Harvard-trained theologian Meggan Watterson marched out of her church at age ten. With little-girl clarity, she knew something tremendously crucial was missing…the voices of women. Watterson became a theologian and a pilgrim to the divine feminine to find the missing stories and images of women’s spiritual voices. She knew women’s voices had never been silenced, just buried. But what she truly sought was her own spiritual voice inside her—the one veiled beneath years of self-doubt. At a sacred site of the Black Madonna in Europe, Watterson had a revelation that changed her. Rather than transcending the body, denying or ignoring it, being spiritual for her meant accepting her body as sacred. Only then, Watterson realized could she hear the voice of unfaltering love inside her- the voice of her soul. With passion, humor, and brutal honesty, Watterson draws on ancient stories and lesser-known texts of the divine feminine, like The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, making them modern and accessible to reveal the spiritual process she went through. She suggests that being spiritual is simply about stripping down to the truth of who we really are. Through her extensive work with women, Watterson found that she was not alone. There are countless women who long for a spirituality that encourages embodiment rather than denies it, that inspires them to abandon their fears but never themselves, and to be led by the audacious and fiercely loving voice of truth inside them. No matter where you rest on the spectrum of spirituality; religious or secular, devout believer or chronic doubter, freelance mystic or borderline agnostic, this story is about the desire in all of us to want to shed everything that holds us back. Reveal provides what religions have left out—the spiritual voice of a woman who has claimed her body as sacred—a woman who has found the divine insider her. In essence, this is a manual for revealing your soul. "I have spent the majority of my life gathering stories of the divine feminine. Each time before getting my masters degrees in theology and divinity, I went on a pilgrimage to sacred sites of the divine feminine throughout Europe. The first one was with a group and the second was on my own… The stories of the divine feminine, of Christianity’s Mary Magdalene, Catholicism’s Black Madonna, Hinduism’s Kali ma, and Buddhism’s Green Tara for example, allowed me to begin to see that I wasn’t as much of a spiritual misfit as I had thought. There was a red thread that became visible to me that ran through so many of the world religions, especially through their mystics, relating that the way to find the divine is to go within. And, that our potential to be transformed by going inward is exactly the same whether we are a man or a woman. The real barometer of our spiritual potential is not our sex, but the commitment of our desire to want to encounter the divine." Excerpt from Reveal

Blue Ocean Faith pastors Ken Wilson and Emily Swan issue an open invitation to renew Christianity 500 years after the Reformation. The authors argue that the church's future depends on focusing more closely the inclusive message of Christianity's founder. Their new cry: "Solus Jesus!" Only Jesus!

Edward Lear's beloved poem has charmed readers since it was first published in 1871. 4+ yrs.

Walter Mosley is one of America’s bestselling novelists, known for his critically acclaimed series of mysteries featuring private investigator Easy Rawlins. His writing is hard-hitting, often limned with a political subtext, and aimed at a broad audience. Years ago, when Mosley was working on a doctorate in political theory, he envisioned writing very different kinds of books from those for which he has become celebrated. But once you’ve been tagged as a novelist, and in Mosley’s case, a genre writer, even a bestselling one, it is hard to get an airing for ideas that cross those boundaries. Folding the Red into the Black has grown out of Mosley’s public talks, which have gotten both enthusiastic and agitated responses, making him feel the ideas in those talks should be explored in greater depth. Mosley’s is an elastic mind, and in this short polemic he frees himself to explore some novel ideas. He draws on personal experiences and insights as an African-American, a Jew, and one of our great writers to present an alternative manifesto of sorts: “We need to throw off the unbearable weight of bureaucratic capitalist and socialist demands; demands that exist to perpetuate these systems, not to praise and raise humanity to its full promise. And so I propose the word, the term Untopia.”

A bold reconsideration of Hoodoo belief and practice Katrina Hazzard-Donald explores African Americans' experience and practice of the herbal, healing folk belief tradition known as Hoodoo. She examines Hoodoo culture and history by tracing its emergence from African traditions to religious practices in the Americas. Working against conventional scholarship, Hazzard-Donald argues that Hoodoo emerged first in three distinct regions she calls "regional Hoodoo clusters" and that after the turn of the nineteenth century, Hoodoo took on a national rather than regional profile. The spread came about through the mechanism of the "African Religion Complex," eight distinct cultural characteristics familiar to all the African ethnic groups in the United States. The first interdisciplinary examination to incorporate a full glossary of Hoodoo culture, Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System lays out the movement of Hoodoo against a series of watershed changes in the American cultural landscape. Hazzard-Donald examines Hoodoo material culture, particularly the "High John the Conquer" root, which practitioners employ for a variety of spiritual uses. She also examines other facets of Hoodoo, including rituals of divination such as the "walking boy" and the "Ring Shout," a sacred dance of Hoodoo tradition that bears its corollaries today in the American Baptist churches. Throughout, Hazzard-Donald distinguishes between "Old tradition Black Belt Hoodoo" and commercially marketed forms that have been controlled, modified, and often fabricated by outsiders; this study focuses on the hidden system operating almost exclusively among African Americans in the Black spiritual underground.

"Required reading for every woman who longs to step into her power and live with pleasure and purpose." — Kris Carr, New York Times best-selling author Author, educator, and School of Womanly Arts founder Regena Thomashauer has been working with women for the past 25 years, and what began as just a few women in her living room has since grown into a global movement with thousands of graduates worldwide. In her New York Times bestseller Pussy: A Reclamation, she reveals what no one taught you about the source of your feminine power and how to use it. This power is the part of a woman that she has been taught to ignore, push down, and despise. Indeed, the word that most viscerally sums it up is "arguably the most powerful pejorative word in the English language." Like any expletive used effectively, the title of this book is meant to be a wake-up call. It is a reclamation, in a world that desperately requires the feminine. Readers learn the secret ingredient every woman is missing; how to crack the confidence code; why sex appeal is an inside job; what’s ahead on the next frontier of feminism—and how they can help make it happen; and much more. By turns earthy and erudite, passionately argued and laugh-out-loud funny, Pussy delivers the tools and practices a woman requires to do and be whatever she wants in this life. It’s a call for her to tune in, turn on, and not drop out—but live more richly, fully, and lusciously than she ever thought she could.

“You walk into Thoughts and Prayers like it’s a familiar pop cultural fun house—then you get drawn into one of the mirrors and find you’re actually deep in someplace very real: fleshy, frightening, full of anguished intelligence and bitter fun.” —Mary Gaitskill “Alissa Quart’s poems are nimble and seething, capturing our baroquely scurrilous world. She writes across the holes of what’s been lost, hopeless and strangely optimistic at once.” —Eileen Myles  “Quart’s poems have impeccable technique and pleasure-giving verve. A book of grit, danger, and paradoxical elegance.” —Wayne Koestenbaum Thoughts and Prayers is a beautiful and startling volume of poetry about our political existence. With both humor and luminosity, it gets at the personal and collective emotional experience of American public life, from the 1970s to the 1990s Democrats, through the collapse of the news industry, to the burlesque Trump era.