Perhaps the most personal aspect of anyone’s life is the individual connection with feelings about faith. Each of us has faith in something and we seek confirmation of our beliefs through various means; sometimes confirmation comes through the expression of others. A great way to celebrate the many spiritually based holidays of this lovely Spring season, is to read great books (beyond sacred scripture) that reflect our particular faith or, perhaps just as important, introduce us to other faiths. What may surprise you is how similar the core values of different faiths are, just as the core of humanity is similar despite our many differences.

Some books that may interest, enlighten and inspire you are:

Non-Fiction
The World’s Religions – Huston Smith
The History of God – Karen Armstrong
The Varieties of Religious Experience – William James
Think on These Things – Jiddu Krishnamurti
This is My God – Herman Wouk
Black Elk Speaks – John G. Neihardt and Nicholas Black Elk
The Candle of Vision – George William Russell (pseudonym Æ)
In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching – P.D. Ouspensky
Orthodoxy – G. K. Chesterton

Fiction
Silence – Shūsaku Endō
The Peaceable Kingdom – Jan de Hartog
Siddharta – Herman Hesse
The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer – Bashevis Singer
The Razor’s Edge – W. Somerset Maugham
Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor

Poetry
The Prophet – Kahlil Gibran
Gitanjali – Rabindrnaath Tagore
Collected Poems – W. B. Yeats
The Essential Rumi – Rumi
Complete Poems – Marianne Moore

For Children
A Gentle Thunder – Max Lucado
God’s Paintbrush – Sandy Eisenberg Sasso
What is God? – Etan Bortizer
The Golden Rule – Ilene Cooper
All I See is Part of Me – Chara Curtis