Flunking Sainthood: a year of breaking the Sabbath,
forgetting to pray, and still loving my neighbor
Jana Riess
Paraclete Press, 2011
248.4 R562f
This wry memoir tackles twelve different spiritual practices in a quest to become more saintly, including fasting, fixed-hour prayer, the Jesus Prayer, gratitude, Sabbath-keeping, and generosity. Although Riess begins with great plans for success ("Really, how hard could that be?" she asks blithely at the start of her saint-making year), she finds to her growing humiliation that she is failing--not just at some of the practices, but at every single one. What emerges is a funny yet vulnerable story of the quest for spiritual perfection and the reality of spiritual failure, which turns out to be a valuable practice in and of itself.
-publisher
Homies and Hermanos: God and gangs in
Central America
Robert Brenneman
Oxford, 2012
259.5 B838h
"A fascinating window into how street-tough gangbangers abandon the vida loca for evangelical Christianity, trading one set of identity markers, community, and mores for another. Homies and Hermanos describes how religious conversion provides Central American pandilleros with one of the only ways to leave gang life that does not end in the morgue. Beautifully written and compellingly told!"
--Virginia Garrard-Burnett, author of Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Montt, 1982-1983
Inside Scientology: the story of America's most
secretive religion
Janet Reitman
Houghton Mifflin, 2011
299.936 R3791