heroic caring for young people can be. But when we're caught up in the day-to-day challenges of raising children, we can easily miss the sanctity of these moments. Gifted poet, empathetic pastor, and mom of three Meta Herrick Carlson names the moments we take for granted or that make us second-guess ourselves. Ordinary Blessings for Parents includes blessings for washing bottles, for belly laughs, for the death of a beloved adult, and for the legacy we want to pass on.
The ordinary moments of life can be sacred, if we simply take a moment to notice. From gifted poet and empathetic pastor Meta Herrick Carlson, Ordinary Blessings collects blessings for loving yourself, enduring hard things, authenticity, living with others, and the rhythms of each day. Pause, take a deep breath, and open these pages to find that you've been standing on holy ground all along.
When we picture the first Advent, we see Mary and Joseph huddled by a manger, magi, shepherds, and a bright star in a midnight sky. But this harmonized version has lifted the true Advent story out of its context—those who experienced the first Advent had to travel through great darkness to reach the hope that shining star announced. In The First Advent in Palestine, trusted scholar and community organizer Kelley Nikondeha takes us back to the landscape of Palestine and features the stories of modern-day Palestinians, centering their voices to help us meet an Advent recognizable for today.
When the Spirit speaks to him in his daily prayers, Choctaw elder and spiritual explorer Steven Charleston takes a pen and writes down the messages. This stunning collection of more than two hundred meditations introduces us to the Spirit Wheel and the four directions that ground Native spirituality: tradition, kinship, vision, and balance. We are all searching for belonging and a vision of the world that makes sense. Together we can turn toward the wisdom of our ancestors, kinship with all of Mother Earth's creatures, the vision of the Spirit, and mindful balance of life.
Native America knows something about cultivating resilience and resisting darkness. Choctaw elder Steven Charleston offers words of hard-won hope, rooted in daily conversations with the Spirit and steeped in Indigenous wisdom. For all who yearn for hope, Ladder to the Light is a book of comfort, truth, and challenge in a time of anguish and fear. Night will not last forever. Together we can climb toward the light.
What does it mean to become rooted in the land? How can we become better relatives to our greatest teacher, the Earth? Becoming Rooted invites us to live out a deeply spiritual relationship with the whole community of creation and with Creator. Through meditations and ideas for reflection and action, Randy Woodley, an activist, author, scholar, and Cherokee descendant, recognized by the Keetoowah Band, guides us on a one-hundred-day journey to reconnect with the Earth. In walking toward the harmony way, we honor balance, wholeness, and connection.
Shelia Burlock, Sylvia Burlock, Melissa Burlock
Learn how to love and care for your natural hair spiritually and practically. Uplifting and authentic, My Divine Natural Hair helps Black women embrace the God-created beauty of natural hair through inspirational readings and salon chair guidance on how to heal, consistently care for, and grow their coils.
Cat Psalms and Dog Psalms
Our cats and dogs have a lot to teach us about spirituality if we pay attention. These two illustrated collections, Cat Psalms and Dog Psalms, are gentle and earnest tributes to the hidden spiritual wisdom of our feline and canine companions.
