My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
10 best books like My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (Christian Wiman): Waiting for God, Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life, Reluctant Pilgrim: A Moody, Somewhat Self-Indulgent Introvert's Search for Spiritual Community, Short Trip to the Edge: Where Earth Meets Heaven--A Pilgrimage, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing, The Shaping of a Life: A Spiritual Landscape, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation
| Author | Simone Weil |
| ISBN | 0060959703 |
"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...
| Author | Nora Gallagher |
| ISBN | 0307592987 |
This taut yet lyrical memoir tells of the author’s experience with a baffling illness poised to take her sight, and gives a deeply felt meditation on vulnerability and on what it means to lose the faith you had and find something better.
One day at the end of 2009, during a routine eye exam that...
| Author | Kathleen Norris |
| ISBN | 1594489963 |
Kathleen Norris’s masterpiece: a personal and moving memoir that resurrects the ancient term acedia, or soul-weariness, and brilliantly explores its relevancy to the modern individual and culture.
Kathleen Norris had written several much loved books, yet she couldn’t drag herself...
| Author | Enuma Okoro |
| ISBN | 1935205102 |
If you sometimes feel lost on your spiritual journey, you'll find a trustworthy companion in Enuma Okoro, a purse shopping, tea-drinking, colon-cleansing, shaky follower of Jesus who just wants to find a godly man with good hair. But after her father's unexpected death, her grief seems to morph into...
| Author | Scott Cairns |
| ISBN | 0060843225 |
While walking on the beach with his Labrador, poet and literature professor Scott Cairns ran headlong into his midlife crisis. A fairly common experience among men nearing the age of fifty, midlife crises are usually manifested in the form of sports cars and younger women; not so for this Baptist turned...
| Author | Lauren F. Winner |
| ISBN | 0061768111 |
Following up her highly acclaimed Girl Meets God, author Lauren F. Winner has written an engrossing reflection of literary grace and spiritual wisdom with Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis.
As she lives through a failed marriage and the loss of her mother, Winner finds her Christian faith...
| Author | Leland Ryken |
| ISBN | 0877881235 |
This is an extraordinary treasure of thought-provoking reflections, by many of my favorite authors (including Lewis, Tolkien, and Chesterton). The sections on “Imagination, Beauty and Creativity” and “Myth and Fantasy” were particularly rich, at times enchanting. “In Praise of Stories”...
| Author | Phyllis A. Tickle |
| ISBN | 0385497563 |
In The Shaping of a Life, Phyllis Tickle recounts her life with honesty and humor, richly conveying both the external events and the internal insights and emotions. As Tickle chronicles her deepening understanding of prayer and the rewards of marriage, family, and spiritual life, she reaches across...
| Author | Paul Elie |
| ISBN | 0374529213 |
The story of four modern American Catholics who made literature out of their search for God
In the mid-twentieth century four American Catholics came to believe that the best way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them - in works that readers of all kinds could admire....
| Author | Frederick Buechner |
| ISBN | 0060611820 |
Of the three memoirs that Buechner wrote, this was probably my least favorite. I can’t bring myself to give this book less than 4 star. There are some hidden wisdom-gems that spoke especially to my life right now. Buechner writes of his middle life and college teaching career. He compares and contrasts...
Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters
| Author | Amy Andrews |
| ISBN | 0829438319 |
When Amy Andrews and Jessica Mesman Griffith met in a creative writing class in graduate school, they both confessed to writing about God. They bonded one night while reading the Book of Ruth and came to truly understand the unlikely friendship of Ruth and Naomi. In these two Old Testament women, they...
| Author | Richard Lischer |
| ISBN | 0307960536 |
This poignant love story of a father for his son is at once funny, heartbreaking, and hopeful. In it a young man teaches his entire family “a new way to die” with wit, candor, and, always, remarkable grace. This emotionally riveting account probes the heart without sentimentality or self-pity....
| Author | Martin Laird |
| ISBN | 0195378725 |
"The practice of contemplation is one of the great spiritual arts," writes Martin Laird in A Sunlit Absence. "Not a technique but a skill, it harnesses the winds of grace that lead us out into the liberating sea of silence."
In this companion volume to his bestselling Into the Silent Land, Laird focuses...
| Author | Belden C. Lane |
| ISBN | 0195315855 |
In the tradition of Kathleen Norris, Terry Tempest Williams, and Thomas Merton, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes explores the impulse that has drawn seekers into the wilderness for centuries and offers eloquent testimony to the healing power of mountain silence and desert indifference.
Interweaving...
| Author | James K.A. Smith |
| ISBN | 0801035783 |
How does worship work? How exactly does liturgical formation shape us? What are the dynamics of such transformation? In the second of James K. A. Smith's three-volume theology of culture, the author expands and deepens the analysis of cultural liturgies and Christian worship he developed in his well-received...
| Author | Gregory Wolfe |
| ISBN | 1933859881 |
Culture, Not Politics.
We live in a politicized time. Culture wars and increasingly partisan conflicts have reduced public discourse to shouting matches between ideologues. But rather than merely bemoaning the vulgarity and sloganeering of this era, says acclaimed author and editor...
Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense
| Author | Francis Spufford |
| ISBN | 0571225217 |
Francis Spufford's Unapologetic is a wonderfully pugnacious defense of Christianity. Refuting critics such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the "new atheist" crowd, Spufford, a former atheist and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, argues that Christianity is recognizable, drawing...
| Author | Flannery O'Connor |
| ISBN | 0374236917 |
"I would like to write a beautiful prayer," writes the young Flannery O'Connor in this deeply spiritual journal, recently discovered among her papers in Georgia. "There is a whole sensible world around me that I should be able to turn to Your praise." Written between 1946 and 1947 while O'Connor was...
Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer
| Author | Rowan Williams |
| ISBN | 0802871976 |
In this simple, beautifully written book Rowan Williams explores four essential components of the Christian life: baptism, Bible, Eucharist, and prayer. Despite huge differences in Christian thinking and practice both today and in past centuries, he says, these four basic elements have remained...
Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography
| Author | Richard Rodríguez |
| ISBN | 0670025305 |
An award-winning writer delivers a major reckoning with religion, place, and sexuality in the aftermath of 9/11
Hailed in The Washington Post as "one of the most eloquent and probing public intellectuals in America," Richard Rodriguez now considers religious violence worldwide, growing...
A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015
| Author | Wendell Berry |
| ISBN | 1619026163 |
More than thirty-five years ago, when the weather allowed, Wendell Berry began spending his sabbaths outdoors, walking and wandering around familiar territory, seeking a deep intimacy only time could provide. These walks arranged themselves into poems and each year since he has completed a sequence...
The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought
| Author | Marilynne Robinson |
| ISBN | 0312425325 |
In this award-winning collection, the bestselling author of Gilead offers us other ways of thinking about history, religion, and society. Whether rescuing "Calvinism" and its creator Jean Cauvin from the repressive "puritan" stereotype, or considering how the McGuffey readers were inspired...
