Blue Like Jazz

A popular book by Don Miller which does an excellent job of expressing faith "non-religiously". Here's what he has to say on www.bluelikejazz.com:
When I started writing this book I just wanted to end up with something like Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies, because in Traveling Mercies it felt like she was free, free to be herself, to tell her story, to just vent, to rant, to speak as if she were talking to a friend. Traveling Mercies helped me write this book, and in a way, for a while, Anne will be "The Beattles" of spiritual books, because she has infulenced so many of us. I definitely feel as though I got permission from Anne Lamott, permission to be human and to interact with God without all of the mind-melt that comes with growing up in a religious family. I never believed it would be published, and so I was pretty open in this book. My carreer was dead when I started this thing, so I felt like I was just talking to myself, or to the little reading group that met at my house. Sting has this song where he says that he is alone on an island and puts a message in a bottle and throws it into the ocean, only to wake the next morning and have a hundred million bottles washed upon his shore. He sings "I guess I'm not alone at being alone." and I think that sums up how I feel about Blue Like Jazz. It feels like I thought I was alone but woke up one morning to discover nothing could be further from the truth. And people have been incredibly kind.

A Glimpse of Jesus

Many of my thoughts about restoring our images of God and ourselves are expressed quite well by Brennan Manning. His book "A Glimpse of Jesus: The stranger to self-hatred" paints a great picture of who Jesus was, what he was about and what he means to us. Some great thoughts about compassion, healing through affirmation, meal sharing...