Spirituality and Religion May 2026 |
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| Braving the Truth: Essential Essays for Reckoning With and Reimagining Faith by Rachel Held EvansThis posthumous collection of essays from Rachel Held Evans, who unexpectedly passed away in 2019, reflects her ongoing commitment to questioning inherited beliefs while remaining deeply engaged with faith and community. Written with honesty and warmth, the pieces explore doubt, grace, and belonging, modeling a generous, open‑handed approach to belief during times of personal and cultural change. |
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Joyful, Anyway
by Kate Bowler
You can't always be happy, but you can be joyful, anyway. We live in a culture convinced that chasing happiness will optimize our bodies, our minds, our relationships, our lives. But in the meantime, bad news usually stays bad: illness, chronic pain, grief, and disappointment don't obey our timelines or vision boards. We are left wondering why, if we're doing everything right, life still feels so hard. Honest and bracingly tender, Joyful, Anyway proves that experiencing joy does not depend on resolving everything that makes life difficult. Drawing on a decade of living with serious illness and a lifetime studying America's obsession with progress, Kate Bowler shows why people so busy chasing happiness miss out on actual joy. Joy isn't something you can optimize or manufacture--it finds us at the edge of expectation, when life interrupts our scripts. Joyful, Anyway gives language for the ache we all carry and practices for putting yourself in the way of joy loosening control, introducing novelty, choosing charity, and staying open to the surprising, technicolor moments that pull us back into life. Joy reminds us that no matter what, life is still worth loving. For every time we ask is this it?, joy will answer: There is more.
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Another Kind of Freedom
by Pema Chodron
What if the freedom you seek isn't found by changing your circumstances but by embracing life exactly as it is? Pema Chödrön goes back to her very foundations in her latest and possibly most important book. With the spiritual classic The Myth of Freedom as the touchstone, Pema invites us to look beyond the "myth of freedom"--the idea that we can escape discomfort--and to work compassionately and wisely with what keeps us stuck. Drawing from the seminal work from her beloved teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Pema explores how meditation, mindfulness, and radical self-acceptance can transform our struggles, neuroses, and pain into gateways to awakening. With her characteristic humor, practical wisdom, and compassionate insight, she shows us how to make friends with our minds, work skillfully with emotions, and open our hearts to the richness of human experience.
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| A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness by Michael PollanEmbracing the mystery of consciousness from every angle -- scientific, philosophical, spiritual, and literary -- Michael Pollan asks the question: what does it mean to be aware? Ranging far beyond the human mind, he explores how consciousness may take shape both artificially and throughout the natural world, encouraging readers to look more closely at their own inner lives and to consider the possibility that the universe itself is more alive than we might think. |
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The Power of Real Optimism
by Deepika Chopra
Optimism isn't about pretending everything is fine. It's about staying open and flexible--especially when it's not. In this fresh, science-backed debut, professional psychologist and media expert Dr. Deepika Chopra shows us how to build the kind of optimism that can actually withstand real life.We've been sold the idea that optimism is a mood, a mindset, or worse--just an inherent trait. But what if real optimism is something else entirely? In The Power of Real Optimism, Dr. Deepika Chopra--known as The Optimism Doctor(R)--offers a radically different definition: optimism as a science, a skill, and a psychological muscle we can strengthen. Drawing from over a decade immersed in the science of resilience, emotional well-being, and cognitive psychology--as well as her work with clients, innovative workshops, and hallmark practices (think: evidence-based visualization, narrative reframing, her signature self-worth work, and even color therapy)--Dr. Chopra offers a toolkit for navigating the chaos, uncertainty, and nuance of being human--without losing yourself to it.
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Reparenting the Inner Child: The New Science of Our Oldest Wounds and How to Heal Them
by Nicole Lepera
As adults, we often fall into patterns that feel irrational or out of character--shutting down, lashing out, people-pleasing, or self-sabotaging. Beneath those reactions lies our inner child, a younger part of us still trying to get its needs met the only way it knows how. We all carry the imprint of our earliest years. Childhood is brief, yet its impact is lifelong. Some parts of us were met with love while other parts were met with silence, criticism, or disapproval. To survive, we learned to adapt--learning to over perform, to hide, or stay small. Most of us made it through with a mix of love and lack. And many of us still protect the parts of ourselves that once felt unsafe. While we can't change what happened, we can change how it lives within us and impacts our lives today. Reparenting the Inner Child offers a clear, compassionate path to self-integration, combining practical exercises, somatic tools, and guided reflections to help us create the safety, love, and boundaries we've always needed. Through her holistic framework that models individual development, Dr. LePera explains how we can cultivate the emotional maturity and regulation to respond calmly instead of reacting, to embrace desire instead of shame, and to question the stories we've long believed about who we have to be. Enlightening, empowering, and clarifying, Reparenting the Inner Child is a book that will stand the test of time as a comprehensive guide for personal development and healing, and a resource that will forever change the way we understand ourselves.
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The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness
by Arthur C. Brooks
If you struggle to discern life's meaning, you're not alone. Millions today describe a growing sense of emptiness, a lack of purpose and significance. And there's a reason: Rapid cultural, economic, and technological changes have rewired our brains, reducing their ability to perceive depth and purpose. In The Meaning of Your Life, social scientist and happiness expert Arthur C. Brooks shows you how to push back against these changes and find the meaning you need to live a happy, fulfilling life. Relying on cutting-edge science, he offers practical, evidence-based strategies for breaking free of the powerful trends and personal habits that dull your focus on the why of your life. Drawing on the great philosophers and the world's faith traditions, he shows how everyone can--and must--approach life's most important and mysterious questions and provides a blueprint that will help even the most skeptical person find a life of spiritual transcendence, passionate love, and true calling. What is the meaning of my life? is not an unanswerable question, but rather the start of a pilgrimage into unexplored corners of your consciousness. The Meaning of Your Life is your handbook for this journey.
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What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative
by Jim Collins
Inspired by relentless curiosity, Jim Collins devoted a decade to studying these questions and to minutely analyzing those moments when life flips from clarity to confusion and casts us into a befuddling fog. His exploration follows various lives side-by-side, paired together at cliffs, and analyzes the different choices made and divergent paths taken. Two rock musicians confronting a future without the group that had brought them success. Two public figures tainted by scandal having to make decisions about how to rebuild their lives. Two suffragists achieving their epic goal and so left with the puzzle of what to do next. Two figure skaters seeking new purpose when their Olympic careers come to an end. What emerges from Collins's extensive studies--of writers, actors, scientists, leaders and many others--is a framework for understanding how individual lives can be built, sustained and constantly renewed.By examining the long arc of these remarkable lives, Collins tackles life's questions. What does it take to: Discover a deeply fulfilling role in life--one that you are naturally 'encoded' for--and then to find a second one, if the first one ends? Overcome a major cliff--a fracture point that forces choices about what's next and calls for you to re-envision the years to come? Make your personal economics work so that you can focus on one big thing that feeds your inner fire? Navigate the fog, when you feel uncertain or even outright lost, and build confidence step by step? Build personal momentum decade upon decade, so that your most creative and energetic years are spread across an entire lifetime? Surprising, story-driven, deeply researched, and uplifting, What to Make of a Life is a book like no other, convincingly showing how a richly fulfilled life is within reach of us all.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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