Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions

The Book of Mormon Girl: Stories from an American Faith

Joanna Brooks · 209 pages

Story about leaving behind the innocence of childhood belief and embracing the complications and heartbreaks that come to every adult life of faith. Explores the author's journey through her faith, and the experience of being a Mormon.

Fear and Trembling/Repetition

Soren Kierkegaard · 464 pages

The two books comprised in this volume are in greater demand than any other works of Kierkegaard. This preference is a credit to the public taste, for Kierkegaard himself called them "the most perfect books I have written," though in this commendation he included The Concept of Dread, and later stretched it to include Training in Christianity.

Surprised By Truth: 11 Converts Give the Biblical and Historical Reasons for Becoming Catholic

Paul Thigpen, Marcus Grodi, Jimmy Akin, Steve Wood, Robert A. Sungenis, Julie Swenson, Rick Conason, T.L. Frazier, Tim Staples, Dave Armstrong, Al Kresta · 270 pages

Confessions of a Latter-day Virgin: A Memoir

Nicole Hardy · 295 pages

Nicole Hardy, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, explores how she came, at the age of thirty-five, to a crossroads regarding her faith and her identity.

Secret Ceremonies: A Mormon Woman's Intimate Diary of Marriage and Beyond

Deborah Laake · 240 pages

In this book, Deborah Laake, a former member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, chronicles her experiences with Mormonism and the various rituals performed in their temples. Laake recounts her studies at the Brigham Young University, her loveless first marriage at nineteen, her subsequent divorce and the problems she encountered with the Mormon authorities and her relatives due to

Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

Donald Miller · 256 pages

The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

A.J. Jacobs · 492 pages

Raised in a secular family but interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world, A.J. Jacobs decides to attempt to obey the Bible as literally as possible for one full year. He vows to follow the Ten Commandments. To be fruitful and multiply. To love his neighbor. But also to obey the hundreds of less publicized rules: to avoid wearing clothes made of mixed fibers; to stone adulterers. The

Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis

Lauren F. Winner · 272 pages

Infidel

Ayaan Hirsi Ali · 353 pages

"Ultimately a celebration of triumph over adversity, Hirsi Ali's story tells how a bright little girl evolved out of dutiful obedience to become an outspoken, pioneering freedom fighter. As Western governments struggle to balance democratic ideals with religious pressures, no story could be timelier or more significant.--From publisher description."--From source other than the Library of Congress

Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers In Exile

John Shelby Spong · 288 pages

An important and respected voice for liberal American Christianity for the past twenty years, Bishop John Shelby Spong integrates his often controversial stands on the Bible, Jesus, theism, and morality into an intelligible creed that speaks to today's thinking Christian. In this compelling and heartfelt book, he sounds a rousing call for a Christianity based on critical thought rather than blind

The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver · 596 pages

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of on

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

Christopher Hitchens · 499 pages

Presents excerpts on the subject of religion from the writings of such notable non-believers as John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, Albert Einstein, Richard Dawkins, and Salman Rushdie.

Let Me be a Woman

Elisabeth Elliot · 190 pages

We are called to be women. The fact that I am a woman does not make me a different kind of Christian, but the fact that I am a Christian does make me a different kind of woman. For I have accepted God's idea of me, and my whole life is an offering back to him of all that I am and all that he wants me to be. In these days of conflicting demands and cultural pressures, what kind of woman do you wish

The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne · 272 pages

The Witch Of Portobello

Paulo Coelho

Orthodoxy

G.K. Chesterton · 156 pages

Orthodoxy is G. K. Chesterton’s response to his critics’ assertion that his earlier collection of essays, Heretics, had “merely criticised current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy.” In his intellectual journey from pagan to agnostic to positivist philosopher, he had attempted to build a philosophy “some ten minutes in advance of the truth.” But when he compared his modern p

The Color Purple

Alice Walker · 274 pages

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeenth because of the sometimes explicit content, particula

The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor's Journey Into Christian Faith

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

Rosaria, by the standards of many, was living a very good life. She had a tenured position at a large university in a field for which she cared deeply. She owned two homes with her partner, in which they provided hospitality to students and activists that were looking to make a difference in the world. There, her partner rehabilitated abandoned and abused dogs. In the community, Rosaria was involv

The Forty Rules of Love

Elif Shafak, lyf shfq · 354 pages

Priestess of Avalon

Marion Zimmer Bradley, Diana L. Paxson · 394 pages

God in the Dock

C.S. Lewis · 346 pages

The Fire Next Time

James Baldwin · 120 pages

**From Amazon.com:** A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, *The Fire Next Time* galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of

Holy Bible: King James Version

Anonymous

Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots

Deborah Feldman · 272 pages

Traces the author's upbringing in a Hasidic community in Brooklyn, describing the strict rules that governed her life, arranged marriage at the age of seventeen, and the birth of her son, which led to her plan to leave and forge her own path in life.