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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.

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 You Believe

N. T. Wright

N. T. Wright presents Christian ethics as the formation of character for God’s promised new creation. Rejecting both rule-only morality and the idea that authentic action should simply feel spontaneous, he retrieves virtue language: repeated choices, communal practices, worship, Scripture, and the Spirit gradually form people able to act with wisdom. The Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love orient this training toward humanity’s vocation within renewed creation.

The Agile Church

Dwight J. Zscheile

Zscheile presents congregational learning, experimentation, and local participation as responses to rapid social and religious change.

All About Love

bell hooks

hooks treats love as an ethic and practice of care, knowledge, responsibility, respect, trust, and commitment rather than sentiment alone.

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.

Animal Liberation

Peter Singer

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

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.

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.

Belonging Without Othering

john a. powell and Stephen Menendian

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

Belonging: A Culture of Place

bell hooks

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

Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home

Toko-pa Turner

Turner blends memoir, dreamwork, folklore, and depth psychology to explore estrangement and the recovery of belonging.

The Beloved Community

Charles Marsh

A history of how theology, organizing, interracial community, and institutional conflict shaped the American civil-rights movement.

The Benedict Option

Rod Dreher

Rod Dreher argues that Christians who hold traditional doctrines should respond to secularization not chiefly by winning elections but by building communities capable of sustaining belief and practice. Inspired loosely by Benedictine life, he urges thicker formation through worship, education, family, work, discipline, hospitality, and local institutions so that orthodox Christianity can endure what he sees as an increasingly hostile cultural environment.

Beyond a Binary God

Tara K. Soughers

A transgender priest’s theological exploration of gender, embodiment, Scripture, and images of God beyond simple binaries.

Beyond Shame

Matthias Roberts

A therapist offers an affirming Christian approach to sexual shame, desire, values, and embodied wholeness.

The Bible, Disability, and the Church

Amos Yong

Theologian Amos Yong develops a Christian theology of disability by bringing biblical interpretation, disability studies, Pentecostal experience, and ecclesiology into conversation. He revisits healing narratives, creation, the image of God, the body of Christ, hospitality, and the Spirit, challenging churches that define normalcy too narrowly or imagine disabled people chiefly as recipients of cure, care, or charitable ministry.

Bible, Gender, Sexuality

James V. Brownson

James Brownson compares 'gender complementarity' and 'kinship' frameworks across Scripture, then applies the larger biblical moral logic to same-sex relationships. It adds a dense theological map for readers who have outgrown introductory arguments.

A Bigger Table

John 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.

Black Disability Politics

Sami 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.

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.

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.

Born Again Again

Katie and Joe Bauer

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.

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Robin Wall Kimmerer braids botanical science, Citizen Potawatomi teachings, memoir, plant stories, and reflections on language, gratitude, reciprocity, gift, and responsibility. Rather than treating plants as passive resources, she invites readers to encounter them as teachers and relatives within living systems of exchange, while tracing the damage caused by extraction and settler colonialism.

Braving the Wilderness

Brené Brown

Brené Brown examines how people can maintain self-respect and human connection amid ideological sorting, conflict, and the pressure to conform.

Broken Trust

F. Remy Diederich

Diederich offers a pastoral account of spiritual abuse and recovery, with attention to distorted authority, boundaries, and rebuilding trust.

Brown Church

Robert Chao Romero

Historian Robert Chao Romero traces a five-hundred-year tradition of Latino Christian social justice across colonization, missions, labor, civil rights, immigration, and contemporary church life. He names this tradition Brown Church, centering figures, movements, and theologies through which Latina and Latino Christians have resisted racial hierarchy while drawing on Scripture, Catholic and Protestant faith, community memory, and public action.

Canoeing the Mountains

Tod Bolsinger

Bolsinger applies adaptive-leadership ideas to congregations facing terrain for which inherited expertise no longer supplies a route.

Care Work

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha gathers essays, practical experiments, and movement knowledge from queer and trans disabled communities of color. The book develops ideas including care webs, access intimacy, collective access, mutual aid, disability justice, and sustainable organizing while naming scarcity, burnout, abuse, and unequal care labor.

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.

Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

David P. Gushee

Christian ethicist David Gushee narrates and defends his movement from traditional evangelical teaching toward full LGBTQ inclusion. He engages Scripture, sexual ethics, covenant, church practice, pastoral consequences, and responses from critics, presenting change as a matter of Christian discipleship rather than departure from biblical or ecclesial concern.

Christianity After Religion

Diana 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.

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.

A Church Called Tov

Scot McKnight; Laura Barringer

New Testament scholar Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer describe how church cultures become toxic and contrast them with a ‘tov’ culture shaped by goodness, empathy, grace, truth, justice, service, and Christlike leadership. Using institutional patterns and the aftermath of abuse, they focus less on identifying a single bad leader than on the habits, incentives, loyalties, and silences that allow harm to be protected.

The Church Cracked Open

Stephanie Spellers

A church leader’s call for institutional surrender, solidarity, and re-formation after racial injustice and institutional decline expose old arrangements.

Church Finder

United Church of Christ

The United Church of Christ’s directory for finding local congregations by location and selected attributes.

The Church in the Power of the Spirit

Jürgen Moltmann

Moltmann develops an ecumenical, messianic ecclesiology shaped by the Spirit, freedom, mission, and solidarity with the oppressed.

The Church of Mercy

Pope Francis

This collection of Pope Francis’s early addresses emphasizes mercy, encounter, poverty, service, and a church that moves toward the margins.

The Church of Us vs. Them

David E. Fitch

Fitch argues that churches reproduce hostility when they organize identity around enemies, and proposes practices of presence and reconciliation.

Church Refugees

Josh Packard; Ashleigh Hope

Packard and Hope report on people who remain spiritually engaged while leaving congregational institutions they experience as constraining or ineffective.

The Color of Compromise

Jemar Tisby

Historian Jemar Tisby traces white Christian complicity in American racism from slavery and segregation through the civil-rights era and contemporary institutions. Written as a narrative history with an explicit Christian moral call, it shows how churches and leaders repeatedly chose compromise, silence, paternalism, or active support for racial hierarchy.

The Color of Law

Richard Rothstein

Rothstein documents government policies that created and reinforced residential segregation in the United States.

Come as You Are

Emily 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.

Come As You Are

Emily Nagoski

Listener questions and sex research make embodied consent, desire and pleasure discussable without purity-culture assumptions.

Community and Growth

Jean Vanier

Jean Vanier reflects on communal life through the founding vision and daily experience of L’Arche, where people with and without intellectual disabilities share life. He writes about belonging, vulnerability, conflict, forgiveness, celebration, authority, growth, and the movement from idealism toward receiving actual people. The book’s spiritual account of community is now inseparable from documented findings that Vanier sexually abused and manipulated women.

Community: The Structure of Belonging

Peter Block

Consultant Peter Block proposes that community is produced through the structure of conversations rather than delivered by experts or heroic leaders. He emphasizes invitation, possibility, ownership, dissent, commitment, and gifts, using small-group questions to shift participants from deficiency and blame toward chosen accountability. The book applies an asset-based, facilitative approach to neighborhoods, civic life, organizations, and other gatherings.

The Connection Between Racism and Greed

Malcolm Foley with Pete Enns and Jared Byas

Malcolm Foley connects racial injustice with economic self-interest and asks what solidarity, truth-telling, and a less exploitative Christian life could require.

Consent and “Enthusiastic Maybe”

Emily Nagoski

A real couple tests consent language where desire is willing but not emphatic, adding nuance beyond slogans. This exact object earns inclusion because hearing the exchange performs work the 574-book shelf cannot supply as directly.

Conspirituality

Derek Beres; Matthew Remski; Julian Walker

Provides critical vocabulary for spiritual influence, wellness pseudoscience, cult dynamics, and the traffic between mystical claims and authoritarian politics.

Creative Resistance & the Joy of Nonviolence

Drew G. I. Hart and Jarrod McKenna with Pete Enns and Jared Byas

A lively conversation about love, power, shalom, and creative nonviolence, with attention to what resistance can look like in ordinary communities.

The Cross and the Lynching Tree

James H. Cone

James H. Cone places the crucifixion of Jesus beside the lynching of Black Americans, arguing that the two symbols interpret one another and expose white Christianity's failure to confront racial terror. Through theology, history, spirituals, blues, literature, and the witness of figures including Ida B. Wells and Martin Luther King Jr., he asks what the cross can mean when Christians ignore crucified people.

David Hayward: Naked Pastor

David Ames; David Hayward

Names the vocational and marital consequences often missed by topic-only deconstruction resources.

Dear Church

Lenny Duncan

Lenny Duncan writes a love letter and prophetic manifesto to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the wider white mainline church. Drawing on his life as a Black, queer Lutheran pastor, he confronts white supremacy, institutional self-protection, respectability, tokenism, policing, and the distance between public welcome and actual redistribution of power.

Deconversion Therapy

Karen Alea; Bonnie Lewis

Disability and the Gospel

Michael S. Beates

Beates offers a Reformed evangelical theology of disability, suffering, providence, and congregational belonging.

Disability Visibility

Alice Wong

Wong gathers first-person essays by disabled writers on access, identity, work, culture, intimacy, activism, and community.

The Disabled God

Nancy L. Eiesland

Nancy Eiesland's foundational disability theology begins with the image of the resurrected Christ as a disabled God whose wounds remain. Drawing on sociology, Christian theology, interviews, Eucharist, and disability activism, she critiques ideals of cure, passive suffering, inaccessible worship, and churches that treat disabled people only as recipients of care.