Memoir Religion

Tani Adewumi didn’t know what Boko Haram was or why they had threatened his family. All he knew was that when his parents told him the family was going to America, Tani thought it was the start of a great adventure rather than an escape. In truth, his family’s journey to the United States was nothing short of miraculous - and the miracles were just beginning.

When a health scare puts him in the hospital, Eric Weiner-an agnostic by default-finds himself tangling with an unexpected question, posed to him by a well-meaning nurse. "Have you found your God yet?" The thought of it nags him, and prods him-and ultimately launches him on a far-flung journey to do just that.

There are times when looking back helps to fuel our future. Looking back at the life of evangelist Maria Woodworth-Etter, you will be emboldened by the truth that nothing is impossible to the believer who surrenders to God. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Maria Woodworth-Etter, the grandmother of the Pentecostal movement, astounded many Americans as she traveled across the country holding revivals. At these meetings, the worst sinners in the town were saved, the most diseased were healed, and her biggest critics were proven wrong.

The story begins as Colleen and Newell Cerak first learn the doubtful, then shocking news that their daughter, buried five weeks earlier, is still alive. Forming a backdrop to the reunion are the faces of the Van Ryn family, strangers to the Ceraks, who are just coming to terms with the harsh reality that the girl whose bedside they have been posted at for five weeks is not their daughter after all - and that their own daughter, Laura, has already been buried under the name of Whitney Cerak.

John Newton, Charles Simeon, and William Wilberforce suffered lifelong opposition and endured for the causes of gospel truth, missionary zeal, and political justice. They found, in solid doctrine and humble joy, the tough roots for habitual tenderness in response to their adversaries - without doctrinal or moral flinching. They are examples of remarkable grace. In the third book of the Swans Are Not Silent series, best-selling author John Piper looks at the lives of these three great men and how they not only endured great opposition but did so with joy and without bitterness.

In the best-selling tradition of The Devil in the White City, award-winning author Brian Hicks tells the explosive story of the Morro Castle, the elegant luxury liner that burned off the coast of New Jersey on September 7, 1934. The captain died under mysterious circumstances seven hours before his ship caught fire off the New Jersey coast.

In this groundbreaking book, one of America's premier religion writers revives ancient expressions through cultural commentary, vulnerable personal narratives, and surprising biblical insights. Both provocative and liberating, Learning to Speak God from Scratch will breathe new life into your spiritual conversations and lure you into the embrace of the God who inhabits them.

The First World War laid waste to a continent and brought about the end of innocence — and the end of faith. Unlike a generation of young writers who lost faith in the God of the Bible, however, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis found that the Great War deepened their spiritual quest. Both men served as soldiers on the Western Front, survived the trenches, and used the experience of that conflict to ignite their Christian imagination.

Brennan Manning has been dazzingly faithful in preaching and writing variations on the ragamuffin theme, Yes, Abba is very fond of you! But today the crowds are gone and the lights are dim, the patches on his knees have faded. If he ever was a ragamuffin, truly it is now. In this his final book, Brennan roves back his past, honoring the lives of the people closest to him, family and friends who've known the saint and the sinner, the boy and the man. Far from some chronological timeline, these memories are witness to the truth of life by one who has lived it.

One day in 1986, Laura Schroff, a busy ad sales executive, passed a small boy panhandling on the street. She stopped and offered to take him to McDonald's for lunch. Twenty years later, at Laura's 50th birthday party, Maurice Mayzik gave a toast, thanking Laura for that small act of kindness, which ended up changing the course of his life. In that toast Maurice said that when Laura stopped on that busy street corner all those years ago, God had sent him an angel.

Covering her courtship and marriage to Steven Curtis Chapman, struggles for emotional balance, and living with grief, Mary Beth's story is our story - wondering where God is when the worst happens. In Choosing to SEE, she shows how she wrestles with God even as she has allowed him to write her story - both during times of happiness and those of tragedy. Readers will hear firsthand about the loss of her daughter, the struggle to heal, and the unexpected path God has placed her on.

Cold Tangerines is a collection of stories that celebrate the extraordinary moments hidden in our everyday lives. It is about God, and about life, and about the thousands of daily ways in which an awareness of God changes and infuses everything. It is about spiritual life, and about all the things that we have called nonspiritual life that might be spiritual after all.

The Chippewa shaman No-Eyes shares her wisdom and perspective on life. No-Eyes sits in her humble Colorado cabin, offering startling but compelling visions of the future, including some upheavals on the horizon. Listening intently to her teacher and new friend, Summer Rain learns about the unique relationship between the Earth Mother and the many creatures in her domain.

It's 1970. A dark Wisconsin night. A once-shy farm boy, now in his 20s, stands on a bridge over a river. He's left the farm, studied for the clergy, and done a stint in the air force. He's a proofreader now. He's seen faraway places, but tonight he's in Wisconsin overlooking the dark water. He's about to see the face of God, to become a God-realized man. From this momentous turning point, Harold Klemp's life would never be the same.

With over 70 million records sold, heavy metal pioneers Black Sabbath are one of the most influential bands of all time. From the very beginning, Geezer Butler was at the heart of their success. He named the group, provided the bass behind their distinctive sound and wrote the lyrics that resonated so powerfully with fans around the world. At long last, Geezer is ready to tell his side of the Sabbath story, from early days as a scrappy blues quartet through to the many lineup changes, the record-breaking tours and the international hell-raising with Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi and Bill Ward.

Seven years ago, Christian Wiman, a well-known poet and the editor of Poetry magazine, wrote a now-famous essay about having faith in the face of death. My Bright Abyss, composed in the difficult years since and completed in the wake of a bone marrow transplant, is a moving meditation on what a viable contemporary faith - responsive not only to modern thought and science but also to religious tradition - might look like.

Gareth Duignam, born in Dublin, Ireland in 1979, shares his transformative journey in this autobiography. From a life of non-conformity, he embarked on a spiritual awakening that led him to become a teacher, proficient in transmitting potent energies like Shaktipat and the Supramental Force.

In October, 1973, the poet and singer Leonard Cohen—39 years old, famous, unhappy, and at a creative dead end—traveled to the Sinai desert and inserted himself into the chaos and bloodshed of the Yom Kippur War. Moving around the front with a guitar and a pick-up team of local musicians, Cohen dived headlong into the midst of a global crisis and met hundreds of fighting men and women at the worst moment of their lives. His audiences heard him knowing it might be the last thing they heard, and those who survived never forgot what they heard.

In the late nineteenth century, a group of German-speaking Mennonites traveled from Russia into Central Asia, where their charismatic leader predicted Christ would return. Over a century later, Sofia Samatar joins a tour following their path, fascinated not by the hardships of their journey, but by its aftermath: the establishment of a small Christian village in the Muslim Khanate of Khiva. Named Ak Metchet, "The White Mosque," after the Mennonites' whitewashed church, the village lasted for fifty years.

Master Sergeant Changiz Lahidji served on Special Forces A teams longer than anyone in history, completing over a hundred combat missions in Afghanistan. Changiz is a Special Forces legend. He also happens to be the first Muslim Green Beret. Changiz served this country starting with Operation Eagle Claw in 1980, when he entered Tehran on a one-man mission to spy on Iranian soldiers guarding the US embassy where 52 US diplomats were being held hostage.