Memoir Religion

Origen (c. 185-c. 253) was the most influential Christian theologian before Augustine, the founder of Biblical study as a serious discipline in the Christian tradition, and a figure with immense influence on the development of Christian spirituality. This volume presents a comprehensive and accessible insight into Origen's life and writings, written and compiled by Joseph W. Trigg, a leading Origen authority. An introduction analyzes the principal influences that formed him as a Christian and as a thinker.

Brigham Young was a rough-hewn craftsman from New York whose impoverished and obscure life was electrified by the Mormon faith. He trudged around the United States and England to gain converts for Mormonism, spoke in spiritual tongues, married more than 50 women, and eventually transformed a barren desert into his vision of the Kingdom of God. While previous accounts of his life have been distorted by hagiography or polemical exposé, John Turner provides a fully realized portrait of a colossal figure in American religion, politics, and westward expansion.

Austin Channing Brown’s first encounter with a racialized America came at age seven, when she discovered her parents named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man. Growing up in majority-white schools and churches, Austin writes, “I had to learn what it means to love blackness,” a journey that led to a lifetime spent navigating America’s racial divide as a writer, speaker, and expert helping organizations practice genuine inclusion.

Once she answered the divine calling, Aimee Semple McPherson rose fast from unfulfilled housewife in Rhode Island to "miracle woman" - the most enigmatic, pioneering, media-savvy Christian evangelist in the country. She preached up and down the United States, traveling in a 1912 Packard with her mother and her children - and without a man to fix flat tires. Her ministry was rolled out in tents, concert halls, boxing rings, and speakeasies. She prayed for the healing of hundreds of thousands of people, and built a Pentecostal temple in Los Angeles of Hollywood-epic dimensions.

For 30 years, Lynn Wilder, once a tenured faculty member at Brigham Young University, and her family lived in, loved, and promoted the Mormon Church. Then, their son Micah, serving his Mormon mission in Florida, had a revelation: God knew him personally. God loved him. And the Mormon Church did not offer the true gospel. As Lynn tells her story of abandoning the deception of Mormonism to receive God's grace, she gives a rare look into Mormon culture, what it means to grow up Mormon, and why the contrasts between Mormonism and Christianity make all the difference in the world.

It’s hard to give up on the feeling that the life you really want is just out of reach. A beach body by summer. A trip to Disneyland around the corner. A promotion on the horizon. Everyone wants to believe that they are headed toward good, better, best. But what happens when the life you hoped for is put on hold indefinitely?

In My Sisters the Saints, author Colleen Carroll Campbell blends her personal narrative of spiritual seeking, trials, stumbles, and breakthroughs with the stories of six women saints who profoundly changed her life: Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, Faustina of Poland, Edith Stein of Germany, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and Mary of Nazareth. Drawing upon the rich writings and examples of these extraordinary women, the author reveals Christianity's liberating power for women and the relevance of the saints to the lives of contemporary Christians.

It was an outlawed book, a text so dangerous "it could only be countered by the most vicious burnings, of books and men and women." But what book could incite such violence and bloodshed? The year is 1526. It is the age of Henry VIII and his tragic Anne Boleyn, of Martin Luther and Thomas More. The times are treacherous. The Catholic Church controls almost every aspect of English life, including access to the very Word of God. And the church will do anything to keep it that way.

Investigative journalist Sarah Berman explores the shocking practices of NXIVM, a cult run by Keith Raniere and many enablers. Through the accounts of central NXIVM figures, Berman uncovers how dozens of women seeking creative coaching and networking opportunities instead were blackmailed, literally branded, near-starved, and enslaved. Don't Call It a Cult is a riveting account of NXIVM's rise to power, its ability to evade prosecution for decades, and the investigation that finally revealed its dark secrets to the world.

What do you do when you discover information that is before its time? What do you do when your curiosity takes you on an adventure that is so bizarre that there is nothing normal to relate to? This is what happened to Dolores Cannon in 1968, long before she began her career as a past-life hypnotherapist and regressionist. Travel back with us to that time when the words reincarnation, past-lives, regression, walk-ins, New Age were unknown to the general population.

When four-year-old Colton Burpo emerges from life-saving surgery with remarkable stories of his visit to heaven, his family doesn’t know what to believe. Heaven Is for Real details what Colton saw and his family’s journey towards accepting their young son had visited the afterlife.

For a long time, Edie thought she had escaped. It started in an Appalachian trailer park, where a young girl dreamed of becoming a doctor. But every day Edie woke up to her reality: a poverty-stricken world full of alcohol and violence, where getting out seemed impossible. She taught herself to drive a stick shift truck at 12 years old so she could get her drunk daddy home from the bar. She spent Saturdays at Brushy Mountain prison visiting her incarcerated cousin. She watched adults eat while her stomach gnawed.

In his book Out of the Devil's Cauldron: A Journey from Darkness to Light, John Ramirez tells the story of how he was trained to be the third-ranked high priest of a satanic cult in New York City, casting powerful witchcraft spells and controlling entire spiritual regions. But what started as a long spiral into the underworld ended in a miraculous encounter with Jesus Christ that changed the course of his life. Let John Ramirez walk you through the dark alleys of this world as he uncovers the hidden secrets of darkness through his powerful testimony.

Still Learning is India Oxenberg’s intimate, first-person account of how she was lured into and, seven years later, escaped from the NXIVM cult, DOS. As the secret sorority within NXIVM's vast Ponzi network, DOS was created by Keith Raniere and his acolytes to serve as a source of "slaves" to Keith and the other “masters”. Despite the fantastical headlines, the focus of Still Learning reflects what many parents and age peers of India’s will recognize as a far more familiar 20-something conundrum - a new adult trying to discover who she is.

Beginning with Jesus' birth, Ken Bailey leads you on a kaleidoscopic study of Jesus throughout the four Gospels. Bailey examines the life and ministry of Jesus with attention to the Lord's Prayer, the Beatitudes, Jesus' relationship to women, and especially Jesus' parables. Through it all, Bailey employs his trademark expertise as a master of Middle Eastern culture to lead you into a deeper understanding of the person and significance of Jesus within his own cultural context.

For anyone wondering if the Christian faith is still relevant in a post-modern culture, for anyone thirsting for a genuine encounter with a God who is real, for anyone yearning for a renewed sense of passion in life...Blue Like Jazz is a fresh and original perspective on life, love, and redemption.

Pray, Hope, and Don't Worry: True Stories of Padre Pio Book I, written by Diane Allen and published by Padre Pio Press, features 55 chapters and is a glimpse into the life and spirituality of St. Pio of Pietrelcina, who has often been called "the greatest mystic of the 20th Century."

In middle age, Ehrenreich came across the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence and set out to reconstruct that quest, which had taken her to the study of science and through a cataclysmic series of uncanny - or as she later learned to call them, "mystical" - experiences. A staunch atheist and rationalist, she is profoundly shaken by the implications of her life-long search. Certain to be a classic, Living with a Wild God combines intellectual rigor with a frank account of the inexplicable, in Ehrenreich's singular voice, to produce a true literary achievement.

You Are Worth It is a memoir about the War in Afghanistan and Kyle’s heroics, yes, but it also is a manual for living. Organized around the credos that have guided Kyle’s life (from “Don’t Hide Your Scars” to “Call Your Mom”), the book encourages us to become our best selves in the time we've been given on earth.

Jam-packed fun facts, travel tips, and beverage recs, this guide includes some of the country’s most notorious crime scenes, hauntings, and supernatural sightings. You’ll also find Christine and Em’s personal recommendations to the best local bars and ice cream parlors, oddity museums, curiosity shoppes, and more. Explore some of the most bizarre cases you’ve heard on the show, as well as exclusive new content from bayous, basements, and bars!