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Holy the Firm

10 best books like Holy the Firm (Annie Dillard): The Sense of Wonder, The Twisted Ones, The Topeka School, The Library of the Unwritten, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us, The Marrow of Tradition, Waiting for God

The Sense of Wonder
AuthorRachel Carson
First published more than three decades ago, this reissue of Rachel Carson's award-winning classic brings her unique vision to a new generation of readers. Stunning new photographs by Nick Kelsh beautifully complement Carson's intimate account of adventures with her young nephew, Roger, as they...
The Twisted Ones
AuthorT. Kingfisher
ISBN1534429573
When a young woman clears out her deceased grandmother’s home in rural North Carolina, she finds long-hidden secrets about a strange colony of beings in the woods.

When Mouse’s dad asks her to clean out her dead grandmother's house, she says yes. After all, how bad could it be?

Answer:...
The Topeka School
AuthorBen Lerner
ISBN0374277788
From the award-winning author of 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, a tender and expansive family drama set in the American Midwest at the turn of the century: a tale of adolescence, transgression, and the conditions that have given rise to the trolls and tyrants of the new right

Adam Gordon...
The Library of the Unwritten
AuthorA.J. Hackwith
ISBN1984806386
In the first book in a brilliant new fantasy series, books that aren't finished by their authors reside in the Library of the Unwritten in Hell, and it is up to the Librarian to track down any restless characters who emerge from those unfinished stories.

Many years ago, Claire was named Head Librarian...
Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
AuthorMadeleine L'Engle
In this classic book, Madeleine L'Engle addresses the questions, What makes art Christian? What does it mean to be a Christian artist? What is the relationship between faith and art? Through L'Engle's beautiful and insightful essay, readers will find themselves called to what the author views as...
This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto
AuthorSuketu Mehta
ISBN1473563496
An impassioned defence of global immigration from the acclaimed author of Maximum City.

Drawing on his family’s own experience emigrating from India to Britain and America, and years of reporting around the world, Suketu Mehta subjects the worldwide anti-immigrant backlash to withering...
Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life
AuthorAbigail Thomas
ISBN0385720556
A beautifully crafted and inviting account of one woman’s life, Safekeeping offers a sublimely different kind of autobiography. Setting aside a straightforward narrative in favor of brief passages of vivid prose, Abigail Thomas revisits the pivotal moments and the tiny incidents that have shaped...
The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us
AuthorPaul Tough
ISBN0544944488
“Indelible and extraordinary.”—Tara Westover, author of Educated: A Memoir, New York Times Book Review
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

The best-selling author of How Children Succeed returns with a powerful, mind-changing inquiry into higher education in...
The Marrow of Tradition
AuthorCharles W. Chesnutt
ISBN0140186867
Things they didn't teach you in American History

I consider myself fortunate to have gone to segregated schools in the Jim Crow South of the 1950's,thanks to teachers who taught us many of the things that were missing from the approved text books. The text books in the Virginia schools would...
Waiting for God
AuthorSimone Weil
ISBN0060959703
"My dear father, I have made up my mind to write to you....I have been wondering lately about the will of God, what it means, and how we can reach the point of conforming ourselves to it completely I will tell you what I think about this." SIMONE WEIL, LETTER I, WAITING FOR GOD

Emerging from the thought-provoking...
Heretics
AuthorG.K. Chesterton
ISBN0486449149
G. K. Chesterton, the "Prince of Paradox," is at his witty best in this collection of twenty essays and articles from the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on "heretics" — those who pride themselves on their superiority to Christian views — Chesterton appraises prominent figures who fall...
The Okay Witch
AuthorEmma Steinkellner
ISBN1534431454
Sabrina the Teenage Witch meets Roller Girl in this hilarious, one-of-a-kind graphic novel about a half-witch who has just discovered the truth about herself, her family, and her town and is doing her best to survive middle school now that she knows everything!

Magic is harder than it looks.
...
Dream Work
AuthorMary Oliver
ISBN0871130696
Dream Work, a collection of forty-five poems, follows both chronologically and logically Mary Oliver's American Primitive, which won for her the Pulitzer Prize for the finest book of poetry published in 1983 by an American poet. The depth and diversity of perceptual awareness-so steadfast and radiant...
Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss
AuthorMargaret Renkl
ISBN1571313788
An Indie Next Selection for July 2019
An Indies Introduce Selection for Summer/Fall 2019

From New York Times opinion writer Margaret Renkl comes an unusual, captivating portrait of a family--and of the cycles of joy and grief that inscribe human lives within the natural world.

Growing...
The Sacred Journey: A Memoir of Early Days
AuthorFrederick Buechner
ISBN0060611839
This was insightful, uncommonly honest, and beautiful. I couldn't put the book down, but had to, twice, before finishing the mere 112 pages (3 chapters called "Once Below a Time, Once Upon a Time, and Beyond Time").
I will not share any of the story, so as not to ruin any of it for future readers; however,...
An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith
AuthorBarbara Brown Taylor
ISBN0061370460
In her critically acclaimed Leaving Church ("a beautiful, absorbing memoir."—Dallas Morning News), Barbara Brown Taylor wrote about leaving full-time ministry to become a professor, a decision that stretched the boundaries of her faith. Now, in her stunning follow-up, An Altar in the World,...
My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
AuthorChristian Wiman
ISBN0374216789
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...
Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
AuthorKathleen Norris
ISBN0618127240
A beautiful meditation on life in the Great Plains from award-winning author and poet Kathleen Norris.

 

Kathleen Norris invites readers to experience rich moments of prayer and presence in Dakota, a timeless tribute to a place in the American landscape that is at once desolate...
The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why
AuthorPhyllis A. Tickle
ISBN1596445750
From the church's birth to the reign of St. Gregory the great, to the Great Schism and through the Reformation, Phyllis Tickle notes that every 500 years the church has been rocked by massive transitions. Remarkably enough, Tickle suggests to us that we live in such a time right now. The Great Emergence...
Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC
AuthorFrederick Buechner
ISBN0060611391
In Wishful Thinking, the first book in his much-loved lexical trilogy, Frederick Buechner puts the language of God, the universe, and the human spirit under his wry linguistic microscope. In his often ironic and always keen-sighted reflections on such terms as agnostic, envy, love, and sin, he invited...
A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997
AuthorWendell Berry
ISBN1582430063
Berry’s Sabbath poems embrace much that is elemental to human life--beauty, death, peace, and hope.In his preface to the collection, Berry writes about the growing audience for public poetry readings. While he sees poetry in the public eye as a good thing, Berry asks us to recognize the private life...
The Cocktail Party
AuthorT.S. Eliot
Cocktail Party, T.S. Eliot
Characters: Edward Chamberlayne, Julia (Mrs. Shuttlethwaite), Celia Coplestone, Alexander Maccolgie Gibbs, Peter Quilpe, An Unidentified Guest later identified as Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, Lavinia Chamberlayne, A Nurse-Secretary, Caterer's Man

Act...
Eye Level: Poems
AuthorJenny Xie
ISBN1555978029
Jenny Xie’s award-winning debut, Eye Level, takes us far and near, to Phnom Penh, Corfu, Hanoi, New York, and elsewhere, as we travel closer and closer to the acutely felt solitude that centers this searching, moving collection. Animated by a restless inner questioning, these poems meditate on...
Dynamics of Faith
AuthorPaul Tillich
ISBN0060937130
For an evangelical like myself, my assessment of this book depends a great deal on perspective. If I'm viewing Paul Tillich as a Christian theologian than the book, while still insightful and interesting, is hugely problematic. While it probably wouldn't be correct to fully associate Tillich with...
Telling Secrets
AuthorFrederick Buechner
ISBN0060609362
I love Buechner's work, period. While reading his books, I'm frequently struck with an odd sense of familiarity, realizing only after considering that he just essentially said (in a much more eloquent manner) something that I've been wrestling with, thinking about, praying through, and more. He's...
The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
AuthorWendell Berry
ISBN1593760078
"Here is a human being speaking with calm and sanity out of the wilderness. We would do well to hear him."—The Washington Post Book World

Art of the Commonplace gathers twenty essays by Wendell Berry that offer an agrarian alternative to our dominant urban culture. Grouped around five themes—an...
The Story of Christianity: Volume 2: The Reformation to the Present Day
AuthorJusto L. González
ISBN0060633166
Another excellent survey of Christian history from the Reformation up to the early 21st century. As in his previous volume, Gonzalez is attentive to those voices who have been unrepresented in the Christian narrative, especially women and the Third World. Gonzalez paints a more positive picture...
Heretics / Orthodoxy
AuthorG.K. Chesterton
ISBN0785242600
This Nelson Royal Classic includes two famous classical works by G.K. Chesterton, Heretics and Orthodoxy. In response to the wrong doctrinal teaching of many of his contemporaries, G.K. Chesterton takes readers back to the "fundamentals" in Heretics. In the compelling work,Orthodoxy, Chesterton...
Alternative to Futility
AuthorElton Trueblood
This book was the final part of a trilogy that Trueblood wrote called the "Trilogy for Our Times". It studies the "new world" as it was shortly after World War II. In this book he outlines what he feels is necessary for our world to awake from the futility of war into " a society of loving souls, set free from...
Struggling with Scripture
AuthorWalter Brueggemann
ISBN0664224857
Challenging the traditional meaning of Scripture is not easy, even in the face of issues that call into question those traditional interpretations. In these reflections, Walter Brueggemann says that the Bible, as the live word of the living God, will not submit to the accounts we prefer to give it....
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