Books like Love, Pray, Listen — picked by fans

Few books helped me make sense of the collapse of my carefully constructed life more than Falling Upward.

Like many people, I spent decades building an identity—career, success, relationships, beliefs about who I was and who I needed to become. When much of that began to fall away, it felt like failure. Richard Rohr helped me see the possibility that something else might be happening.

What stayed with me was his suggestion that the losses, disappointments, and unravelings we spend so much energy resisting may actually become our greatest teachers. I didn't read this book as a theory. I read it while living it. Again and again, it helped me trust that what felt like falling apart might also be a doorway into something deeper and more true.

In this wise and welcome field guide, Michelle Van Loon casts a vision for what our lives might look like if we refuse to settle and instead lean into the many challenges, losses, and disappointments of midlife as traction to keep growing. Becoming Sage not only empowers us to flourish today—it infuses us with hope for our future. (Plus, because Michelle is incredibly funny, there’s humor throughout.)

Hagerty is a meticulous reporter and deftly weaves personal stories with many facts and figures about midlife. She interviews experts in sociology, psychology, neurobiology, and genetics while exploring the question, "How do you thrive in midlife?" Hagerty argues that rather than seeing midlife as a time of crises, we should be able to experience it as a time of renewal: a time when we feel a growing sense of certainty about who we are and what we have to offer the world.

Kenison wrote this book when she was in her forties, after she nudged her husband to sell their long-time family house and move to rural New Hampshire with their two teenage sons. The book gives voice to being uprooted, letting go of the familiar, and the profound transitions of mid-life. Kenison writes beautifully of the stirrings and longings that prompt us to see our lives from a new vantage point, ultimately allowing us to move on with grace and grit.  

Martin Schleske is a German luthier and theologian. My daughter is a violinist. I picked up this book at the recommendation of Byron of Hearts & Minds Books, hoping to learn more about the violin-making process, and it has remained one of my favorite books ever since. Schleske slowly and carefully walks the reader through his process, from choosing the right trees, to designing the structure, to helping “closed” violins discover their sound. Along the way, he shares how his work crafting violins helps him grow in his faith.

I can only read a couple pages of this book at a time, as Schleske’s profound wisdom often leaves me with thoughts I need time to process and sort through. This is a book about how God, as the Artist, will continue to shape me, work with me, and help me be the best instrument I can be to make music… show more.

Based on the latest research on brain development and extensive clinical experience with parents, Dr. Laura Markham’s approach is as simple as it is effective. Her message: Fostering an emotional connection with your child creates real and lasting change. When you have that vital connection, you don’t need to threaten, nag, plead, bribe—or even punish. This remarkable guide will help parents better understand their own emotions—and get them in check—so they can parent with healthy limits, empathy, and clear communication to raise a self-disciplined child. If you’re tired of power struggles, tantrums, and searching for the right “consequence,” look no further. You’re about to discover the practical tools you need to transform your parenting in a positive, proven way.

There is a misconception that reading Buddhist scripture would somehow steer the reader away from God, but given the chance, it does exactly the opposite, actually strengthening the reader's existing faith (whatever it may be). Many of the people who attend my public talks, discussions, and Q&A’s, jokingly refer to themselves as “Recovering Catholics” in search of deeper meaning, and this book beautifully bridges the gap between traditions, highlighting how compatible the two practices can be with one another.  

I always feel that personal stories are the best recommendation for what people believe. Dan Graves gives us many prominent scientists who were at the same time sincere Christian believers.

They lived over many centuries and worked in various scientific fields, making some of the most important discoveries. Some were Catholics; some were protestants. I think this is a very readable book, and if anyone ever tries to say that a good scientist can’t be a Christian or the other way around, it provides complete proof that this is untrue.

This book was published in 1992, prior to the recent revolution in our understanding of Jewish and Christian origins, but no book has done more to revolutionize my own understanding of Jewish and Christian origins than this one. What is so important about this book is not any specific fact or revelation, but rather the framework that Margaret Barker establishes for understanding the complex development of Jewish concepts of divinity. Barker shows how the polytheistic roots of Semitic religion led to ongoing turmoil within ancient Judaism and interpretations of the scriptures in ways that indicated there were two or more divine beings, not one.

Talal Asad’s genealogical analysis of the concept of religion in Western thought is a classic.

Asad, a Saudi-born anthropologist, proposed that it was the unique product of Western modernity and secularism to perceive religious discourse in the public arena as a disguise for power, which created a bias towards it in public life. This bias was then internationalized through the transposition of an inherently ethnocentric concept of religion.

Among other insights, Asad stressed the need to approach religious traditions in reference to the experience of the believers and the texts or traditions they invoke in their everyday life. A seminal piece of work that can provide a point of reference for anyone working to decolonize religious studies.