In good times and in bad, our spiritual life can be a huge source of comfort and encouragement. Even more, our faith can help us build deep connections with those around us and guide us to build a world that is inclusive and welcoming of all. These books are overflowing with wisdom and guidance for your journey, offering spiritual enrichment regardless of where you are or may be going.
Spiritual Encouragement
Everything Good about God Is True
You know what you don't believe: about the Bible, the church, and God. But what if someone asked: "What do you believe?" In Everything Good about God Is True, Bruce Reyes-Chow helps us consider what it means to choose faith and how to create one's own "faith montage." What if we could articulate the gospel of love, humility, and justice? What if everything good about God is true?
Disillusioned by narrow theology and constricted dogma, people are leaving Christianity in droves. But Jesus describes the reign of God as a house with many rooms. What if there are nooks and crannies of faith we have yet to explore? In A Faith of Many Rooms, Debie Thomas claims that the space where God dwells is expansive and full of belonging.
Forged families can be authentic and life-giving. In an era when our relationships with our families of origin are more complicated than ever, Forged shows us how following the way of Jesus can lead us to a new kind of family—a forged family—and to a faith community that rejects hierarchical structures in favor of inclusive and loving friendships that last.
Spirituality and Culture
Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Susan M. Shaw
Who is God when we see God through the eyes of survivors? Many books have dealt with sexual abuse scandals in the church and the role of pastoral care for survivors. Others have provided liberatory readings of biblical texts to support survivors of sexual violence. Surviving God takes a new approach, centering the voices of sexual abuse survivors while rethinking key Christian beliefs, to lead us to deep healing and a transformed church.
What does jazz have to do with spirituality? In Thriving on a Riff, Presbyterian minister and jazz pianist Bill Carter traces the meaning and spirituality of jazz, weaving together stories from the history of American music with his own experiences and those of generations of jazz musicians. As we encounter the transcendence of jazz, we meet a God who not only embraces syncopation but blesses the swing.
A grandmother's theology carries wisdom strong enough for future generations. In the pages of In My Grandmother's House, now in paperback, public theologian Yolanda Pierce builds an everyday womanist theology rooted in liberating scriptures, stories from the Black church, and truths from Black women's lives. The Divine has been showing up at the kitchen tables of Black women for a long time. It's time to get to know that God.
Contemplative Spirituality
The world of contemplative Christianity has yielded to the same voices for too long, most from centuries before our time with lives unlike ours and experiences disconnected from marginalization and oppression. In Queering Contemplation, Cassidy Hall flings the doors wide open for all seeking an inclusive, authentic, and definitely more queer contemplative experience.
The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism
What exactly is Christian mysticism? Is it necessary for the survival of Christianity? How can it be relevant in our crisis-ridden world? Questions like these inspire The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism, a newly updated edition from beloved spiritual teacher and bestselling author Carl McColman. As a practice-oriented book, it is an invitation to embrace the mystical element within Christianity—a practice that can equip faithful persons with a joyful sense of divine intimacy, not just for personal benefit but as a foundation to a life of service and activism in the interest of justice.
Dive deeper with the free The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism study guide—perfect for church groups, book clubs, or individual reflection.
For centuries the practice of breath prayer has helped center people from a variety of faith traditions on the sacred in everyday life. In Breath Prayer, Christine Valters Paintner introduces us to this simple, meditative spiritual practice and offers beautiful poem-prayers for walking, working, dressing, cleaning, sitting in silence, doing the dishes, living in community—breathing the divine into our daily lives.
Inspiration and Prayer
Native America knows something about cultivating resilience and resisting darkness. Choctaw elder and Episcopal priest 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.
Also available from Steven Charleston is Spirit Wheel: Meditations from an Indigenous Elder.
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.
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.
Spirituality in Nature
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.
Many of us long for a deeper spirtuality. With an ecospiritual lens on biblical narratives and a fresh look at a community larger than our own species, Church of the Wild uncovers the wild roots of faith and helps us deepen our commitment to a suffering earth by falling in love with it—and calling it church. Through mystical encounters with wild deer, whispers from a scrubby oak tree, wordless conversation with a cougar, and more, Victoria Loorz helps us connect to a love that literally holds the world together—a love that calls us into communion with all creatures.
Throughout millennia and across the monotheistic religions, the natural was often revered as a sacred text. As we grapple to make sense of today's tumultuous world, one where nature is at once a damaged and damaging source of disaster, as well as a place of refuge and retreat, we are called again to examine how generously it awaits our attention and devotion, standing ready to be read by all. Weaving together the astonishments of science; the profound wisdom and literary gems of thinkers, poets, and observers who have come before us; and her own spiritual practice and gentle observation, Barbara Mahany reintroduces us to The Book of Nature. We needn't look farther for the divine.
Wisdom from Spiritual Leaders
Known as the godfather of the civil rights movement, Howard Thurman served as a spiritual adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders and activists in the 1960s. In What Makes You Come Alive, Dr. Lerita Coleman Brown beckons readers into their own apprenticeship with Thurman. Brown walks with us through Thurman's inimitable life and commitments as he summons us into centering down, encountering the natural world, paying attention to sacred synchronicity, unleashing inner authority, and recognizing the genius of the religion of Jesus.
Walking the Way of Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman, freedom fighter and leader in the Underground Railroad, is one of the most significant figures in US history. In Walking the Way of Harriet Tubman, Therese Taylor-Stinson introduces Harriet, a woman born into slavery whose unwavering faith and practices in spirituality and contemplation carried her through insufferable abuse and hardship to become a leader for her people. Harriet's lived spirituality illuminates a profound path forward for those of us longing for internal freedom, as well as justice and equity in our communities. As the luminous significance of Harriet Tubman's spiritual life is revealed, so too is the path to our own spiritual truth, advocacy, and racial justice as we follow in her footsteps.
In The Seeker and the Monk, Sophfronia Scott mines the extensive private journals of one of the most influential contemplative thinkers of the past for guidance on how to live in these fraught times. As a Black woman who is not Catholic, Scott both learns from and pushes back against Thomas Merton, holding spirited and intimate conversations on race, ambition, faith, activism, nature, prayer, friendship, and love. By engaging in this lively discourse, readers will gain a steady sense of how to dwell more deeply within—and even to love—this despairing and radiant world.
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