THE LIBRARY · 662 BOOKS · 232 PODCASTS & EPISODES · 47 COMMUNITIES & DESTINATIONS · 10 MAPS
152 matching resources
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.
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 EpisodeData Over Dogma
Examines what biblical texts call angels and demons and contrasts those texts with later popular images.
BookDavid Albert Jones
A compact history of angels across Jewish, Christian, Islamic, philosophical, artistic, and popular-cultural settings.
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.
BookJoanne Cacciatore
A bereavement researcher and practitioner offers compassionate reflections and practices for living with devastating loss.
BookAtul 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.
BookAnil 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.
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.
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.
Bookjohn a. powell and Stephen Menendian
A framework for building belonging without defining community through exclusion, domination, or forced sameness.
BookToko-pa Turner
Turner blends memoir, dreamwork, folklore, and depth psychology to explore estrangement and the recovery of belonging.
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.
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.
BookIsrael 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.
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.
BookSami Schalk
Disability studies scholar Sami Schalk traces Black disability politics across the Black Panther Party and National Black Women’s Health Project, the National Black Disability Coalition, and contemporary Black disabled cultural activism. Using archival research, interviews, and cultural analysis, she shows how Black movements have addressed disability even without disability-rights language and how ableism, racism, gender, class, and state violence shape one another.
BookBessel 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.
Podcast EpisodePlanetary Radio
Uses Adam Frank’s astrobiology book to discuss what scientists can responsibly infer about life and intelligence beyond Earth.
BookRobert D. Putnam
A landmark empirical account of declining civic participation, associational life, trust, and social capital in the United States.
BookBrené Brown
Brené Brown examines how people can maintain self-respect and human connection amid ideological sorting, conflict, and the pressure to conform.
BookStephen Hawking
A classic popular introduction to cosmology, black holes, time, and the search for a unified physical account.
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.
BookDonald D. Hoffman
Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that evolution shapes perception for fitness rather than truth and develops that claim toward a theory of conscious agents and reality.
BookIsabel Wilkerson
A narrative argument that American racial hierarchy can be illuminated through comparison with caste systems in India and Nazi Germany.
BookDaniel 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.
BookJosh Packard; Ashleigh Hope
Packard and Hope report on people who remain spiritually engaged while leaving congregational institutions they experience as constraining or ineffective.
BookRichard Rothstein
Rothstein documents government policies that created and reinforced residential segregation in the United States.
BookEmily Nagoski
Sex educator Emily Nagoski explains sexual wellbeing through anatomy, the dual-control model of excitation and inhibition, stress, context, responsive desire, arousal nonconcordance, body image, and cultural messages. Her central argument is that variation is normal and that sexual response is shaped less by a universal drive than by the interaction between a person's system and the circumstances around it.
Annaka Harris
Annaka Harris introduces the mystery of subjective experience through short thought experiments about perception, free will, the self, and whether consciousness may be more basic in nature than we usually assume. The book is less a survey of the field than an invitation to notice how strange ordinary awareness becomes when examined closely.
BookDavid J. Chalmers
Chalmers develops the “hard problem” of consciousness and argues that subjective experience is not explained by functional accounts alone.
Susan Blackmore
Susan Blackmore offers a compact tour of the questions that make consciousness difficult: subjective experience, attention, the self, free will, altered states, and the relation between mind and brain. She introduces major experiments and theories while showing why even the word consciousness remains contested.
BookNadine Burke Harris
A pediatrician explains adverse childhood experiences, stress physiology, and the case for trauma-informed public health.
Podcast EpisodeData Over Dogma
Traces biblical demon language while asking how supernatural explanations can become harmful when applied to mental distress.
BookJohn H. Walton and J. Harvey Walton
Examines biblical language about demons and spirits within its ancient cultural and literary worlds rather than using the texts as a direct catalogue of invisible beings.
Podcast EpisodeMisquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Explores how biblical and later Christian ideas about demons, ghosts, and Satan developed rather than appearing as one unchanged system.
BookErnest Becker
Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker argues that awareness of mortality creates an existential terror humans manage through symbolic worlds, heroic identities, social status, religion, romance, work, and imagined participation in something enduring. Drawing heavily on psychoanalysis, existential thought, anthropology, and Otto Rank, he interprets personality and culture as organized defenses against creatureliness, vulnerability, dependence, and death.
BookBrian P. Levack
A history of possession and exorcism that asks how religious cultures supplied the scripts through which afflicted people and their communities understood and enacted possession.
BookRobert P. Jones
A demographic and cultural account of the decline of white Protestant dominance in the United States.
BookMatthew Desmond
Sociologist Matthew Desmond follows eight Milwaukee families and their landlords through evictions, court dates, moves, unsafe housing, lost possessions, and repeated efforts to regain stability. Combining immersive ethnography with housing data and policy analysis, he argues that eviction is not merely a consequence of poverty: it actively produces poverty by disrupting employment, schooling, health, credit, relationships, and neighborhood life.
BookJoseph P. Laycock and Eric Harrelson
Traces a feedback loop in which horror films borrow religious ideas and then reshape religious belief, reported experience, and public fear about demons and exorcism.
BookDavid Robson
Science writer David Robson explores how expectations can shape perception, stress responses, performance, habits, symptoms, and behavior. The book offers a lively account of real mind-body effects while repeatedly distinguishing them from the idea that belief can produce any desired external result.
BookSarah McCammon
Journalist Sarah McCammon combines her own story with reporting and interviews to examine the growing exvangelical movement. She explores how conservative white evangelicalism shaped people through faith, family, politics, gender, sexuality, fear, and belonging—and why many have begun to leave it. The book describes a social and personal movement more than it argues for a new theology.
BookVirginia Sole-Smith
A journalist examines anti-fat bias, parenting, medicine, food culture, and what children learn about bodies.
BookChristof Koch
A neuroscientist presents integrated information theory and argues that consciousness corresponds to intrinsic causal structure.
BookAntonio Damasio
A neurologist develops a layered account of emotion, feeling, core consciousness, and autobiographical self.
BookPhilip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry
A concise sociological history and analysis of white Christian nationalism in the United States.
BookRupert Gethin
A university-level introduction to Buddhist history, doctrine, cosmology, meditation, ethics, and traditions.
BookRonald L. Numbers
Edited by Ronald Numbers, this collection tests twenty-five recurring claims about science and religion against historical evidence. Its distinctive value is showing that the relationship has been conflictual, cooperative, and entangled in ways slogans obscure.
BookPhilip Goff
An analytic philosopher argues that physical science describes structure and behavior while leaving intrinsic conscious nature unexplained, motivating panpsychism.
BookBrené Brown
Brown presents practices of wholehearted living organized around vulnerability, shame resilience, authenticity, and connection.
BookStephen Prothero
Stephen Prothero introduces eight religious traditions by emphasizing the different human problems they diagnose, the goals they seek, and the practices or paths they commend. His central argument is that treating religions as different routes up one mountain erases consequential differences in doctrine, ritual, history, and aspiration.
BookFrancesca Stavrakopoulou
Biblical scholar Francesca Stavrakopoulou reconstructs the embodied deity of ancient Israel and Judah by attending to God’s feet, genitals, torso, arms, face, senses, voice, and bodily presence in temples and landscapes. Combining Hebrew Bible texts, ancient Near Eastern iconography, archaeology, inscriptions, and reception history, she argues that later Jewish and Christian abstractions often obscure how materially and anthropomorphically biblical authors imagined God.
BookRobert Waldinger and Marc Schulz
Lessons from the Harvard Study of Adult Development center relationships as a major contributor to long-term well-being.
BookKaren L. King
King translates and studies the surviving Gospel of Mary, its manuscript gaps, theology, conflicts over authority, and place in early Christianity.
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