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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.

Advaita Vedanta

Eliot Deutsch

A compact philosophical reconstruction of Advaita Vedanta’s accounts of reality, the self, ignorance, knowledge, and liberation.

The Advaita Worldview

Anantanand Rambachan

Rambachan explains Advaita Vedanta through its teachings about brahman, the world, human identity, liberation, and ethical life.

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.

African Religions and Philosophy

John S. Mbiti

A landmark African scholar’s synthesis that challenged Western dismissal of African religious worlds and philosophies.

After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

Jack Kornfield

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

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 Ethical Union Member Societies

American Ethical Union

A directory of Ethical Culture societies that combine ethical learning, community rituals, service, and non-theistic congregational life.

Angels: A History

David Albert Jones

A compact history of angels across Jewish, Christian, Islamic, philosophical, artistic, and popular-cultural settings.

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.

Approaching the Qur'an

Michael Sells

Michael Sells introduces selected early revelations of the Qur’an through new translations, brief commentary, and recordings of Arabic recitation. He pays close attention to sound, rhythm, imagery, and the movement between warning, mercy, creation, and human response. The book helps English-speaking readers encounter why the Qur’an is heard and recited as well as read.

The Art of Gathering

Priya Parker

Facilitator Priya Parker argues that meaningful gatherings begin with a specific purpose and require intentional choices about invitation, boundaries, authority, conflict, beginnings, and endings. Through examples from meals, meetings, conferences, and civic life, she challenges hosts to stop relying on convention and design around what people are actually gathering to do.

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.

Autobiography of a Yogi

Paramahansa Yogananda

Yogananda’s spiritual autobiography moves from his Bengali childhood and search for a guru through discipleship under Sri Yukteswar, encounters with saints and yogis, and his work establishing Kriya Yoga in the United States. Memoir, spiritual instruction, interreligious interpretation, and hagiographic wonder stories combine to present yoga as a path toward direct realization of God rather than primarily physical exercise.

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.

Be As You Are

Ramana Maharshi; edited by David Godman

Selections organize Ramana Maharshi’s teachings on self-inquiry, awareness, mind, surrender, and liberation.

Be Here Now

Ram Dass

Ram Dass combines memoir, hand-drawn visual teaching, yoga, meditation, devotional practice, and practical instruction in one of the defining books of American countercultural spirituality. He tells how psychologist Richard Alpert’s experiments with psychedelics led him to India, a guru, and a new identity, then invites readers into present-moment awareness and spiritual practice.

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 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: A Culture of Place

bell hooks

Essays on Kentucky, Black life, land, memory, class, regional identity, and the difficult work of returning home.

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 Bhagavad Gita

Eknath Easwaran

The Gita places a warrior's moral crisis inside a teaching on dharma, disciplined action, devotion, knowledge, and the nature of the self. Easwaran's edition offers substantial orientation while preserving the scriptural dialogue.

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.

The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles

Bruce H. Lipton

Bruce Lipton uses cell biology, epigenetics, and quantum language to argue that perception and belief powerfully shape biology. The book begins with real questions about gene regulation, then extends them into much broader claims about consciousness, energy, healing, and personal transformation.

The Biology of Transcendence

Joseph Chilton Pearce

Joseph Chilton Pearce argues that human development is shaped by interacting biological, emotional, cultural, and spiritual capacities and that experiences of transcendence can reorganize the body and brain. Moving across child development, neuroscience, contemplative traditions, heart research, culture, and personal story, he proposes that modern institutions inhibit an innate movement toward greater intelligence, compassion, and expanded consciousness.

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.

The Book of Assistance

Abdallah ibn Alawi al-Haddad; translated by Mostafa al-Badawi

A concise classical manual of intention, prayer, remembrance, conduct, and spiritual discipline from the Hadrami Sufi tradition.

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.

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Alan Watts

A playful argument that the isolated ego is a social fiction and that persons belong to a larger field of life and reality.

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.

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.

Caste

Isabel Wilkerson

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

Caught in the Pulpit

Daniel C. Dennett & Linda LaScola

Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola report interviews with clergy who no longer believe important parts of what their roles require them to teach. Expanded from an initial pilot study, the book explores secrecy, vocational identity, financial dependence, family and congregational expectations, routes into ministry, and the difficult choices available to closeted or former nonbelieving clergy.

Christine Jorgensen

Eric Marcus

A 1957 interview lets listeners hear the person behind a media-made trans spectacle and notice the burden of public explanation. This exact object earns inclusion because hearing the exchange performs work the 574-book shelf cannot supply as directly.

Christof Koch on Consciousness and Integrated Information

Sean Carroll's Mindscape

A leading consciousness researcher and a physicalist host expose live evidentiary disagreement inside science rather than pushing the traveler toward a spiritual metaphysics. This exact conversation earns inclusion because the audio mode performs work a parallel book entry would not.