I was born into the heart of American religious fundamentalism and spent years helping build the Religious Right before walking away from it. My book tells the story of that journey: from certainty to doubt, from dogma to paradox, from fear to love.
Iâve lived at the crossroads of faith, politics, family, and artâand these recommendations reflect the questions that still haunt me: How do we live with compassion in a divided world? How do we raise our children with tenderness in the absence of certainty? These books moved me because they donât preach. They search. They speak in the voice of those of us who are done with black-and-white thinking, but still believe in grace.
I found Timâs deep dive into American evangelicalism hauntingly familiar.
Itâs a rare book that manages to speak with empathy and honesty about a movement I know all too well. Tim doesnât just expose extremism; he reminds us of the messy, human hearts inside itâhearts that once belonged to me, too.
His work nudged me to remember that even in the shadows of dogma, love and beauty can still find a way to flourish.
The award-winning journalist and staff writer for The Atlantic follows up his New York Times bestseller American Carnage with this timely, rigorously reported, and deeply personal examination of the divisions that threaten to destroy the American evangelical movement.
Evangelical Christians are perhaps the most polarizingâand least understoodâpeople living in America today. In his seminal new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, journalist Tim Alberta, himself a practicing Christian and the son of an evangelical pastor, paints anâŚ
Gerardâs reflections on a fractured America resonate so deeply with me.
He writes with the same kind of searching spirit I tried to bring to my book: an effort to find a moral center in a world that often seems to have lost its way.
Gerardâs book helped me see that even when everything feels like itâs falling apart, there are still spaces for wonder and decency to take root. And thatâs what keeps me writingâand hoping.
AMERICAN BREAKDOWN dissects how, in the space of a generation, the pillars that sustained the once-dominant superpower have been dangerously eroded. From government to business, from media to medicine-the strength and security of the American experiment have been weakened by a widening gap between the elites who control these institutions and the public.
At the root of this breakdown is a precipitous fall in Americans' trust in their political, business and cultural leaders. As Baker writes, "This pathology of distrust across American society is eating the country away from the inside." Millions of Americans say they have little faith inâŚ
Christianâs book doesnât just chart the decline of faithâit asks the bigger question: what might remain?
Like me, he wrestles with the paradox of caring deeply about spiritual life while no longer buying into the old formulas.
Reading his work expanded my own sense that love, art, and simple acts of grace are the true spiritual inheritance we can still pass downâno matter how loudly the old structures crumble.
Traditional religion in the United States has suffered huge losses in recent decades. The number of Americans identifying as "not religious" has increased remarkably. Religious affiliation, service attendance, and belief in God have declined. More and more people claim to be "spiritual but not religious." Religious organizations have been reeling from revelations of sexual and financial scandals and cover-ups. Public trust in "organized religion" has declined significantly. Crucially, these religious losses are concentrated among younger generations. This means that, barring unlikely religious revivals among youth, the losses will continue and accelerate in time, as less-religiousâŚ
Ruthâs gentle, funny, and deeply wise reflections on raising boys struck a nerve in me as a father.
Itâs not just a parenting bookâitâs about nurturing tenderness and a sense of wonder in a world that too often demands toughness.Â
Ruth gave me fresh language for something Iâve long felt: that creating beauty and giving loveâespecially to the next generationâis the most radical kind of spirituality there is.
Combining painfully honest memoir, cultural analysis, and reporting, BoyMom is a humorous and heartbreaking deep dive into the complexities of raising boys in our fraught political moment.
âRapist, school-shooter, incel, man-child, interrupter, mansplainer, boob-starer, birthday forgetter, frat boy, dude-bro, homophobe, self-important stoner, emotional-labor abstainer, non-wiper of kitchen counters. Trying to raise good sons suddenly felt like a hopeless task.â   As the culture wars rage, and masculinity has been politicized from all sides, feminist writer and mother of three boys Ruth Whippman finds herself conflicted and scared. While the right pushes a dangerous vision of fantasy manhood, her feminist peers oftenâŚ
Melanieâs memoir is a testament to how love and grief can live side by side.
Her story of grappling with faith, family, and loss resonated deeply with me, and her prose is simply luminousâelegant, honest, and profoundly moving. Like my own path, Melanieâs journey is about making peace with lifeâs messinessâfinding the courage to create beauty in the ruins and hold fast to love, even when faith itself is in doubt.
I came away reminded that doubt is not the opposite of faith, but the companion that keeps it real and tender.
"A profound and riveting journey through shame and grief, A Hard Silence is, quite simply, unforgettable." Monica Wood, author of When We Were the Kennedys
In the mid 1980s, Canada's worst public health disaster was unfolding. Catastrophic mismanagement of the country's blood supply allowed contaminated blood to be knowingly distributed nationwide, infecting close to two thousand Canadians with HIV. Among them was Melanie Brooks's surgeon father who, after receiving a blood transfusion during open-heart surgery in 1985, learned he was HIV positive.
At a time when HIV/AIDS was widely misunderstood and public perception was shaped by fear, prejudice, and homophobia,âŚ
Caught between the beauty of his grandchildren and grief over a friendâs death, Frank Schaeffer finds himself simultaneously believing and not believing in Godâan atheist who prays. Schaeffer wrestles with faith and disbelief, sharing his innermost thoughts with a lyricism that only great writers of literary nonfiction achieve.
Schaeffer writes as an imperfect son, husband and grandfather whose love for his family, art and life trumps the ugly theologies of an angry God and the atheist vision of a cold, meaningless universe. Schaeffer writes that only when we abandon our hunt for certainty do we become free to create beauty, give love and find peace.
