Religious Culture

If you’ve prayed, confessed, and done everything right—but your desire for other women never went away—you’re not broken. You’re human. And your body has been trying to tell you the truth for years. SACRED FREEDOM is the first book to reveal how purity culture didn’t just wound men spiritually—it shaped their nervous systems, buried desire in shame, and left the body carrying a conflict the mind could never resolve. Called “essential reading” by Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers, this powerful blend of memoir, theology, psychology, and embodied healing shows men of faith how to ...

What's Your Religious Literacy IQ? Quick—can you: Name the four Gospels? Name a sacred text of Hinduism? Name the holy book of Islam? Name the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old Testament?Name the Ten Commandments? Name the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism? If you can't...

Stephen Mansfield, the acclaimed New York Times best-selling author, has highlighted the growing popularity of Mormonism—a belief system with cultic roots—and the implications of its critical rise. Mormons are moving into the spotlight in pop culture, politics, sports, and entertainment via presidential candidates like Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, media personality Glenn Beck, mega-bestselling Twilight author Stephenie Meyer, and The Book of Mormon, the hottest show on Broadway.

How did a libertine who lacks even the most basic knowledge of the Christian faith win 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016? And why have white evangelicals become a presidential reprobate's staunchest supporters? Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping account of the last 75 years of white evangelicalism, showing how American evangelicals have worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism.

In Jezebel Unhinged Tamura Lomax traces the use of the jezebel trope in the Black church and in Black popular culture, showing how it is pivotal to reinforcing men's cultural and institutional power to discipline and define Black girlhood and womanhood. Drawing on writing by medieval thinkers and travelers, Enlightenment theories of race, the commodification of women's bodies under slavery, and the work of Tyler Perry and Bishop T. D. Jakes, Lomax shows how Black women are written into religious and cultural history as sites of sexual deviation.

For half of the 20th century, Huston Smith covered the world seeking answers to the supreme questions in life: Why are we here? What do we really want? What does it all mean? From humble village temples to glinting mosques and towering cathedrals, Smith has uncovered the spiritual treasures...

Beginning with Jesus' birth, Ken Bailey leads you on a kaleidoscopic study of Jesus throughout the four Gospels. Bailey examines the life and ministry of Jesus with attention to the Lord's Prayer, the Beatitudes, Jesus' relationship to women, and especially Jesus' parables. Through it all, Bailey employs his trademark expertise as a master of Middle Eastern culture to lead you into a deeper understanding of the person and significance of Jesus within his own cultural context.

Welcome back to Shiloh Ridge, where faith, family, and the spirit of the West collide in this heartwarming multi-generational ranching series. The Glovers have always put God, country, and family first—though not always in that order. In this inspirational family saga, the bonds of kinship are tested and strengthened as the family tree grows in the heart of Three Rivers. As a bridge story linking the love stories of Ward and Judge, this clean and wholesome romance captures the quiet miracles and daily trials of life in a small town full of cowboys. A Season of New Life and Motherhood ...

Widely hailed as a revelation of a "lost" golden age, this history brings to vivid life the rich and thriving culture of medieval Spain, where, for more than seven centuries, Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in an atmosphere of tolerance, and literature, science, and the arts flourished.

AN NPR BEST BOOK OF 2024 An award-winning journalist's exploration of how race, identity and political trauma have influenced the rise in far-right sentiment among Latinos, and how this group can shape American politics “A deeply reported, surprisingly personal exploration of a phenomenon...

This is not a book about losing faith. It’s about walking away from the version of it that asked you to disappear. In Not Your Good Girl Anymore, Faith Hubble writes with razor-edged tenderness about what it means to grow up obedient, to unlearn silence, and to come home to a self you were never taught to love. Told in three parts—what they taught me, the leaving, and free looks like this—this collection traces the quiet violence of religious shame and the fierce, beautiful work of reclaiming your body, voice, and worth. These poems are for the ones who stopped being good to start ...

Woven from Joseph Campbell’s previously unpublished work, this volume explores Judeo-Christian symbols and metaphors - and their misinterpretations - with the famed mythologist’s characteristic conversational warmth and accessible scholarship. Campbell’s insights highlight centuries of confusion between literal and metaphorical interpretations of Western religious symbols that are, he argues, perennially relevant keys to spiritual understanding and mystical revelation.

From a familythat inspired Big Love’s story of Bill Henricksonand his three wives, this first-ever memoir of a polygamous family captures theextraordinary workings of a unique family dynamic, and argues forthe acceptance of plural marriage as an alternative lifestyle. Readers ofCarolyn...

For more than a decade, New York University president John Sexton has used baseball to illustrate the elements of a spiritual life in a wildly popular course at NYU. Using great works of baseball literature as well as the actual game’s fantastic moments, its legendary characters, and its routine rituals - from the long-sought triumph of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers to the heroic achievements of players like the saintly Christy Mathewson and the sinful Ty Cobb to the loving intimacy of a game of catch between a father and son - Sexton teaches that through the game we can touch the spiritual dimensions of life.

While patriarchy and misogyny are problems everywhere, they take on a particularly pernicious form in Christian churches, where those with power have been insisting, since many decades before #MeToo, that this sexually dysfunctional environment is, in fact, exactly how God wants it to be. #ChurchToo turns over the rocks of the church's sexual dysfunction, revealing just what makes sexualized violence in religious contexts both ubiquitous and uniquely traumatizing. 

She's a city girl returning to her hometown. He's a country boy through and through. When these two former best friends (and ex-lovers) start working together, romantic sparks fly that could ignite a wildfire... Will Regina and Blake get burned or can they tame the flames into true love? Regina Barlow never looked back after she left Chestnut Springs in her rear-view mirror. She likes living in a big city, and she's not thrilled to be going back to the small town in the Texas Hill Country. When Gina arrives at The Texas Longhorn Ranch as their new pastry chef, it's not the first time she's ...

She's looking for solace. He's asked her out before, but never followed through. Can Cami and Clay find time for their second chance romance now? Cami Quinn has had enough of being the shiny new date for the cowboys in Quinn Valley. She's on her fifth or sixth broken heart, and she needs the soothing, healing messages she's found at the fall fireside series in the past. When she arrives at the first one, there aren't any seats—except by the handsome Clay Martin, a cowboy who's asked her out before and never followed through. She wasn't going to say yes to the next man who asked her out. ...

“A narrative of great power. Warm with friendly personality and pulsating with . . . profound eloquence and religious fervor.” —New York Times In this 1939 novel based on the familiar story of the Exodus, Zora Neale Hurston blends the Moses of the Old Testament with the Moses of black...

Welcome to Heaven, Inc., the grossly mismanaged corporation in the sky. For as long as anyone can remember, the founder and CEO (known in some circles as "God") has been phoning it in. Lately, he's been spending most of his time on the golf course. And when he does show up at work, it's not to...

A Christmas Eve delivery gone wrong leads to a relationship neither of them expected. Ward Glover is finally finding his rhythm as the cowboy foreman at Shiloh Ridge Ranch. He’s dedicated to his work and his faith, but after so many changes in his life, he’s been hesitant to open his heart again. That changes on Christmas Eve when a beautiful woman in a massive dump truck gets stranded right in front of his house, bringing an unexpected spark to the small town Texas ranch. Dorothy “Dot” Crockett is more comfortable hauling gravel in her beloved truck, Brutus, than navigating the ...