Here are 76 books that God Talks fans have personally recommended if you like
God Talks.
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I have always loved fantasy worlds and romantic stories, but in recent years I’ve found it harder to read stories with extreme violence or trauma. When I started writing fiction, I planned to write a fantasy romance with a kingdom and a battle, but I couldn’t do it—my characters organized a nonviolent revolution and formed a democratic system of governance instead. I reconsidered and decided to write what I call cozy fantasy romances. So many types of romance novels could be set in a fantasy world, such as an office romance or road trip comedy. I’ve been searching for these types of romance novels—fun, lighthearted romances set in a fantasy world—and am slowly finding them.
This book made me laugh out loud so many times—it's the funniest fantasy I have ever read. An oddball crew breaks into the protagonist’s prison cell to rescue a prince, so the protagonist claims to be the prince and is rescued along with his cellmate.
The journey back to the prince’s country is a road trip comedy with a wacky cast... but amid all the crude jokes are real emotional moments and characters being kind to each other. The protagonist can’t stop himself from falling for the prince and grows as a person in the process. Nothing about the story ever gets too serious, and the bad bits happen quickly and without prolonged trauma. I loved everything about it.
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
Since I was young, I’ve suffered from Major Depressive Disorder, coupled with chronic pain that surfaced when I was in middle school. Being in constant pain—mental and physical—obviously drains the spirit. I found no hope whatsoever in phrases such as, “It gets better.” When you have chronic pain, that statement means nothing, because you know it won’t. These books, however, offered me something that I hadn’t encountered before: someone acknowledging that, although it may never get better, there is still something for me here, whatever form it takes. These books do not shame depressives, they console (and even commiserate) with them, and I hope you find them as fulfilling as I have.
The Savage God destroyed me upon finishing it for the first time.
Alvarez travels through history in this non-fiction study, tracing the perceptions of suicide from ancient societies to the present day, all with an empathetic eye. Alvarez views suicide both as a societal phenomenon and an intimately personal experience.
His own experience with suicide so closely mirrored my own that I still remember the final pages of the book vividly. To be frank, the book’s a bit dated—it was written in the 70s and some of Alvarez’s comments (as well as his reverence of Freud) haven’t aged well. Nevertheless, the worthwhile sections—of which most of the book is composed—are unforgettable.
"Suicide," writes the notes English poet and critic A. Alvarez, "has permeated Western culture like a dye that cannot be washed out." Although the aims of this compelling, compassionate work are broadly cultural and literary, the narrative is rooted in personal experience: it begins with a long memoir of Sylvia Plath, and ends with an account of the author's own suicide attempt. Within this dramatic framework, Alvarez launches his enquiry into the final taboo of human behavior, and traces changing attitudes towards suicide from the perspective of literature. He follows the black thread leading from Dante through Donne and the…
I grew up without a TV (well, we had a monitor for movies), so we spent a lot of time as a family reading. And the novels that I gravitated more and more towards were ones with psychological themes. It didn’t matter if they were modern or ancient; if they got at something unexplainable (or even explainable) about the human psyche, about what motivates us to behave in the ways that we do—especially if those behaviors are self-destructive—I wanted to read them. And I still do.
It felt like historical fiction—until I found out that it wasn’t. I thought I knew where it was headed—until I didn’t. I thought it was realism until—sorry, no spoilers.
The Haddesley siblings are a truly messed-up bunch. Each of them has their own quirks, and each of them has their own extreme dysfunction. But I couldn’t help identifying with them, even in their weirdness.
I hoped they could make it out of the swirling vortex of their history and the lies surrounding them. And then everything took a twist.
Everyday Medical Miracles
by
Joseph S. Sanfilippo (editor),
Frontiers of Women from the healthcare perspective. A compilation of 60 true short stories written by an extensive array of healthcare providers, physicians, and advanced practice providers.
All designed to give you, the reader, a glimpse into the day-to-day activities of all of us who provide your health care. Come…
I love to hear the reasons behind what people think regarding the origin of the universe, the existence of God, and the fate of mankind. These topics are all closely related to apologetics, the study of defending one’s faith. I was taught in church that most of humanity is destined for endless torment in hell. However, I now see there is a wealth of scriptural and historical evidence to support the contention that all people will ultimately see the truth and be saved by Jesus Christ. This is a crucial question every Christian must confront, as it is central to defining the character and identity of God.
First published in 1999, this book has since been heralded as required reading for anyone considering the possibility that God might save all of His creatures in the end. Talbott’s approach is humble and thorough, and, like any good book, the message is easily grasped by the interested reader. Drawing from a wealth of knowledge, he tests numerous salient scriptures and the history of their interpretation.
If God seems to be reacting to an out-of-control creation rather than proactively controlling the outcome to align with His perfect will, this book should be next on your list.
Will the love of God save us all? In this book Thomas Talbott seeks to expose the extent to which the Western theological tradition has managed to twist the New Testament message of love, forgiveness, and hope into a message of fear and guilt. According to the New Testament proclamation, he argues, God's love is both unconditional in its nature and unlimited in its scope; hence, no one need fear, for example, that God's love might suddenly turn into loveless hatred at the moment of one's physical death. For God's love remains the same yesterday, today, and forever. But neither…
We are two dads, both with three kids, who are on a journey of trying our best to raise our kids in the way of Jesus. Of particular interest to us both is exploring how Jesus overcomes evil. Does He beat up the bad guys like superheroes do? Does He drop bombs on them, like nations do? With all the struggles kids experience at school—and everything they hear about evil occurring around the world—we think it’s important for kids to learn how Jesus teaches us to love our enemies, even from the earliest ages.
We believe that at the heart of Christian theology is the truth that God has chosen to reveal himself definitively in Jesus Christ. This is how we know what God is like!
We don’t just love our enemies as an abstract ethic that we hope will work. In looking at Jesus, we now know that this is also what God is like. This book is a beautiful introduction to the theological truth that Jesus really is the image and nature of God.
The answer depends on the imagination of those we ask. Some of those answers are not very healthy--especially for children! Many ideas and images of God are harmful, such as the angry God who threatens us. Or the distant God who is not there when we need him. Or the magical God who will grant our wishes if we are good enough or beg hard enough. Such ideas of God make it hard for us to love God with our whole heart or to let God love us.
I like short books that don’t feel too daunting to read. This very readable, brief tale, described by Adams as a thought experiment wrapped in a story, reminds us how to see the world differently. Something we could all do with, to challenge our prejudices and lift us from our echo chambers.
Explore the mysteries and magic of the cosmos with the acclaimed creator of Dilbert.
God's Debris is the first non-Dilbert, non-humor book by best-selling author Scott Adams. Adams describes God's Debris as a thought experiment wrapped in a story. It's designed to make your brain spin around inside your skull.
Imagine that you meet a very old man who—you eventually realize—knows literally everything. Imagine that he explains for you the great mysteries of life: quantum physics, evolution, God, gravity, light psychic phenomenon, and probability—in a way so simple, so novel, and so compelling that it all fits together and makes…
Odette Lefebvre is a serial killer stalking the shadows of Nazi-occupied Paris and must confront both the evils of those she murders and the darkness of her own past.
This young woman's childhood trauma shapes her complex journey through World War II France, where she walks a razor's edge…
I'm a teacher, philosopher, writer, Professor of Philosophy, and holder of the Sullivan Chair in Philosophy at Rockhurst University, Kansas City, Missouri, USA. I'm the author/editor of sixteen books on such topics as religion and science, religion and politics, contemporary European philosophy, and political philosophy. I'm particularly interested in how religion and science, especially evolution, can be shown to be compatible with each other, as well as in developing an argument that there is no chance operating in nature (including in biology). My book and the books below explore these fascinating topics from almost every possible angle, and should whet readers’ appetites for further thinking about these intriguing matters!
This book considers the relationship between the natural sciences and the concept of God acting in the world. Nicholas Saunders examines the Biblical motivations for asserting a continuing notion of divine action and identifies several different theological approaches to the problem. He considers their theoretical relationships with the laws of nature, indeterminism, and probabilistic causation. His radical critiques of current attempts to reconcile special divine action with quantum theory, chaos theory, and quantum chaos are especially interesting, though he will not convince everyone! Saunders provocatively suggests that we are still far from a satisfactory account of how God might act in a manner that is consonant with modern science despite the copious recent scholarship in this area.
Divine Action and Modern Science considers the relationship between the natural sciences and the concept of God acting in the world. Nicholas Saunders examines the Biblical motivations for asserting a continuing notion of divine action and identifies several different theological approaches to the problem. He considers their theoretical relationships with the laws of nature, indeterminism, and probabilistic causation. His book then embarks on a radical critique of current attempts to reconcile special divine action with quantum theory, chaos theory and quantum chaos. As well as considering the implications of these problems for common interpretations of divine action, Saunders also surveys…
I care about stories of redemption after service because I have lived through the collapse that can follow it. After my time in the U.S. Army, I struggled with addiction, shame, and spiritual distance that almost defined my life. I have seen how uniforms can hide internal battles. I am drawn to books that help remind me that failure is not final and that grace reaches deeper than shame. Today, I serve fellow veterans through benefits advocacy. I am moved by stories that show no one is too far gone for God’s redeeming work.
I first read this book when I felt spiritually empty and needed reassurance.
Manning writes to people who feel spiritually imperfect. He reminds readers that God’s love reaches us, even though our walk is not pretty. His honesty about weakness helped me stop pretending and trust God daily.
I pull out this book to remember that grace is for everyone.
Most of us believe in God’s grace—in theory. But somehow we can’t seem to apply it in our daily lives. We continue to see Him as a small-minded bookkeeper, tallying our failures and successes on a score sheet.
Yet God gives us His grace, willingly, no matter what we’ve done. We come to Him as ragamuffins—dirty, bedraggled, and beat-up. And when we sit at His feet, He smiles upon us, the chosen objects of His “furious love.”
Brennan Manning’s now-classic meditation on grace and what it takes to access it—simple honesty—has changed thousands of lives.…
I love words! As a child, I learned the power of stories from my father, a master storyteller and creator of 480 original Brer Rabbit stories. I began writing myself at the age of seven, majored in journalism, and enjoyed a career that included everything from technical writing to several of the best-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul books. But only through poetry did I discover the beauty of getting to the essence of experience. I love how poetry takes both the writer and the reader to a deeper place, creating intimacy, giving us “ah-ha” moments, and touching heart and spirit.
I would own this book for Mary Oliver’s poem “How I Go to the Woods” alone! Oliver’s love of nature, the way she notices the details of her surroundings, and the language she uses to describe her experiences are breathtaking. It’s easy to see why Mary Oliver won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
“Joy is not made to be a crumb,” writes Mary Oliver, and certainly joy abounds in her new book of poetry and prose poems. Swan, her twentieth volume, shows us that, though we may be “made out of the dust of stars,” we are of the world she captures here so vividly. Swan is Oliver’s tribute to “the mortal way” of desiring and living in the world, to which the poet is renowned for having always been “totally loyal.”
Can a free-spirited country girl navigate the world of intrigue, illicit affairs, and power-mongering that is the court of Louis XIV—the Sun King--and still keep her head?
France, 1670. Sixteen-year-old Sylvienne d’Aubert receives an invitation to attend the court of King Louis XIV. She eagerly accepts, unaware of her mother’s…
I have a PhD in cultural mythology and wrote my dissertation on heroine journeys, which became my book Jane Eyre’s Sisters: How Women Live and Write the Heroine Story. I've come to understand that the traditional hero quest story is usually about returning society to the way it used to be, before something threatened or changed it. In contrast, heroines (as long as they are not just gender-swapped heroes) tend to question how things have been and upset the status quo. First, the heroine must learn to discern what is good and right in the world and identify the old, rotten ways that must be discarded if all are to prosper.
In her Kencyrath series, Hodgell gives us a new slant on the idea of the hero destined to save the world. Her heroine Jame’s propensity to break or destroy things, from crockery to the most treasured institutions and customs of her world (usually by accident), may be proof that she is, in fact, turning into That-Which-Destroys, an aspect of the Three-Faced God prophesied to return and destroy the forces of evil threatening all the worlds with annihilation.
But even as she grows in power, Jame begins to challenge everything about her own culture—not just the restrictions placed on women, but the ingrained ideas about power and privilege in general. She also comes to question the prophesy itself and seeks out other cultures for answers. Jame may have arcane powers, but her ruthless honesty with herself and everyone else may be her most powerful weapon.
Jame is a Kencyr. Kencyrs are not native to the planet where they now live. For thirty centuries they have been the weapon that their Three-Faced God has used against the power of the Perimal Darkling. And though they have fought well, the Darkling has come to planet after planet, and the Kencyrs have moved on.
Jame knows this as she stumbles out of the hilly, barren Haunted Lands into the city of Tai-tastigon. But she knows little else. She does not remember where she has been or what she has done for the last ten years of her life.…
