The Best Religious Biographies & Memoirs 2025

1. Returning : A Spiritual Journey (Paperback)

A grippingly honest account of how one man succeeded in filling the emptiness at the core of his soul. --RABBI HAROLD S. KUSHNER, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People One of the most important memoirs of the spirit I've ever read. --BILL MOYERS

Dan Wakefield was a successful writer of novels, nonfiction, and screenplays when he awoke to a private life that was disintegrating in alcohol, depression, and isolation. He fled Hollywood for Boston where he reclaimed a faith he had thought he was too sophisticated to embrace. In this moving memoir, Wakefield returns to his religious roots and his early life: his Indiana boyhood, his tumultuous student days, and his growth as a writer.

2. Grace like a River: An Autobiography

Grace like a River: An Autobiography

Grace like a River: An Autobiography

3. Pre-Owned Hope Personified: Frances Maschal Landers: A Woman from Arkansas, A Priest from Haiti, A Generation Changed through Education (Paperback) 1512749990 9781512749991

9781512749991. Pre-Owned: Good condition. Trade paperback. Language: English. Pages: 306. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 306 p. Explorer Christopher Columbus discovered the tropical Caribbean island of Hispaniola in 1492. Its western third would become Haiti. After three hundred years of slavery and colonial rule, Haiti became the world's first black republic. Over two hundred years later, Haiti's children continue to search for hope as they grow up against a backdrop of poverty, unemployment, civil unrest, disease, disasters, hunger, and illiteracy. At age sixty, Frances Landers took her first mission trip . . . to Haiti. The children entranced her. But could she even dream of making a difference? Partnering with a tall, visionary Haitian priest, and stepping out in faith, she accomplished far more than she could possibly have dreamed. In 1981, Frances raised money for a small school in Haiti. Thirty-five years later, her Haiti Education Foundation educates thousands of children in dozens of schools in remote mountain villages. Environments of energy and expectation have replaced illiteracy and lethargy. Frances's HEF has changed tens of thousands of lives in Haiti. And across the United States, too, as people experience the joy of helping others help themselves. The story of Frances Maschal Landers is nothing short of a miracle. Yet even miracles are burdened with struggle . . . progress against setbacks, the love of the Lord against the darkness of voodoo, the construction of schools against the destruction of an earthquake. Join Frances on her journey. You will emerge at the end, like she, personifying hope.

Title: Hope Personified: Frances Maschal Landers: A Woman from Arkansas, A Priest from Haiti, A Generation Changed through Education Book Format: Paperback ISBN10: 1512749990 EAN: 9781512749991 Author: Miller, Martha Abbey CONDITION - GOOD - Pre-Owned - Pages can include limited notes and highlighting, and the copy can include 'From the library of' labels or previous owner inscriptions. Accessories such as CD, codes, toys, may not be included.

4. Touching the Rock : An Experience of Blindness (Paperback)

Shortly after John Hull went blind, after years of struggling with failing vision, he had a dream in which he was trapped on a sinking ship, submerging into another, unimaginable world. The power of this calmly eloquent, intensely perceptive memoir lies in its thorough navigation of the world of blindness -- a world in which stairs are safe and snow is frightening, where food and sex lose much of their allure and playing with one's child may be agonizingly difficult. As he describes the ways in which blindness shapes his experience of his wife and children, of strangers helpful and hostile, and, above all, of his God, Hull becomes a witness in the highest, true sense. Touching the Rock is a book that will instruct, move, and profoundly transform anyone who reads it. "John Hull goes a long way toward taking us with him through his descent into total blindness...He lets us see with no trace of self-pity or self-praise how blindness has become far him a genuine acquisition, an unforeseeably rich gift that has made of him what so few of us are: excellent watchers and hearers of the world...triumphant in the teeth of ruin". -- Reynolds Price

With a foreword by Oliver Sacks Shortly after John Hull went blind, after years of struggling with failing vision, he had a dream in which he was trapped on a sinking ship, submerging into another, unimaginable world. The power of this calmly eloquent, intensely perceptive memoir lies in its thorough navigation of the world of blindness—a world in which stairs are safe and snow is frightening, where food and sex lose much of their allure and playing with one's child may be agonizingly difficult. As he describes the ways in which blindness shapes his experience of his wife and children, of strangers helpful and hostile, and, above all, of his God, Hull becomes a witness in the highest, true sense. Touching the Rock is a book that will instruct, move, and profoundly transform anyone who reads it.