Memoir Religion

The ancient historian Josephus is key to a proper understanding of the time of Christ and the early church era. This recording, an abridged paraphrase of two Josephus histories, will transport you back in time to the period 37 B.C. to A.D. 70, from the time Herod took Jerusalem to become "King of the Jews," to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and its temple.

In this Very Short Introduction, Deborah Martinsen explores Dostoevsky's tumultuous life story: his political imprisonment and narrow escape from execution, his Siberian exile, his gambling addiction, his romantic marriage, and his literary success.

From the best-selling author of the biography of Shunryu Suzuki (Crooked Cucumber), comes a memoir and oral history of Tassajara—a monastery founded in 1967 by Shunryu Suzuki, abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center. Peopled like a Sixties film of Buddhist invasion, with hippies, dreamers, lovers, a wave of serious practitioners. Nyogen Senzaki, D.T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and of course Shunryu Suzuki and Richard Baker are all here. This is the story of what happened at and surrounding the founding of the first Zen monastery in the West.

A sweeping history of three generations darkened by the long shadow of the Holocaust, The Cello Still Sings is a vivid, moving, and true story of personal discovery. As a child Janet is haunted by the eerie hush surrounding her parents' experiences. George and Katherine, two professional musicians and Holocaust survivors, bury the memories of who and what they were before, silencing the past in order to live.

This is an amazing true story of a female civilian employee of the Army Corps of Engineers in Basrah and Nasiriyah, Iraq. She was riding in a truck with men when a roadside bomb destroyed the vehicle. Her body was so severely damaged that there was no possible way she could live. She vividly recounts her near-death experience when she went out of her body, to the spirit world.

Bernadette Soubirous was born in Lourdes, France in 1844. Between February 11 and July 16, 1858, the Virgin Mary appeared to Bernadette eighteen times at the Grotto in Massabielle. When Bernadette was twenty-two years old, she entered the Sisters of Charity Religious Order in Nevers, France. To this day, Lourdes remains one of the greatest healing centers in the world.

In this eye-opening book, angelologist Father Marcello Stanzione tells the fascinating story of Father Amorth and his life as an exorcist. You'll learn of his daily schedule and how he managed to perform dozens of exorcisms each week. You'll find out what his exorcism room looked like, and how various devils responded to his bold practice. Best of all, you'll hear Father Amorth's own startling explanations of many truths about the Devil that our culture has forgotten and about the canny methods the Deceiver has adopted in recent years to corrupt believers and unbelievers alike.

I had it all: an estate in Belize, and a great marriage to my husband, Michael. In the blink of an eye, a horrific car crash on a Mexican highway took Michael's life and left me hurt and alone in a country where I didn't speak the language. I thought I had lost the love of my life forever… until he started speaking to me from the other side... So, apparently, now I can talk to dead people. Lots of dead people.

What if Augustine's Confessions had been written not by a man, but by a mother? How might her tales of desire, temptation, and transformation differ from his? In this memoir, Natalie Carnes describes giving birth to a daughter and beginning a story of conversion strikingly unlike Augustine's - even as his journey becomes a surprising companion to her own. The challenges Carnes recounts will be familiar to many parents. She wonders what and how much she should ask her daughter to suffer in resisting racism, patriarchy, and injustice.

John Henry Newman was an influential figure in the Church of England who shocked the Anglican community in 1843 when he joined the Roman Catholic Church. Newman's spiritual autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, is a classic of English literature. Besides serving as an eloquent response to his critics, it also explores the nature of Christianity and its place in the world. Newman’s work The Idea of a University covers topics such as the character of the academic community, the place of religion and moral values in the university milieu, and more.

When a mass shooter killed five people in an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, grieving people graffitied James Dobson's Focus on the Family headquarters with the words "Their blood is on your hands." Such an accusation comes as no surprise to Amber Cantorna-Wylde, whose father is a Focus on the Family executive and cast Amber out of her family when she came out in 2012.

When Carolyn Weber moved to Oxford University to study, she didn't expect to find God there. But she did. As she grappled with her newest and most important relationship, she also found that there was another invitation: to think bigger about love. In this book we follow Weber through courtship and into marriage and parenthood. Now a literature professor, Weber reflects on her relationship with a sometimes-absent father and how that has shaped her.

With no mission board to support or guide her, and less than 10 dollars in her pocket, Gladys Aylward left her home in England to answer God's call to take the message of the gospel to China. With the Sino-Japanese War waging around her, she struggled to bring the basics of life and the fullness of God to orphaned children. Time after time, God triumphed over impossible situations, and drew people to himself. Gladys Aylward: The Little Woman tells the story of one woman's determination to serve God at any cost.

Five years after his brilliantly successful, Pulitzer Prize-winning book about God as portrayed in the Old Testament, Jack Miles gives us his striking consideration of Christ. He presents Christ as a hero of literature based only in part on the historical Jesus, asking us to take the idea of Christ as God Incarnate not as a dogma of religion but as the premise of a work of art, the New Testament.

Covering her courtship and marriage to Steven Curtis Chapman, struggles for emotional balance, and living with grief, Mary Beth's story is our story - wondering where God is when the worst happens. In Choosing to SEE, she shows how she wrestles with God even as she has allowed him to write her story - both during times of happiness and those of tragedy. Readers will hear firsthand about the loss of her daughter, the struggle to heal, and the unexpected path God has placed her on.

King David was a complicated, conflicted man of flesh. But too often he is viewed as an Americanized shepherd boy on a Sunday school felt board or a New Testament saint alongside the Virgin Mary. Not only does this neglect one of the Bible’s most complex stories of sin and redemption, it also bypasses the gritty, life lessons inherent in the amazing true story of David. Mark Rutland shreds the felt-board character, breaks down the sculpted marble statue, and unearths the real David of the Bible.

The Psychedelic Diaries marries traditional memoir to today’s conversations around sex, drugs, and current world events by following 24-year-old Kaitlin Tilotta’s adventures as a professional dominatrix on a deliberate five-month experimental psychedelic drug bender.

Monastic life and its counter-cultural wisdom come alive in the stories and lessons of Br. Paul Quenon, OCSO, during his more than five decades as a Trappist at the Abbey of Gethsemani. He served as a novice under Thomas Merton, and he also welcomed some of the monastery's more well-known visitors to Merton's hermitage. In Praise of the Useless Life includes Quenon's quiet reflections on what it means to live each day with careful attentiveness. The humble peace and simplicity of the monastery and of Quenon's daily life are beautifully portrayed in this memoir.

How is it possible that a chain-smoking socialist, a teenage video gamer, an opium addict, a satanic high priest, a disabled beggar, and a self-absorbed mean girl became saints? Popular itinerant missionary Meg Hunter-Kilmer will stretch your preconceived notions of holiness by exploring the lesser-known lives of seventy-five extraordinary people whose human struggles and limitations reveal the power of God's grace.

Scotland's beloved storyteller, George MacDonald, 19th-century Scottish novelist and poet, was reintroduced to 20th century Christians by C. S. Lewis, whose reading of MacDonald's Phantastes triggered his own spiritual awakening and conversion. Other renowned writers have voiced similar acknowledgements. G. K. Chesterton said of MacDonald, "If we test the matter of originality of attitude, George MacDonald was one of the three or four greatest men of the 19th century."