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Ace

Angela Chen

Journalist Angela Chen combines reporting, memoir, history, and interviews to introduce asexuality and the wider ace spectrum. She explores attraction, libido, romance, compulsory sexuality, consent, race, disability, gender, relationship structures, and the difficulty of recognizing an identity in a culture that treats sexual desire as universal and essential to maturity, intimacy, liberation, and a meaningful life.

Adam Frank: Are there aliens out there? Probably. But UFOs – not so much

Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda

Astrophysicist Adam Frank distinguishes the scientific case for widespread cosmic life from the much weaker case that reported UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors.

Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them)

Sallie Tisdale

Writer, nurse, and Buddhist practitioner Sallie Tisdale offers direct practical counsel for dying and accompanying someone who is dying. She addresses bodies, diagnosis, caregiving, communication, fear, pain, planning, last days, deathbed presence, grief, and the physical handling of a corpse, weaving clinical experience with Buddhist reflection and candid accounts of uncertainty, irritation, tenderness, and the limits of control.

After Evangelicalism

David P. Gushee

David Gushee addresses readers who can no longer inhabit white American evangelicalism but have not necessarily abandoned Christianity. After diagnosing evangelical identity, authority, politics, and moral formation, he proposes a post-evangelical path organized around Jesus, the kingdom of God, Christian humanism, responsible interpretation, and a different public ethic. The book therefore moves beyond departure: it is a concise constructive proposal for what Christian faith might become afterward.

After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

Jack Kornfield

Accounts from practitioners across traditions about integrating awakening, failure, relationship, and ordinary responsibility after peak experience.

After the Flying Saucers Came

Greg Eghigian

A global history of how flying-saucer reports, investigators, institutions, media, and public expectations produced the modern UFO phenomenon after 1947.

After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond

Bruce Greyson

Psychiatrist Bruce Greyson reviews decades of research and clinical encounters involving near-death experiences, including recurring reports of leaving the body, altered time, light, beings, life review, peace, and lasting changes in values. He considers neurological, psychological, and survival interpretations while arguing that the reports deserve disciplined study rather than automatic dismissal.

Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto

Lesley Hazleton

Journalist Lesley Hazleton defends agnosticism as an active stance of intellectual and spiritual openness rather than indecision awaiting a final answer. Blending memoir, history, philosophy, science, and religious observation, she resists both dogmatic belief and dogmatic disbelief, exploring mystery, mortality, awe, doubt, uncertainty, and the human impulse to make certainty protect us from the vulnerability of not knowing.

All There Is with Anderson Cooper

Anderson Cooper

A journalist grieving his own family creates room for public figures and listeners to speak without making grief a problem to solve.

American Cosmic

D. W. Pasulka

A religious-studies account of how UFO experience, secrecy, media, technology, and new forms of authority can generate worlds of meaning that resemble religious formation.

American Exorcism

Michael W. Cuneo

Reports on American exorcism and deliverance cultures after extensive observation, placing their growth within media, institutional, and social change.

Anatheism: Returning to God After God

Richard Kearney

Philosopher Richard Kearney proposes anatheism—a return to the question of God after both inherited theism and confident atheism have been disrupted. Through philosophy, biblical stories, literature, art, hospitality, and interreligious reflection, he explores encounters with the stranger in which the divine may be received again without restoring the sovereign, certain, or coercive God that critique has made untenable.

Andy Crouch: If UFOs Reveal Alien Life, Would Christians Be Ready?

Good Faith

Explores how Christians might respond theologically and pastorally if persuasive evidence of extraterrestrial life emerged.

Angels and Demons

Data Over Dogma

Examines what biblical texts call angels and demons and contrasts those texts with later popular images.

Angels and Demons: Introducing Lord of Spirits

The Lord of Spirits

Introduces an Eastern Orthodox account of angels, demons, and the spiritual world from within that tradition’s scriptures and theology.

Animal Liberation

Peter Singer

An influential utilitarian argument that animal suffering deserves serious moral consideration and that species membership alone is not decisive.

Annika Schmeding, Sufi Civilities

Rotating scholar hosts

Contemporary Afghan Sufi authority, gender and civil society appear through ethnography rather than generic mystical universalism. This exact object earns inclusion because hearing the exchange performs work the 574-book shelf cannot supply as directly.

Astrology and Popular Religion in the Modern West

Nicholas Campion

Historian Nicholas Campion studies modern Western astrology as a form of popular religion and lived cosmology. Rather than asking only whether predictions are accurate, he examines how astrologers understand an enchanted or purposeful cosmos, negotiate fate and free will, relate astrology to science and psychology, and locate the practice within New Age culture.

Astrology: A History

Peter Whitfield

Peter Whitfield follows astrology across more than two millennia, from ancient celestial interpretation through Greek and Roman thought, its contested relationship with Christianity, medieval and Renaissance revivals, and its later separation from modern astronomy. Richly illustrated and relatively brief, the book helps readers see astrology as a changing intellectual and religious tradition rather than a timeless set of personality labels.

The Awakened Brain

Lisa Miller

Clinical psychologist Lisa Miller combines personal narrative with research on spirituality, development, depression, resilience, and the brain. She argues that a capacity for spiritual awareness is part of human life and that cultivating connection to something larger than the isolated self can support meaning and psychological well-being.

Awe

Dacher Keltner

Psychologist Dacher Keltner explores awe through research, stories, art, music, nature, moral courage, collective movement, birth, and death. He shows how encounters with what feels larger than the self can alter attention, soften self-focus, and deepen connection—without requiring readers to begin with religious belief.

Bearing the Unbearable

Joanne Cacciatore

A bereavement researcher and practitioner offers compassionate reflections and practices for living with devastating loss.

Becoming Neighbors with Amar D. Peterman

Blake Chastain

An exvangelical conversation turns belonging toward actual neighborliness and place rather than another identity label. This exact object earns inclusion because hearing the exchange performs work the 574-book shelf cannot supply as directly.

Becoming Supernatural

Joe Dispenza

Joe Dispenza combines meditation instruction, workshop reports, personal transformation stories, and language drawn from neuroscience, epigenetics, and quantum physics. He argues that people can move beyond habitual identity and biology toward unusual healing and changes in lived reality.

Being Mortal

Atul Gawande

Surgeon and writer Atul Gawande examines how medicine, families, and institutions respond when cure is no longer possible and frailty makes independence harder to sustain. Through patients, clinicians, nursing homes, hospice programs, and his own father’s illness, he explores autonomy, safety, serious-illness conversations, assisted living, risk, caregiving, and the practical question of what makes life worth living near its end.

Being Wrong

Kathryn Schulz

Journalist Kathryn Schulz explores error as a basic human condition whose defining feature is that being wrong usually feels exactly like being right—until the moment a belief breaks against reality. Moving through philosophy, psychology, memory, perception, politics, love, grief, and comic failure, she examines why certainty is seductive, why error threatens identity, and how fallibility can produce curiosity, revision, empathy, and surprise.

Being You

Anil Seth

Neuroscientist Anil Seth explains consciousness through the brain's ongoing predictions about the world and the body. Perception, in his account, is a controlled construction constrained by sensory signals; the experienced self is likewise assembled through embodied processes rather than located in a single inner essence. He connects experiments, illusions, clinical cases, and theory while defending biological naturalism.

The Believer

Ralph Blumenthal

A biography of Harvard psychiatrist John Mack follows his controversial study of people reporting alien encounters and the professional, ethical, and metaphysical questions that followed.

The Believing Brain

Michael Shermer

A popular account of pattern detection, motivated reasoning, and how people form and defend beliefs.

Believing in Magic

Stuart A. Vyse

Psychologist Stuart Vyse examines why intelligent people develop and retain superstitious beliefs and rituals. Drawing on research into learning, coincidence, uncertainty, control, cultural transmission, and cognitive bias, he explains how meaningful patterns can become convincing even when a causal connection has not been demonstrated. Astrology appears within a wider human landscape of divination, luck, ritual, and magical thinking.

Belonging Without Othering

john a. powell and Stephen Menendian

A framework for building belonging without defining community through exclusion, domination, or forced sameness.

Beyond Belief

Elaine Pagels

Historian Elaine Pagels uses the Gospel of Thomas and conflicts among early Christians to explore how competing understandings of Jesus, revelation, authority, resurrection, and spiritual knowledge were narrowed as canon, creed, and episcopal structures developed. Personal reflection appears beside accessible historical narrative.

The Bible and the Believer

Marc Zvi Brettler, Peter Enns, and Daniel J. Harrington

Three biblical scholars—a Jew, a Protestant, and a Catholic—describe how their communities can receive scripture religiously while also using historical and literary criticism. Their essays clarify where the traditions share problems, where their interpretive authorities differ, and how each author personally negotiates tensions between inherited belief and modern scholarship.

The Bible Doesn't Say That

Joel M. Hoffman

Biblical linguist Joel Hoffman examines forty familiar claims that he believes depend on mistranslation, missing cultural context, or later assumptions imposed on the text. Written for nonspecialists, the examples show why knowing what English words appear on a page is not always the same as understanding what an ancient Hebrew or Greek text communicates.

The Bible Unearthed

Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman

Archaeologist Israel Finkelstein and historian Neil Asher Silberman compare the Bible’s stories about ancient Israel with evidence found in the ground. They argue that many foundational stories took written shape much later than the events they describe and reflect the concerns of the kingdom of Judah. The book shows how archaeology can change the way readers understand the patriarchs, Exodus, conquest, David, Solomon, and the Bible’s formation.

The Bible: A Biography

Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong follows the Bible as a changing collection of texts interpreted by Jewish and Christian communities across centuries. Rather than offering a chapter-by-chapter guide, she emphasizes how worship, politics, scholarship, printing, reform, modern criticism, and changing ideas of authority have repeatedly shaped what readers believed the Bible was and how it should be used.

The Bible: A Very Short Introduction

John Riches

Biblical scholar John Riches introduces the Bible's varied writings, the worlds in which they arose, the formation of Jewish and Christian scriptures, and the many ways these texts have shaped—and been reshaped by—later cultures. The second edition also attends to newer scholarship and the Bible's continuing political and global influence.

Biblical Time Machine

Helen Bond; Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

Working historians make current biblical scholarship approachable without pretending historical method resolves theology.

The Big Picture

Sean Carroll

Physicist Sean Carroll moves from quantum fields, cosmology, and emergence to life, consciousness, morality, and meaning. He calls his framework ‘poetic naturalism’: there is one natural world, but multiple vocabularies can truthfully describe its higher-level patterns. The book argues that purpose and value can be constructed and real for human beings without being written into the universe by a supernatural source.

Black Elk Speaks

Black Elk; as told through John G. Neihardt

An influential mediated narrative of Black Elk’s visions, Lakota history, colonial violence, and communal loss.

The Blind Watchmaker

Richard Dawkins

A forceful explanation of how cumulative natural selection can produce apparent design without a designing intelligence.

The Body Is Not an Apology

Sonya Renee Taylor

Sonya Renee Taylor presents radical self-love as more than confidence or body positivity: a practice of resisting body shame and the social hierarchies built around race, size, gender, sexuality, age, and disability. Personal reflection and public ethics remain closely connected throughout.

The Body Keeps the Score

Bessel van der Kolk

Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk surveys how overwhelming experience can alter memory, attention, bodily sensation, relationships, and the nervous system. Drawing on clinical cases, neuroscience, developmental research, and decades of trauma treatment, he explains why people may continue reacting to danger after an event has ended and discusses approaches ranging from relational therapy and EMDR to yoga, neurofeedback, theater, and body-based work.

Bodyfulness

Christine Caldwell

Somatic therapist Christine Caldwell treats the body not as an object to manage but as a living source of attention, agency, relationship, and meaning. Brief explanations and practices in breathing, sensing, moving, resting, and relating make embodiment concrete rather than merely conceptual.

Bonus Episode: Everything is Still Falling Apart

Mike Cosper

The series steps sideways from one church to rootlessness, loneliness and the institutional conditions that reward charisma. This exact object earns inclusion because hearing the exchange performs work the 574-book shelf cannot supply as directly.

Book Club Edition: The Little Book of Aliens by Adam Frank

Planetary Radio

Uses Adam Frank’s astrobiology book to discuss what scientists can responsibly infer about life and intelligence beyond Earth.

The Book of Dead Philosophers

Simon Critchley

A witty philosophical gallery of how thinkers met death and what their endings suggest about living.

The Book of Delights

Ross Gay

Brief daily essays notice delight amid friendship, race, grief, gardens, public life, and ordinary vulnerability.

Bowling Alone

Robert D. Putnam

A landmark empirical account of declining civic participation, associational life, trust, and social capital in the United States.

Boy Erased

Garrard Conley

A memoir of growing up gay in a conservative Christian family and entering a conversion-therapy program.

Brain Science 15th Annual Review Episode

Ginger Campbell

A single review compares Anil Seth, Antonio Damasio, Mark Solms and others, revealing disagreement within neuroscience of consciousness. This exact object earns inclusion because hearing the exchange performs work the 574-book shelf cannot supply as directly.

Brain Science with Ginger Campbell, MD

Ginger Campbell

Breaking Open

Jules Evans; Tim Read, editors

This collection brings together first-person accounts of overwhelming spiritual or transformative experiences alongside reflection on what helped and what harmed. Its contributors describe varied paths through crisis rather than offering one universal explanation or sequence.

Breaking the Spell

Daniel C. Dennett

A philosopher’s proposal to study religion as a natural human phenomenon shaped by cultural evolution.

A Brief History of Time

Stephen Hawking

A classic popular introduction to cosmology, black holes, time, and the search for a unified physical account.

Buddhism Without Beliefs

Stephen Batchelor

Stephen Batchelor presents Buddhism as an agnostic way of life organized around awakening, ethical response, attention, and the four tasks rather than assent to rebirth, cosmology, or institutional authority. Drawing on his formation as a monk and later departure from orthodoxy, he reframes dharma for modern secular and religiously uncertain readers.

Calling All Aliens

Big Picture Science

Introduces the COSMIC search at the Very Large Array, science-fictional imagination, and the debate over deliberately transmitting messages to other civilizations.

Can People Really Change? with Tina Rasmussen

Michael W. Taft

Rasmussen’s trauma history and long retreat practice let psychology, metta and spiritual bypassing meet in one lived account. This exact object earns inclusion because hearing the exchange performs work the 574-book shelf cannot supply as directly.

The Case for God

Karen Armstrong

Historian of religion Karen Armstrong argues that premodern religious language was primarily practical, symbolic, and apophatic rather than a set of literal propositions competing with science. Moving across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Greek philosophy, mysticism, reform, modernity, and contemporary atheism, she traces how God-talk became increasingly treated as factual explanation and proposes a return to disciplined practice, myth, compassion, and acknowledged unknowing.

Caste

Isabel Wilkerson

A narrative argument that American racial hierarchy can be illuminated through comparison with caste systems in India and Nazi Germany.