THE LIBRARY · 662 BOOKS · 232 PODCASTS & EPISODES · 47 COMMUNITIES & DESTINATIONS · 10 MAPS
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Podcast EpisodeClear+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.
Eliot Deutsch
A compact philosophical reconstruction of Advaita Vedanta’s accounts of reality, the self, ignorance, knowledge, and liberation.
Anantanand Rambachan
Rambachan explains Advaita Vedanta through its teachings about brahman, the world, human identity, liberation, and ethical life.
BookJohn S. Mbiti
A landmark African scholar’s synthesis that challenged Western dismissal of African religious worlds and philosophies.
Greg Eghigian
A global history of how flying-saucer reports, investigators, institutions, media, and public expectations produced the modern UFO phenomenon after 1947.
BookBruce 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.
BookD. 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.
BookMichael W. Cuneo
Reports on American exorcism and deliverance cultures after extensive observation, placing their growth within media, institutional, and social change.
Podcast EpisodeGood Faith
Explores how Christians might respond theologically and pastorally if persuasive evidence of extraterrestrial life emerged.
BookDavid Albert Jones
A compact history of angels across Jewish, Christian, Islamic, philosophical, artistic, and popular-cultural settings.
Podcast EpisodeRotating 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.
BookMichael 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.
BookRobert Alter
A landmark demonstration of how Hebrew Bible stories create meaning through repetition, dialogue, type-scenes, and narrative craft.
BookAndrew Davison
A systematic theological study of how possible life elsewhere bears on creation, angels, the image of God, sin, incarnation, Christology, revelation, and salvation.
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.
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.
BookParamahansa 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.
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.
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.
BookRamana Maharshi; edited by David Godman
Selections organize Ramana Maharshi’s teachings on self-inquiry, awareness, mind, surrender, and liberation.
BookRam 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.
Podcast EpisodeBlake 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.
BookJoe 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.
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.
Bookjohn a. powell and Stephen Menendian
A framework for building belonging without defining community through exclusion, domination, or forced sameness.
Bookbell hooks
Essays on Kentucky, Black life, land, memory, class, regional identity, and the difficult work of returning home.
BookTara K. Soughers
A transgender priest’s theological exploration of gender, embodiment, Scripture, and images of God beyond simple binaries.
BookElaine 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.
BookEknath 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.
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.
BookTheron D. Williams
A pastor’s accessible argument for recognizing Africa and Black presence within biblical geography, genealogy, and interpretation.
BookChristian Smith
A sociologist’s critique of biblicism from inside evangelical Christianity and an argument for a more Christ-centered authority.
BookPeter Enns
Biblical scholar Peter Enns argues that the Bible’s diversity, ancient cosmology, morally troubling narratives, and internal tensions are features readers must engage rather than problems to conceal. Using Israel’s stories, wisdom literature, the Gospels, and Paul, he challenges modern expectations of error-free factual reporting and proposes a Scripture shaped by ancient human authors through whom communities continue wrestling with God.
Podcast ShowHelen Bond; Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones
Working historians make current biblical scholarship approachable without pretending historical method resolves theology.
BookJohn Pavlovitz
John Pavlovitz draws on pastoral experience, personal stories, and the welcome he sees in Jesus to imagine Christian community around four practices: radical hospitality, total authenticity, messy diversity, and agenda-free relationship. The book is less a technical account of church structure than an accessible invitation to notice who receives a chair, who controls the guest list, and whether belonging is being offered as care or as a strategy for changing people.
BookJoseph 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.
BookBlack Elk; as told through John G. Neihardt
An influential mediated narrative of Black Elk’s visions, Lakota history, colonial violence, and communal loss.
BookScot McKnight
Scot McKnight argues that Christians do not simply read and obey the Bible without interpreting it. Every church follows some teachings directly, adapts others, and decides how Scripture’s story speaks in a different time. Using women in church leadership as his main example, he invites evangelical readers to make that process more honest and thoughtful.
BookSonya 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.
BookChristine 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.
Podcast EpisodeMike 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.
Podcast EpisodePlanetary Radio
Uses Adam Frank’s astrobiology book to discuss what scientists can responsibly infer about life and intelligence beyond Earth.
BookAbdallah 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.
BookMargery Kempe
A medieval laywoman’s account of visions, tears, pilgrimage, family negotiation, conflict with clergy, and public devotion.
BookAlan Watts
A playful argument that the isolated ego is a social fiction and that persons belong to a larger field of life and reality.
Podcast EpisodeGinger 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.
Podcast ShowGinger Campbell
BookJules 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.
Podcast EpisodeBig Picture Science
Introduces the COSMIC search at the Very Large Array, science-fictional imagination, and the debate over deliberately transmitting messages to other civilizations.
Podcast EpisodeMichael 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.
BookKaren 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.
BookCynthia Bourgeault
Cynthia Bourgeault teaches Centering Prayer as a Christian practice of consent, surrender, and interior silence. Alongside practical instruction, she describes attention, the sacred word, emotional programs, false-self patterns, and the way contemplative practice may alter one's relationship to thought and identity rather than simply produce calm.
Community / DestinationCenters for Spiritual Living
A global directory of Centers for Spiritual Living communities teaching the New Thought philosophy known as Science of Mind.
BookJ. Philip Newell
Scottish theologian J. Philip Newell draws on Celtic Christian figures and themes to present Christ as the disclosure of a divine presence already woven through creation. Emphasizing John rather than separation, he explores incarnation, the sacredness of Earth, the goodness beneath distortion, contemplation, and reconciliation. The book invites a Christianity that listens for wisdom within nature and the human soul while remaining oriented toward Christ.
BookE. Stanley Jones
A missionary reflects on presenting Christ in India without making Western civilization the container of the gospel.
BookDiana Butler Bass
Writing amid the early-2010s rise of religious disaffiliation, Diana Butler Bass interprets declining institutional loyalty alongside growing interest in experience, relationship, practice, and spiritual awakening. She places contemporary change within a broad history of American religious awakenings and asks whether Christianity might be moving from inherited patterns of believing, behaving, and belonging toward a more experiential form of faith.
Podcast EpisodeEric 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.
BookStephanie Spellers
A church leader’s call for institutional surrender, solidarity, and re-formation after racial injustice and institutional decline expose old arrangements.
Community / DestinationUnited Church of Christ
The United Church of Christ’s directory for finding local congregations by location and selected attributes.
Podcast ShowEmily Nagoski
Listener questions and sex research make embodied consent, desire and pleasure discussable without purity-culture assumptions.
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