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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.

The Agile Church

Dwight J. Zscheile

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

Alpha Course Finder

Alpha

A finder for local or online Alpha courses that introduce core Christian claims through a hosted series of talks and discussion.

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.

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.

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.

Christ of the Celts

J. 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.

The Christ of the Indian Road

E. Stanley Jones

A missionary reflects on presenting Christ in India without making Western civilization the container of the gospel.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Cost of Discipleship

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer contrasts costly grace with religious accommodation and interprets the Sermon on the Mount as a concrete call to follow Jesus.

The Crucifixion

Fleming Rutledge

Fleming Rutledge treats the crucifixion as God's action against sin, death, and enslaving powers, drawing together biblical motifs rather than reducing the cross to one formula. It gives the Jesus shelf serious theological depth.

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

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.

Disentangling Faith

Erin Hicks Moon with Pete Enns and Jared Byas

Erin Hicks Moon tells a warm, candid story of questioning Southern Baptist formation, losing certainty, and finding a Christian faith spacious enough for mystery.

Empty the Pews

Chrissy Stroop

Edited by Chrissy Stroop and Lauren O'Neal, this anthology presents multiple paths out of religious communities, including intellectual, moral, political, gendered, and traumatic rupture.

The End of White Christian America

Robert P. Jones

A demographic and cultural account of the decline of white Protestant dominance in the United States.

The Episcopal Church Find a Church

The Episcopal Church

The Episcopal Church’s directory for locating congregations and worshiping communities.

The Evangelical to Conspiracy Theory Pipeline

Jared Stacy with Pete Enns and Jared Byas

Jared Stacy explains how fear, decline narratives, identity, and spiritualized stories of good and evil can draw evangelical communities toward conspiracy thinking.

The Everlasting Man

G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton offers a sweeping Christian interpretation of world religions, human nature, myth, history, and the uniqueness of Jesus. The book’s two movements contrast humanity’s imaginative and philosophical search with Chesterton’s portrait of Christ and the church, using paradox, polemic, and large historical claims to argue that Christianity answers the strangeness of the human creature and the drama of history.

Exvangelical

Blake Chastain

The Exvangelicals

Sarah 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.

Faith Development and Pastoral Care

James W. Fowler

Practical theologian James Fowler extends his influential faith-development theory into pastoral care. He describes faith as a universal way people organize meaning, trust, loyalty, and ultimate concern, then asks how ministers can accompany transitions and crises across proposed developmental stages. Case material and pastoral reflection connect life history, relationships, vocation, symbolic worlds, and communities of faith.

Following Jesus as a Native Traditionalist

Randy Woodley with Pete Enns and Jared Byas

Randy Woodley distinguishes Jesus from the colonial harms carried by Western Christianity and explores story, community, land, and Indigenous ways of knowing.

Freeing Jesus

Diana Butler Bass

Diana Butler Bass reflects on six ways she has known Jesus across a changing Christian life: Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence. Rather than constructing one definitive doctrine, she brings memoir, scripture, tradition, and lived experience into conversation and shows how a relationship with Jesus can change without simply disappearing.

From the Christ Mind: Jesus of Nazareth

Darrell Morley Price

The book expands ACIM-associated themes of forgiveness, responsibility, illusion, and awakening through teachings presented as coming from the Christ mind of Jesus.

The Future of Faith

Harvey Cox

A historical-theological argument that Christianity is moving from belief-centered systems toward a Spirit-centered age.

The Gospel According to Jesus

John MacArthur

A conservative evangelical defense of “lordship salvation” against versions of conversion detached from discipleship.

The Great Emergence

Phyllis Tickle

Religion writer Phyllis Tickle interprets contemporary Christian disruption through a recurring historical pattern: roughly every five centuries, inherited structures of authority are shaken, traditions reorganize, and new forms of faith emerge alongside altered older ones. She connects the present to the Great Reformation, the Great Schism, Gregory the Great’s era, and earlier upheavals, then describes an emerging networked Christianity less centered on denominational control.

The Great Spiritual Migration

Brian D. McLaren

A programmatic call to move Christianity from belief policing toward love, spiritual practice, and public good.

The Historical Figure of Jesus

E. P. Sanders

New Testament scholar E. P. Sanders reconstructs Jesus within first-century Judaism using historical comparison, source criticism, and judgments about what is most secure in the evidence. He begins with widely accepted actions and outcomes—Jesus' baptism, proclamation, followers, conflict, temple action, and crucifixion—then develops a portrait centered on Israel's restoration, the kingdom of God, and Jesus' place within Jewish eschatological hope.

Historical Jesus—What More Can We Know?

Helen Bond; Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

Chris Keith and James Crossley explain why historical-Jesus research is changing and what evidence can still support. This exact object earns inclusion because hearing the exchange performs work the 574-book shelf cannot supply as directly.

The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant

John Dominic Crossan

A major reconstruction of Jesus through social history, anthropology, and source stratification.

The Holy Post

Phil Vischer; Skye Jethani; Kaitlyn Schiess

How Jesus Became God

Bart D. Ehrman

An influential disputed reconstruction—not a neutral account of Christian origins. Historian Bart Ehrman argues that Jesus did not claim divinity in the later orthodox sense and traces how experiences after his death, Jewish and Greco-Roman categories, worship, debate, and doctrine contributed to increasingly exalted understandings of him.

It's In the Code, Ep. 4: Cool Kid Church

Bradley Onishi; Dan Miller

A short decoding of suburban “relevance” language reveals class, consumer and authority assumptions hiding in familiar church style. This exact object earns inclusion because hearing the exchange performs work the 574-book shelf cannot supply as directly.

Jesus and Empire

Richard A. Horsley

A historical reading of Jesus’ movement within Roman imperial power, village life, and resistance.

Jesus and Jewish Law

Logan Williams; Paul Sloan

Jesus and John Wayne

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Kristin Kobes Du Mez traces how ideals of militant masculinity, patriarchal authority, nationalism, celebrity, and political power became central to much of white American evangelical culture. Moving through popular books, ministries, media figures, military imagery, scandals, and electoral politics, she argues that evangelical support for Donald Trump reflected a long formation rather than a sudden abandonment of stated values.

Jesus and the Disinherited

Howard Thurman

Howard Thurman reads the life and religion of Jesus from the position of people whose ‘backs are against the wall.’ Writing amid segregation, colonialism, and war, he considers how the poor and disinherited survive under dominating power and devotes sustained attention to fear, deception, and hatred as strategies that can protect life yet also deform it.

Jesus and the Victory of God

N. T. Wright

A large historical reconstruction of Jesus within first-century Jewish hopes, symbols, and kingdom expectations.

Jesus Before Christianity

Albert Nolan

South African Dominican Albert Nolan reads Jesus from within the struggle against oppression, asking what his human life meant before later doctrinal systems defined him. He portrays Jesus’ solidarity with the poor, conflict with status and domination, announcement of God’s reign, table fellowship, healing, and trust in God as a liberating social practice. The book then asks what following this Jesus requires amid contemporary injustice.

Jesus for the Non-Religious

John Shelby Spong

Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong attempts to separate Jesus from supernaturalism, creedal literalism, and institutional claims that modern readers may no longer find credible. Drawing selectively on biblical criticism, he rejects traditional accounts of incarnation, miracle, atonement, resurrection, and theism while reconstructing Jesus as a boundary-breaking human presence whose life opens a path toward fuller humanity, love, and freedom.

The Jesus I Never Knew

Philip Yancey

An evangelical writer revisits the Gospel portraits to separate Jesus from familiarity, sentimentality, and cultural projection.

Jesus the Jew

Geza Vermes

A landmark reconstruction of Jesus within first-century Jewish charismatic and prophetic traditions.

Jesus, Interrupted

Bart D. Ehrman

Bart D. Ehrman introduces general readers to historical-critical study of the New Testament by highlighting differences among Gospel accounts, disputed authorship, changing Christologies, and the diversity of early Christianity. He argues that these matters are familiar within academic biblical scholarship but often absent from churches, and he describes how encountering them contributed to the transformation of his own faith and eventual agnosticism.

Jesus: A Pilgrimage

James Martin, SJ

Jesuit priest James Martin follows the life of Jesus through Gospel passages and places associated with them in Galilee and Jerusalem. Travel narrative, mainstream biblical scholarship, Catholic spirituality, humor, and personal reflection meet in an extended attempt to hold together the historical Jesus and the Christ encountered in faith.

Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium

Bart D. Ehrman

Historian Bart D. Ehrman presents Jesus as a Jewish apocalyptic prophet who expected God to intervene soon, defeat the forces of evil, raise the dead, judge humanity, and establish a transformed kingdom. Working through sayings traditions, historical criteria, and the first-century Jewish setting, Ehrman argues that this imminent expectation best explains Jesus’ proclamation, ethics, symbolic actions, following, and execution.