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Hey @Nelsjourney …. i love that book too. i’ve read it several times.
AnonymousMost definitely The Shack & Love Wins. Also the writings of Rumi
AnonymousThe Shack, Can you hear me (tuning into the God Who Speaks) by Brad Jersak (still working to finish that one), I’m trying to like Brennan Manning’s books and I like parts of them and agree with what he says but I’m having problems understanding his philosophy of all you need is God..not people..I haven’t read a lot of non-fiction lately unless you count the books I read for my university courses…
AnonymousThe Divine Conspiracy (Dallas Willard)
Blue Like Jazz (Don Miller)
Velvet Elvis (Rob Bell)
A New Kind of Christianity (Brian McLaren)
The Secret Message of Jesus (Brian McLaren)
A Christianity Worth Believing (Doug Pagitt)
Preaching Reimagined (Doug Pagitt)
Church Reimagined (Doug Pagitt),
The Shaping of Things to Come (Frost and Hirsch)
Community and Growth (Jean Vanier)
and more recently Down We Go: Living into the wild ways of Jesus (Kathy Escobar) to name a few.
AnonymousAnother book I just thought of is “A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows through loss” by Jerry Sittser. Sittser wrote this book three years after his wife, young daughter and mother were killed in a car accident by a drunk driver. The book was recommended to me by our pastor after our friends lost their son suddenly to help me understand a fraction of what they were going through. I was sorrowfully adrift at that time, not knowing how to help them. Little did I know how much this book would also help me with my own losses. I reviewed it on my blog: http://bignoises.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/a-grace-disguised/
Two of my recent favourites are Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward and Walter Brueggemann’s Praying the Psalms. As I have Brueggemann’s book in front of me this is a quote from it to give you a flavour…
“I suggest that most of the Psalms can only be appropriately prayed by people who are living at the edge of their lives, sensitive to the raw hurts, the primitive passions and naive elations that are at the bottom of our life……….We must not make these Psalms too ‘religious’ or pious. Most of the complaint psalms are the voice of those who say, ‘We are as mad as hell and we are not going to take it anymore.'”
Okay, here’s my list:
Christianity After Religion, Celebration of Discipline
The Wounded Healer
Crazy for God
Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
A Generous Orthodoxy
How to Be Evangelical Without Being Conservative
I Loved Jesus in the Night: Teresa of Calcutta — A Secret Revealed
The Idolatry of God: Breaking Our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction
The Jesus Creed: Loving God, Loving Others
Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith
Reconciliation Blues: A Black Evangelical’s Inside View of White Christianity
So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore: An Unexpected Journey
Who Stole My Church?: What to Do When the Church You Love Tries to Enter the Twenty-First Century
AnonymousHmm,
“Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy” by David Burns M.D. Great book on depression and cognitive therapy.
“Adam Bede” by George Elliot. This was very comforting to me after I survived a tragedy and had to constantly hear Christians spout that rage-inducing cliche “All things work together…” This novel ain’t got no time for that. It talks about how when a tragedy happens, we may eventually be grateful for our share of the pain when it makes us stronger and more mature, but it’s impossible to feel glad that we benefited from others’ pain and ruined lives. To do so would be to call evil good. This helped because I could be grateful for my share of the pain, but I could never be narcissistic enough to call such great evil good.
“The Sacredness of Questioning Everything” by Daniel Dark.
Anonymous@starfielder, thanks!
To everyone who has been able to read the Bible without getting bogged down in the baggage, can you please talk some more about how you did it? I’ve tried a number of times over the years, and it always seems to end in intense irritation or boredom. I haven’t felt guilty for not reading it, but I think learning how to read it more objectively would help me in my post-fundamentalist journey.
I’ve never felt bogged down in the scripture to the extent that it affected my faith. I’m somewhat of an academic and went to seminary primarily to learn more of the Bible. Two good books, in my opinion, would be How to Read the Bible for all It’s Worth by Gordon Fee and The Blue Parakeet by Scot McKnight.
For me, the most recent influential book is “A New Kind of Christianity” by Brian McLaren. I felt so liberated when he explained things! He put in words what I had believed for decades without knowing how to express it.
As some of you already know, my influential authors are Alain de Botton and Thich Nhat Hanh. Not enough time to list all the books that helped outside of “Good Without God.”
Anonymousthe misunderstood god … darin hufford…..and his into the wild podcast…… complete game changer for me
Anonymous…also highly recommend prefab sprouts album “let’s change the world with music” for some reason
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