Spiritual Biography

El presente libro no es una obra de teología ni un comentario del los Hechos o de las cartas paulinas - aunque las referencias a ambas áreas resulten ineludibles - sino de Historia. Su metodología es la histórica y, de manera muy especial, la utilizada por la investigación de la Historia Antigua.

Raised in a happy, atheist home, Jennifer had the freedom to think for herself and play by her own rules. Yet, a creeping darkness followed her all of her life. Finally, one winter night, it drove her to the edge of her balcony, making her ask, once and for all, why anything mattered. At that moment, everything she knew and believed was shattered.

Upon her death, the New York Times hailed Madeleine L'Engle as "an author whose childhood fables, religious meditations and fanciful science fiction transcended both genre and generation." L'Engle has long captivated and provoked listeners by exploring the intersection of science and religion in her work. In this intimate memoir, the award-winning author uncovers how her spiritual convictions inform and enrich the everyday.

"Everyone dies, but no one is dead," goes the Tibetan saying. It is with these words that Advice on Dying takes flight. Using a 17th-century poem written by a prominent scholar-practitioner, His Holiness the Dalai Lama draws from a wide range of traditions and beliefs to explore the stages we all go through when we die, which are the very same stages we experience in life when we go to sleep, faint, or reach orgasm (Shakespeare's "little death").

Once upon a time, a successful storyteller lost his voice to throat cancer. Deprived of the instrument of his art and his livelihood, he retreated into dark, sullen silence and depression. While searching for a spiritual explanation, he encountered his former mentor, a cantankerous and often drunken old man. Their meetings began a journey into the timeless wisdom of ancient tales: of beggars and kings, monks and tigers, lost horses, buried treasures, and ultimately the secret of happiness.

This honest book will help you discover a different Jesus from the flannelgraph Sunday school figure, the sweetly smiling Victorian Savior, and all the cultural clichés that have tamed Jesus and kept him in comfortable religious boxes. Philip Yancey cuts through existing views and preconceptions of Jesus - citing opinions from church history, modern history, and popular culture; discussing how different people and cultures view Jesus; dissecting popular quotes about Jesus; and much more - and he offers a more accurate perspective by pointing us back to the Bible.

There’s a lie masquerading as truth that’s running rampant in our culture. It goes something like this: you are powerful enough to control your circumstances and create the life you want through positive thinking, solid planning, and dreaming big enough. But if you’ve ever tried to control your life or to strive your way to self-fulfillment, you’ve discovered what lies on the other side of this supposedly empowering message. Tara Sun explores why the quest for control is overrated—not to mention downright dangerous—and reveals the surprising, lifegiving alternative: radical surrender to God.

Grammy-winning gospel singer, television star, and radio host Erica Campbell speaks to women of all shapes and sizes, demonstrating that true beauty is found not in external appearances, but in celebrating the person God made you to be.

John Dee was one of the greatest scientific minds of his time, but also one of the most controversial. He was a learned man in fields as varied as mathematics and astronomy, centuries before they became formalized fields of study, but he is better remembered for performing magic and alchemy. Instead of astronomy, he became renowned across England for astrology, and he was one of the country’s most notorious occult writers during his life.

My story is not about my past, but about your future, says Marie Roberts Monville. In the startling tragedy of the Amish schoolhouse shooting at Nickel Mines, one story has never been told; Marie Roberts Monville, the wife of the man who created such horror, tells her story for the very first time. It is a story of sorrow and destruction, but also one of majestic deliverance, unending compassion, breathtaking forgiveness, and grace-filled redemption. Within a solitary moment, Marie Monville realized that life, as she knew it, was over.

The Columbine tragedy in April 1999 pierced the heart of our country. We later learned that the teenage killers specifically targeted Rachel Scott and mocked her Christian faith on their chilling, homemade videotapes. Rachel Scott died for her faith. Now her parents talk about Rachel's life and how they have found meaning in their daughter's martyrdom in the aftermath of the school shooting. Rachel's Tears comes from a heartfelt need to celebrate this young girl's life, to work through the grief and the questions of a nation, and to comfort those who have been touched by violence.

In this book, Joni unveils the God whom she has found to be faithful through over 30 years as a paralytic. This is not the story of a woman who has all the answers or who is very different from you. Joni struggles with the same fears, questions, and heartaches we all have in common. But as the weeks and months turn into years and the years into decades, she meets her Savior at every turn.

In her best-selling books Anything and Restless, Jennie Allen challenged women to fully surrender their lives to God and then offered a process to uncover and understand the raw materials he had given them. Now, those two concepts have been combined to create a 40-day journey for women to pursue God and find the deepest yearnings of their heart fulfilled. This step-by-step process, to fully surrender to God and then identify the threads of gifts, passions, places, relationships, and sufferings in your life, is not to get what you want but to find what God wants of you.

When the oldest of Kate Braestrup's four children was 10 years old, her husband, a Maine state trooper, was killed in a car accident. Stunned and grieving, she decided to pursue her husband's dream of becoming a Unitarian minister. She eventually began working with the Maine Game Warden Service, which conducts the state's search-and-rescue operations when people go missing in the wilderness.

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. Thurman championed silence, contemplation, common unity, and nonviolence as powerful dimensions of social change. But Dr. Lerita Coleman Brown didn't learn about him during her years of spiritual-direction training. Only when a friend heard of her longing to encounter the work of Black contemplatives did she finally learn about Thurman, his mystical spirituality, and his liberating ethic.

"With humor and lyrical grace," Kathleen Norris meditates on a place in the American landscape that is at once desolate and sublime, harsh, and forgiving, steeped in history and myth (San Francisco Chronicle). A combination of reporting and reflection, Dakota reminds us that wherever we go, we chart our own spiritual geography.

This book follows the story of highly motivated and entrepreneurial twin brothers David and Jason Benham, from their formative years and ventures into professional baseball to their rise as owners of a multimillion-dollar business empire and securing an HGTV reality series.

A Prairie Girl's Faith provides the first extended, in depth discussion of the Christian faith of one of America's most beloved pioneer women - Laura Ingalls Wilder. Although the faith of the Ingalls' family pervades books in the Little House series, the more specific details of Laura's faith have never been fully explored. It took extraordinary pluck for anyone to survive the harshness of frontier life - from the heartbreak of sudden crop losses to murderous storms to unrelenting loneliness.

From the author of Blue Like Jazz comes a road-trip memoir about three months spent crossing the country in a Volkswagen camping van, wondering out loud if there is more to life than nine-to-five jobs, than the ruts the entire world seem to be stuck in. Follow Don and Paul as they dive headlong into the deepest of human questions and find answers outside words: answers that have to be experienced to be believed.

Thirty-five years of following in the footsteps of Charles de Foucauld color little sister Kathleen’s portrayal of the man and his message. Rather than relying too heavily on Charles de Foucauld's spiritual writings, little sister Kathleen draws on fresh material taken from his correspondence and diaries to set out his legacy for those who live in the deserts of the modern world, reminding us that at the heart of the Christian adventure is friendship with Jesus of Nazareth.