Books like The Varieties of Religious Experience — picked by fans

Few books have reminded me more powerfully that our circumstances and our inner life are not the same thing.

I first read Man's Search for Meaning years ago, and its impact has only deepened over time. Frankl's willingness to look directly at suffering without becoming defined by it challenged many of the assumptions I carried about happiness, success, and what it takes to live a meaningful life.

I return to this book because it continually reminds me that meaning is not something life hands us once everything finally goes our way. It is something we discover in how we meet what life places before us.

During difficult seasons of my own life, Frankl's perspective helped me remember that even when we cannot control our circumstances, we still have a relationship with how we respond to them. Few books have given me more courage, perspective, and hope.

I found Erkhart’s book illuminating with its discussion of a key life shortcoming in the vast majority of the population: we don’t live in the “now.”

Instead, we concentrate on what went well in the past or what may or may not happen in the future. Meanwhile, we miss out on the only time we ever truly have, which is the here and now.

We humans, for all our accomplishments in science, art, engineering, architecture, and literature, are haunted psychologically by the stark awareness of the reality that we all die. The various individual, group, and collective unconscious ways of trying to deny the reality of death are legion.

Becker stunned me with the way he organized a penetrating discussion of how many domains the effort to deny the reality of death enters. In the process of exploring these roads of travel to deny death, I found myself searching my own efforts to get meaning in my own life and try to prepare for my death.

Armstrong has written brilliant histories of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Chinese spirituality, biographies of Buddha and Mohammed, and a memoir of her own spiritual struggles as a nun who left the Catholic Church. Her reputation as the foremost scholar in our time of the history of religions is well-earned. The Case for God is an erudite account of a human need that has existed through all of recorded history and the thwarting of that need, especially in our own polarized time, by fundamentalism, arrogant misreadings of spiritual texts, and notions of God at odds with the selflessness, creativity, and compassion faith is meant to inspire.

Turner asks a great question. How did the United States go from being the deeply religious society of the Puritans and the Founders to a culture of widespread unbelief, especially among the well-educated? His astute analysis of 19th-century America explains why and how agnosticism and atheism gradually became socially acceptable alternatives to faith. As Turner sees it, attempts to “explain” God and fit the Divine into a more rationalistic, scientific, and anti-mystical framework, and the deadening hand of dogma, helped pave the way for a culture resistant to the very idea of God.

Garry Wills, a scholar of Jefferson, Lincoln, modern politics, and religious history, is a major thorn in the side of the Catholic Church. He’s critical of that institution’s checkered past, the questionable primacy of the pope, and the social and political narrowness of its bishops. Yet he is a devout Catholic, a confirmed believer. He sees no contradiction in that. This is a blunt, persuasive book about reconciling an urge to faith in a higher, transcendent power with a sharply critical perspective on an institution that, in Wills’ view, is often less about the teachings of Jesus than a corporate structure pretending to more spiritual authority and infallibility than it has any right to assert.

Augustine's Confessions is an extraordinary book, but it is not always an easy one! Readers looking for help in understanding its brilliant author can do no better than to turn to Peter Brown's biography, first published in 1967. It is a beautifully written, lucid, and illuminating study of Augustine's life and thought, the best possible guide to both the man and his world. In an Epilogue added for the forty-fifth-anniversary edition, Brown discusses what he and other scholars have learned in the decades since he first wrote the book, and how his ideas about Augustine have changed, demonstrating the curiosity and openness that are the hallmarks of a great scholar.

I first read this iconic memoir in 1970, and I still have the five-dollar hardcover I borrowed and never returned. I’ve read it many times now and teach courses on it, yet I find something new every time. Published in 1946, it’s more than a unique life story (in fact, Yogananda left out so much that I felt compelled to write a complete biography of him, The Life of Yogananda).

The book also offers a primer on Indian philosophy and yogic practices, profiles of extraordinary people, vivid glimpses of early 20th-century Indian culture, and eye-popping miracles and wonders, along with attempts to explain them rationally and scientifically. I never became a formal student of Yogananda, but I’ve learned an enormous amount from his seminal book. 

I first read this book in 1987, when I was a fourth-year medical student. This is the book that really sparked my interest in psychiatry.

It opened my eyes to the possibility that even those in the most disturbed state of mind experience meaningful and understandable human dilemmas. It’s as fresh and relevant today as it was when it was first published six decades ago. A deeply humane text that humanizes the most disenfranchised and lost of our human family.

Tillich’s work is foundational for any “mystery-based” religiosity, or to put it another way, “awe-based” spirituality, and The Courage to Be is one of his most accessible and popular works. The Courage to Be, which influenced generations of humanistic and existential-oriented thinkers and therapists is about the willingness to face the anxieties of existence in the service of maximal participation in the life-space we are granted. It is all about boldness and risk-taking, with full awareness of limitation and fragility, to meet the demands of creative participation in love and work.