Really looking forward to reading Courtney Ellis' new book Uncluttered!

Here are some reviews already out:
“Peace. Less. Still. Enough. Simple. Clear. Rested. Read Uncluttered.” –John Ortberg, senior pastor of Menlo Church and author of I’d Like You More if You Were More Like Me

“The key to healthy, sustainable, contagious faith is our commitment to living simpler, quieter, more uncluttered lives. This is the urgent and soul-nourishing message of Uncluttered.” –Brett McCracken, senior editor at The Gospel Coalition

“With disarming candor, sly humor and the empathy of the pastor and spiritual counselor that she is, Courtney Ellis has given us a gift.” –Tod Bolsinger, Vice President & Chief of Leadership Formation, Fuller Seminary

“In Uncluttered Courtney Ellis does what our productivity-obsessed culture tells us is impossible: unplugs from the unnecessary demands of life and plugs in to God and relationships that matter.” –Nicole Caldwell-Gross, Pastor at St.Luke’s (UMC)

“A practical and profound work, tailor-made for this era of noise and busyness.” –Dorcas Cheng-Tozun, author of Start, Love, Repeat: How to Stay in Love with Your Entrepreneur

“Uncluttered is somehow raw, relatable and hilarious, all at the same time.” –Cara Meredith, author of The Color of Life: A White Woman’s Journey Toward Love and Justice

Riveting. . . . Forthright, compassionate, and expertly crafted--everything readers should want from a memoir.
--KIRKUS REVIEWS, a starred review

Everhart is at her best when dismantling the sexism that surrounds rape. . . a touching and empowering story of healing.
-- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, a starred review


Many levels of excellent writing are skillfully woven into this memoir. It is far more than just a moving narrative by a remarkable person (although it is that). It is a story of lived theology: everything that has to do with God and the Gospel written in the language of everyday suffering, pain and blessing and love. Rape and shame, friendship and family find their place on these pages providing witness to a mature lived faith.
-- EUGENE PETERSON, author of The Message


Ruined is one of those memoirs that sticks to your heart, helps you understand the power of a story, and gives you a framework to understand God when terrible things happen. Honest and beautifully written, Ruth's story will help readers discover the love of God in unexpected ways.
--MARY DeMUTH, author of Worth Living


Mostly I wish this book never needed to be written. But it did, it was, and it's powerful. With heart-wrenching honesty and a refusal to leave the chaos, Ruth Everhart shows us the raw courage necessary to emerge both wounded and healed. Alternating between fury, hurt, fear, and rage, we journey with her to find God and her way back to life.
--NANCY ORTBERG, author of Looking for God and Seeing in the Dark

What makes this narrative worth reading is how Everhart has contextualized her response to the rape--feeling ruined--within patriarchal theology. . . . This memoir isn't about a rape; it's the story of rising from hurt to construct a new cosmology that encompasses personal and systemic evil.
-- ELIZABETH JARRETT ANDREW, author of Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir


Ruth has a wonderful gift with language. Ruined is, in turns, wrenching and funny and earthy, horrific and sublime.
-- DAVID WILLIAMS, author of The Believer's Guide to the Multiverse

Her writing is frank and visceral, lyrical and even humorous . . . While the descriptions of the attack . . . are distressing, Ruth brings you into the room in a way that is powerful without being gratuitous. Her theological reflections are profound. Her wrestling with the racial component of the assault is honest and unselfconscious.
-- MARTHA SPONG, editor of There's a Woman in the Pulpit

Ruth's bravery, resilience, honesty, and intelligence - emotional and otherwise - makes reading Ruined so worth the risk of becoming a witness to her pain.
-- KATHERINE WILLIS PERSHEY, author of Very Married: Field Notes on Love & Fidelity


Starred review. In her second memoir, Presbyterian pastor Everhart (Chasing the Divine in the Holy Land) reflects on being sexually assaulted when she was a college student, the assault’s emotional aftermath, and its theological implications. Raised in an insulated Dutch community and the Christian Reformed Church, Everhart’s worldview was forever changed when two men broke into her apartment and raped her. She asks where God was during the brutality, where she was being punished for her sexual experiences, and how a God who wills everything could will something so terrible to happen. In addition to her theological analysis, Everhart is at her best when dismantling the sexism that surrounds rape. She recounts how she sucked in her stomach when asked to strip because, “that’s how thoroughly [she] had internalized the fact that a woman should make herself attractive to the eyes of a man.” She recalls her anger when the doctor who performed her rape kit referred to her rapist as a “clown.” She looks at why many people treat rape differently from other injuries and reminds readers that rape cannot make women less whole. Everhart also includes examples of how churches can provide support to rape survivors. This is a touching and empowering story of healing. (Publishers Weekly)

For more of Ruth Everhart's writing, or to see her other book, which #SpiritualBookClub read, "Chasing the Divine in the Holy Land," go to www.rutheverhart.com

Fans of Gretchen Rubin's wisdom and fortitude in forging ahead in the worlds of happiness and habits, we were thrilled when this book came out in March. She will be interviewed on #SuperSoulSunday on November 8th and will be live tweeting the event @GretchenRubin.

We talk about spiritual practice, the habits that make for a strong spiritual practice, taking the time for exercising the mind, body, and spirit, and Gretchen shows us how to forge patterns that make for strong habits. She also shows what can get in the way of strong habits, what can thwart the best of intentions, and 4 types of people. The type of person you are can play into patterns that will be helpful to you in your spiritual practice. You can enjoy the podcast here: https://gretchenrubin.com/podcast/

Fans of BBT's award winning work for years, even before she was a New York Times bestselling author for "An Altar in the World," this is our #SpiritualBookClub March 2015 selection

"Describing her ensuing near-death experience as a realm of clarity and expansiveness, "a state of being," Moorjani made the choice to return, and her rapid and remarkable recovery defies all medical understanding. Her psycho-spiritual healing, which continues to this day, was self-realization: of her own magnificence, of oneness with universal energy and with a universe comprising. This candid memoir is a cathartic testimony to the magnificence and healing capacity of every human being. (Mar. 1)- Publishers Weekly

Our Spiritual Book Club readers often ask questions of both living and dying, and what comes next. One of our readers, in particular, wanted to read this book, due to Wayne Dyer's praise of it, and also for further insights, so this has become our February 2015 featured book.

If you don't know the story of Nag Hammadi, it's a fascinating tale.

"In December 1945, at the base of cliffs that run along the Nile River near the modern-day town of Nag Hammadi, an Egyptian farmer discovered, in a sealed jar, thirteen ancient Coptic codices containing more than fifty separate tracts. This discovery represented arguably the most significant manuscript discovery of the twentieth century for the study of the New Testament and Christian origins. Of all the texts in this Nag Hammadi Library, none has been more celebrated than the Gospel of Thomas - a Gospel that has played a crucial role in the newly emerging view of early Christianity as a very diverse phenomenon and in the recent revival of historical Jesus studies. Now, after more than fifty years of study, the best text and the best translation of Thomas are presented here in user-friendly form by the Berlin Working Group for Coptic Gnostic Writings, with Stephen J. Patterson and James M. Robinson"

A number of our Spiritual Book Club members are interested in Native American Spirituality. We've read Frank Fools Crow's book "Green Pipe Dancers" and LeAnne Howe's "Shell Shakers." This book, is our November 2014 book, since November is Native American Indian Heritage month in the U.S.

"Edited by Harvey Arden, with an Introduction by Chief Arvol Looking Horse, and a Preface by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark.

In 1977, Leonard Peltier received a life sentence for the murder of two FBI agents. He has affirmed his innocence ever since--his case was made fully and famously in Peter Matthiessen's bestselling In the Spirit of Crazy Horse--and many remain convinced he was wrongly convicted. Prison Writings is a wise and unsettling book, both memoir and manifesto, chronicling his life in Leavenworth Prison in Kansas. Invoking the Sun Dance, in which pain leads one to a transcendent reality, Peltier explores his suffering and the insights it has borne him. He also locates his experience within the history of the American Indian peoples and their struggles to overcome the federal government's injustices."

"My own personal story can't be told, even in this abbreviated version, without going back long before my own birth on September 12, 1944, back to 1890 and to 1876 and to 1851 and, yes, all the way back through all the other calamitous dates in the relations between the red men and white, back to that darkest day of all in human history: October 12, 1492, when our Great Sorrow began" (Peltier, 50).

"We must be an army of one in the endless struggle between the goodness we are all capable of and the evil that threatens us all from without as well as within" (Peltier, 208).

How great to find a book to pick up and meditate upon, seemingly simple Haikus that lead us deeper on the spiritual path, meditations that are perfect for busy days. The book itself serves as a great reminder of the importance of pausing in our days, to reflect, give thanks, contemplate God.All good stuff. Fine gift book, fine coffee table or nightstand book. Enjoy!

An intimate, thought-provoking, and original appraisal of the meaning of religion in our time- from the creator and host of public radio's Speaking of Faith.

A groundbreaking book about Americans searching for faith and mutual respect, The Faith Club weaves the story of three women, their three religions, and their urgent quest to understand one another.

Kabat-Zinn's book outlines the Buddhist technique of "mindfulness": a method of living fully in the moment without judgment.

It's sad that we need a book to remind us of the importance of scheduling time to rest and worship. But because we can work, shop, achieve, and otherwise stay busy every hour of every day of the week, we do. The statement, "I am so busy" has become a frighteningly common lament, according to author Wayne Muller. Our perpetual state of busyness represents a war on our natural rhythms that demand quiet and renewal in order to be emotionally, spiritually, and creatively fertile.

The action in this debut novel alternates between 1738, as a Choctaw family prepares for war against the English, and the 1990s, as their Oklahoma descendants, the Billys, fight a Mafia takeover of the tribe's casino. In trouble with the law and in the fight of their lives, the Billy women must find a way, as their ancestors did, to join forces against a devious foe. Humor, toughness, and resourcefulness are the Billys' only weapons...Until the Shell Shaker shows up.

Raimund Gregorius teaches classical languages at a Swiss lyc?e, and lives a life governed by routine. One day, a chance encounter with a Portuguese woman inspires him to question his life--and leads him to an extraordinary book that will open the possibility of changing it. Inspired by the words of Amadeu de Prado, a doctor whose intelligence and magnetism left a mark on everyone who met him and whose principles led him into a confrontation with Salazar's dictatorship, Gergorius boards a train to Lisbon. As Gregorius becomes fascinated with unlocking the mystery of who Prado was, an extraordinary tale unfolds.

Inspired by a true story, People of the Book is a novel of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity by an acclaimed and beloved author. Called "a tour de force"by the San Francisco Chronicle, this ambitious, electrifying work traces the harrowing journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century S pain. When it falls to Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, to conserve this priceless work, the series of tiny artifacts she discovers in its ancient binding-an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair-only begin to unlock its deep mysteries and unexpectedly plunges Hanna into the intrigues of fine art forgers and ultra-nationalist fanatics.

When Ruth Everhart was given the opportunity to travel to the Holy Land as one of several ministers taking part in a documentary about pilgrimage, she jumped at the opportunity. Little did she know just how demanding -- yet ultimately rewarding -- her transformation from Presbyterian minister, wife, and mom to pilgrim would be. Candid, down-to-earth, and delightful, Ruth recounts her experiences in Chasing the Divine in the Holy Land, inviting readers to journey alongside her on an unforgettable Holy Land pilgrimage.

Theologian Brent Landau presents the ancient account of Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar, the three "wise men" who journeyed to Bethlehem to greet the birth of Jesus. The Revelation of the Magi offers the first-ever English translation of an ancient Syriac manuscript written in the second to third century after the birth of Christ and safeguarded for generations in the Vatican Library. Following in the footsteps of Elaine Pagels and her exploration of the Gnostic Gospels, including the controversial Gospel of Judas, Landau delivers an invaluable source of information to a world interested in learning more about the Nativity and the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

From the celebrated author of The Secret Life of Bees, a magnificent novel about two unforgettable American women

No matter what your fears are: fear of success; love; loss; or confrontation, Dr. Shoshanna shows how to convert this constant sense of dread into peace of mind.