Featured new additions to DPL’s Religion and Spirituality collections! Click on the title to place a hold. For more new books, visit our Upcoming Releases page. As always, if there’s a title you would like to read, please send us a purchase suggestion.
Yoga and the Pursuit of Happiness: A Guide to Finding Joy in Unexpected Places by Sam Chase – True happiness isn’t as unattainable as we often believe. In this unique guide, a celebrated yoga instructor blends ancient wisdom from the “Bhagavad Gita” and “Yoga Sutras” with his own personal journey to show modern readers how to align everyday actions with a greater spiritual purpose, end the cycle of materialism and greed that can get in the way of cultivating stillness of mind, and achieve lasting happiness and joy.
And It Was Beautiful: Celebrating Life in the Midst of the Long Good-Bye by Kara Tippetts – How do you live out extravagant love in the everyday moments? How do you celebrate grace when your life turns out differently than the one you dreamed? Kara Tippetts discovered how to find joy in the small moments of life. She learned how to hold tight to hope even while battling intense physical and emotional pain. And she lived out the truth that God can redeem any story. In her final book, Kara offers gentle reflections on living and dying well.
Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior by Bart D. Ehrman – Throughout much of human history, our most important stories were passed down orally–including the stories about Jesus before they became written down in the Gospels. In this fascinating and deeply researched work, leading Bible scholar Bart D. Erhman investigates the role oral history has played in the New Testament–how the telling of these stories not only spread Jesus’ message but helped shape it.
The Sound of Gravel: A Memoir by Ruth Wariner – Ruth Wariner was the thirty-ninth of her father’s forty-two children. Growing up on a farm in rural Mexico, Ruth lives in a ramshackle house without indoor plumbing or electricity. At church, preachers teach that God will punish the wicked by destroying the world and that women can only ascend to Heaven by entering into polygamous marriages and giving birth to as many children as possible. As she begins to doubt her family’s beliefs and question her mother’s choices, she struggles to balance her fierce love for her siblings with her determination to forge a better life for herself. Recounted from the innocent and hopeful perspective of a child, this is the memoir of one girl’s fight for peace and love.
Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve by Tom Bissell – Peter, Matthew, Thomas, John: Who were these men? What was their relationship to Jesus? Tom Bissell provides rich and surprising answers to these ancient, elusive questions. He examines not just who these men were (and weren’t), but also how their identities have taken shape over the course of two millennia. Ultimately, Bissell finds that the story of the apostles is the story of early Christianity: its competing versions of Jesus’s ministry, its countless schisms, and its ultimate evolution from an obscure Jewish sect to the global faith we know today in all its forms and permutations.