“And what do you do?” someone asked at a crowded reception at the NY Academy of Science. “Write—comparative religion.” Startled, he backed away, asking suspiciously, “Why religion? Are you religious?” Yes, incorrigibly—although I grew up among people who regarded religion as obsolete as an outgrown bicycle stashed in a back closet. While many of us leave institutions behind, identifying as “spiritual, not religious,” I’ve done both—had faith, lost it; then began exploring recent discoveries from Israel and Egypt—Dead Sea Scrolls, Christian “secret gospels,” Buddhist practices, asking, Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century? What I love is how such stories, art, music, and rituals engage our imagination and illuminate our experience.
I wrote this short, intensely personal, book to sort out a question: after growing up in a secular, scientific post-religious family, in high school, went with some friends to an evangelical “Crusade for Christ,” and, to my own surprise and my parents’ shock, I fell right in: got “born again.” To my surprise, that opened up a new dimension of experience that I’d previously met in music, dance, poetry—until, a year later, the “Christian friends” at the evangelical church told me that a close friend who’d just been killed in a car crash was “going to hell” because he was Jewish. Shocked, I asked, "Wasn’t Jesus Jewish?" That didn’t seem to matter: I left immediately, and never went back.
I love this book, written by a secular Jewish psychiatrist: a brilliant, short autobiographical account of his experiences as a prisoner in Auschwitz. Frankl tells what he observed there—how some people survived the worst kind of situation imaginable. While not himself a participant in religious tradition, Frankl came to the conviction that “finding meaning” is a fundamental human need. What’s original—and illuminating—is his insight that such meaning cannot be some generalized cliché. Instead, it must engage each person’s own situation, and the specific kind of meaning found in our own life. And when there’s none to “find,” he powerfully demonstrates how we can—and often must—“create meaning.”
One of the outstanding classics to emerge from the Holocaust, Man's Search for Meaning is Viktor Frankl's story of his struggle for survival in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. Today, this remarkable tribute to hope offers us an avenue to finding greater meaning and purpose in our own lives.
This book instantly drew me in, since Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann asks a question I’ve always wondered about: how the mind—and imagination—work. Here she documents her work with groups that range from Wicca, Evangelical Protestants, Hasidic Jewish communities, to Santeria and hallucinating patients in mental hospitals. Through her research, she explores a kind of “imaginative play” that enables people “to experience the world as responsive and alive.” The book is a page-turner, offering amazing insights about cognition, anthropology, and about why—and how—countless people still powerfully engage religious traditions.
The hard work required to make God real, how it changes the people who do it, and why it helps explain the enduring power of faith
How do gods and spirits come to feel vividly real to people-as if they were standing right next to them? Humans tend to see supernatural agents everywhere, as the cognitive science of religion has shown. But it isn't easy to maintain a sense that there are invisible spirits who care about you. In How God Becomes Real, acclaimed anthropologist and scholar of religion T. M. Luhrmann argues that people must work incredibly hard to…
This is a riveting read for people (like me, maybe you) impatient with second-hand dogma, driven to search for what resonates as authentic. Here the famous author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina tells his own story: how even enormous creative success, wealth, family, and worldwide fame, could not prevent a midlife crisis. Tolstoy tells how he narrowly escaped his inclination toward suicide, then began to discover a spiritual dimension in his own life. After first resolving to rejoin the Orthodox Christian church, he rejected that option, “since I couldn’t believe all they said,” then engaged in his own—unconventional—process of spiritual discovery.
Despite having written War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, at the age of 51, looked back on his life and considered it a meaningless, regrettable failure. A Confession provides insight into the great Russian writer's movement from the pursuit of aesthetic ideals toward matters of religious and philosophical consequence. Authentic and genuinely moving, this memoir of midlife spiritual crisis was first distributed in 1872 and marked a turning point in the author's career as a writer: in subsequent years, Tolstoy would write almost exclusively about religious life, especially devotion among the peasantry. Generations of readers have been inspired…
This book is full of stories, using case studies that include the lives of Walt Whitman, Saint Augustine, and Russian writer Leo Tolstoy—that I found fascinating. Here psychologist William James challenges what he—and I—were both taught: namely, that religions are primarily childish fantasies (the view of Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, in The Future of an Illusion). But after James, as a young man, experienced a terrifying depression, he describes his surprise at what felt to him like a spiritual breakthrough that enabled him to recover. James skips questions about dogma and belief, instead identifies a range of different “varieties of religious experience” that, far more than “belief,” can give rise to spiritual insight.
Standing at the crossroads of psychology and religion, this catalyzing work applied the scientific method to a field abounding in abstract theory. William James believed that individual religious experiences, rather than the precepts of organized religions, were the backbone of the world's religious life. His discussions of conversion, repentance, mysticism and saintliness, and his observations on actual, personal religious experiences - all support this thesis. In his introduction, Martin E. Marty discusses how James's pluralistic view of religion led to his remarkable tolerance of extreme forms of religious behaviour, his challenging, highly original theories, and his welcome lack of pretension…
What kind of person is God—the God of the Hebrew Bible—and how does his personality change through time? Here scholar and former priest Jack Miles explores with wit and insight, how God, seen as a literary character, has been constructed by various writers of the Hebrew Bible. This book brings the Bible into focus as a collection of writings that come from various times and places, each envisioning the creator whose story begins in the Garden of Eden in different ways—humanizing the texts in ways that offer new and enjoyable insights—makes reading the Bible intriguing and fun—a discovery of cultural history!
What sort of "person" is God? What is his "life story"? Is it possible to approach him not as an object of religious reverence, but as the protagonist of the world's greatest book—as a character who possesses all the depths, contradictions, and abiguities of a Hamlet? This is the task that Jack Miles—a former Jesuit trained in religious studies and Near Eastern languages—accomplishes with such brilliance and originality in God: A Biography.
Using the Hebrew Bible as his text, Miles shows us a God who evolves through his relationship with man, the image who in…
Reading was a childhood passion of mine. My mother was a librarian and got me interested in reading early in life. When John F. Kennedy was running for president and after his assassination, I became intensely interested in politics. In addition to reading history and political biographies, I consumed newspapers and television news. It is this background that I have drawn upon over the decades that has added value to my research.
It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.
Long before Trump, each of these phenomena grew in importance. The John Birch Society and McCarthyism became powerful forces; Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first “personal president” to rise above the party; and the development of what Harry Truman called “the big lie,” where outrageous falsehoods came to be believed. Trump follows a pattern that was long established within the Republican Party. This is an untold story that resonates powerfully in the present.
Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism
It didn't begin with Donald Trump. The unraveling of the Grand Old Party has been decades in the making. Since the time of FDR, the Republican Party has been home to conspiracy thinking, including a belief that lost elections were rigged. And when Republicans later won the White House, the party elevated their presidents to heroic status-a predisposition that eventually posed a threat to democracy. Building on his esteemed 2016 book, What Happened to the Republican Party?, John Kenneth White proposes to explain why this happened-not just the election of Trump but the authoritarian shift in the party as a…
Interested in
Christianity,
faith,
and
religious experiences?
11,000+ authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them.
Browse their picks for the best books about
Christianity,
faith,
and
religious experiences.