Spirituality, Faith and Belief
 | Connie May Fowler Bestselling Author │ Novelist │ Memoirist
"When I was a small girl, my parents fought every night. My sister and I would huddle together in our bedroom and I would beg her to read to me so that the sound of their voices might be drowned out. And so she would begin, reading to me from my children's books, night after night. Even then, before I had learned to read, I knew intimately the soul-saving power of literature."
Read More > |
 | Elizabeth Gilbert Bestselling Author │ Short Story Writer │ Memoirist
Oprah Winfrey calls her a “rock star author.” Annie Proulx calls her “a writer of incandescent talent.” A New York magazine editor calls her the “Queen of Quirk,” and goes on to say, “She has an awful lot of humor and charm, and she’s one of those few writers who writes the way she talks.” And talks the way she writes, we might add—with intelligence, wit and not just a shade of the performer behind her expressive and insightful presentations.
Selected Books: The Last American Man, Eat Pray Love, Committed
Read More > |
 | Sue Monk Kidd Bestselling Author │ Novelist │ Essayist
Sue Monk Kidd’s stunning bestselling debut novel, The Secret Life of Bees (2002), has enchanted critics and readers alike, bringing her literary renown and establishing her as one of the most popular writers working today. Taught widely in colleges and high schools, The Secret Life of Bees is Southern storytelling at its finest and is fast becoming a modern classic. The novel has spent more than two and a half years on the New York Times bestseller list, sold six million copies, and been translated into 23 languages. It was produced onstage in New York and was made into an award-winning movie released in the fall of 2008. Barnes and Noble listed The Secret Life of Bees as the sixth bestselling book of the decade.
Selected Books: The Secret Life of Bees, The Mermaid Chair
Read More > |
 | Christopher Phillips Bestselling Author │ Founder, Constitution & Socrates Cafés │ Social Entrepreneur
“To date, Phillips has orchestrated discussions on … Solomonic topics at nursing homes, maximum-security prisons, churches, homeless shelters, bookstores and coffeehouses across the country, gently prodding students, urban professionals, unreconstructed slackers, street people and others to share their worldviews and scrutinize their most basic assumptions.”
–Los Angeles Times
Christopher Phillips has a passion for inquiry. A foremost specialist in the Socratic Method, he reminds us that we ought to ask questions – “not about any chance question,” as Socrates put it in Plato’s Republic, “but about the way one should live.”
Selected Books: Constitution Café, Six Questions of Socrates, Socrates Café.
Read More > |
 | Krista Tippett Author │ Radio Show Host │ Journalist
“It’s always been very important to me to enlarge imaginations about how this part of life we call religious and spiritual actually works in real, far-flung, 21st-century lives.”
—Krista Tippett
Peabody Award winning broadcaster Krista Tippett grew up in Oklahoma, attended Brown University, and spent most of the 1980’s in divided Germany. She was The New York Times stringer in Berlin and also reported for Newsweek, The International Herald Tribune, the BBC, and Die Zeit. Later she served as a special political assistant and chief Berlin aide to the U.S. Ambassador to West Germany.
Selected Books: Speaking of Faith, Einstein's God
Read More > |