Memoir Religion

Beginning with Jesus' birth, Ken Bailey leads you on a kaleidoscopic study of Jesus throughout the four Gospels. Bailey examines the life and ministry of Jesus with attention to the Lord's Prayer, the Beatitudes, Jesus' relationship to women, and especially Jesus' parables. Through it all, Bailey employs his trademark expertise as a master of Middle Eastern culture to lead you into a deeper understanding of the person and significance of Jesus within his own cultural context.

Marie Laveau may be the most influential American practitioner of the magical arts; certainly, she is among the most famous. She is the subject of songs, films, and legends and the star of New Orleans ghost tours. Her grave in New Orleans ranks among the most popular spiritual pilgrimages in the US. Author Denise Alvarado explores Marie Laveau's life and work - the fascinating history and mystery. This book gives an overview of New Orleans Voodoo, its origins, history, and practices. It contains spells, prayers, rituals, recipes, and more.

Educated meets The Vow in this story of liberation and self-empowerment - an inspiring and stranger-than-fiction memoir of growing up in and breaking free from the Children of God, an oppressive, extremist religious cult.

Considered one of the greatest novels of simple and triumphant religious faith to be published in the 20th century, how the The Song of Bernadette came to be written is an inspirational - even miraculous - story in its own right. In June 1940, famed Austrian author Franz Werfel and his beautiful wife, Alma Mahler, were on a desperate flight across France, seeking to escape certain death at the hands of the Nazi invaders. Franz had written many articles and given many radio speeches denouncing their tyranny.

In September 2010, at the beginning of the academic year at Sarah Lawrence College, a sophomore named Talia Ray asked her roommates if her father could stay with them for a while. No one objected. Her father, Larry Ray, was just released from prison, having spent three years behind bars after a conviction during a bitter custody dispute.

The name “Aleister Crowley” instantly conjures visions of diabolic ceremonies and orgiastic indulgences—and while the sardonic Crowley would perhaps be the last to challenge such a view, he was also much more than “the Beast,” as this authoritative biography shows. Perdurabo—entitled after the magical name Crowley chose when inducted into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—traces Crowley’s remarkable journey from his birth as the only son of a wealthy lay preacher to his death in a boarding house as the world’s foremost authority on magick.

Helene Hadsell was "the woman who won every contest prize she desired". In Contesting: The Name It & Claim It Game, she shares her winning secrets in the vibrant, warm, and folksy manner that was uniquely her.

On February 29, 1948, Richard Wurmbrand was arrested by the secret police. His crimes? Leading Christian worship and witnessing—both of which were illegal under the atheistic Communist regime of Romania. Richard spent fourteen years in prison. He was tortured, beaten, and locked into a solitary confinement cell. Sabina Wurmbrand spent three years in a labor camp,nearly freezing to death as she and other prisoners worked on the Danube Canal. She was repeatedly told her husband had died behind bars.

What happens when a nineteen-year-old boy leaves home and heads into the jungles to evangelize a murderous tribe of South American Indians? For Bruce Olson, it meant capture, disease, terror, loneliness, and torture. But what he discovered through trial and error has revolutionized the world of missions. Bruchko, which has sold more than 300,000 copies worldwide, has been called "more fantastic and harrowing than anything Hollywood could concoct."

A sworn member of the Colombo crime family in New York City, Michael Franzese was considered the biggest moneymaker in the mob since Al Capone. At age 35, he was number 18 on Fortune Magazine's list of the 50 most wealthy and powerful Mafia bosses in America. But then he did the unthinkable. He quit the mob. Franzese met Camille Garcia, who turned his world upside down with her innocent beauty. He fell in love with her, married her, and began a new life that didn't include the Mafia.

Macmillan Audio presents In My Own Way, Alan Watts' acclaimed autobiography, published for the first time in audio.

Five hundred years after Luther's now famous 95 Theses appeared, Eric Metaxas, acclaimed biographer of the best-selling Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy and Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery, paints a startling portrait of the wild figure whose adamantine faith cracked the edifice of Western Christendom and dragged medieval Europe into the future.

Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) is one of the most beloved of the Catholic saints. In 1562, during the era of the Spanish Inquisition, Teresa sat down to write an account of the mystical experiences for which she had become famous. The result was this book, one of the great classics of spiritual autobiography. With this fresh translation of The Book of My Life, Mirabai Starr brings the inimitable Spanish mystic to life for a new generation, with contemporary English that mirrors Teresa's own earthy, vernacular Spanish, and that presents us with someone we feel we know.

With resilience, strength, and gut-punching clarity, Marich takes listeners through a tumultuous coming-of-age marked by addiction, escapism, spiritual manipulation, misogyny, and abuse. She shares with unflinching detail the complicity of her mother’s silence and the lengths her father went to assert dominance and control over her body, her desires, her identity—and even her eternal soul—”for her own good” and with a side of televangelistic hellfire.

Graveyard chronicles a host of Ed and Lorraine Warren's most harrowing, fact-based cases of ghostly visitations, demonic stalking, heart-wrenching otherworldly encounters, and horrifying comeuppance from the spirit world. If you don't believe, you will. And whether you listen alone in the dead of night or in the middle of a sunny day, you'll be forever haunted by its gallery of specters eager to feed on your darkest dread.

Kate Bowler is a professor at Duke Divinity School with a modest Christian upbringing, but she specializes in the study of the prosperity gospel, a creed that sees fortune as a blessing from God and misfortune as a mark of God's disapproval. At 35, everything in her life seems to point toward "blessing". She is thriving in her job, married to her high school sweetheart, and loves life with her newborn son. Then she is diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer.

The author Sri "M" is an extraordinary individual. His uniqueness lies not only in the fact that at the young age of 19 and a half, he travelled to snow-clad Himalayas from Kerala, and there he met and lived for several years with a "real-time" yogi, Babaji, but also that he should undertake such an unusual and adventurous exploration, given his non-Hindu birth and antecedents. The metamorphosis of Mumtaz Ali Khan into Sri "M", a yogi with profound knowledge of the Upanishads and deep personal insights, is born of first-hand experiences with higher levels of consciousness....

In 2009, at the age of 23, Deborah Feldman packed up her young son and their few possessions and walked away from her insular Hasidic roots. She was determined to forge a better life for herself, away from the rampant oppression, abuse, and isolation of her Satmar upbringing in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Out of her experience came the incendiary, best-selling memoir Unorthodox, and now, just a few years later, Feldman has embarked on a triumphant journey of self-discovery - a journey in which she begins life anew as a single mother, an independent woman, and a religious refugee.

Canonized on June 16, 2002, Padre Pio of Pietrelcina (1887-1968) was a Capuchin monk and mystic whose life was marked with miracles and wonders, but who said that his only desire was “to be a poor friar who prays.” In this intimate biography, you will see the results of this humble Capuchin's prayers and discover for yourself the source of his great hope. This updated edition contains five new chapters covering the years between beatification and canonization, St. Pio’s continued work in people’s lives, and the devotion of St. John Paul II to this extraordinary saint.

As a member of the strictly religious Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism, Deborah Feldman grew up under a code of relentlessly enforced customs governing everything from what she could wear and to whom she could speak to what she was allowed to read. Yet in spite of her repressive upbringing, Deborah grew into an independent-minded young woman whose stolen moments reading about the empowered literary characters of Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott helped her to imagine an alternative way of life among the skyscrapers of Manhattan.