"Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag." In the summershe stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, this extraordinary work of investigative journalism takes readers inside America’s isolated Mormon Fundamentalist communities. • Now an acclaimed FX limited series streaming on HULU.
“Fantastic.... Right up there with In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song.” —San Francisco...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A lucid, intelligent page-turner” (Los Angeles Times) that challenges long-held assumptions about Jesus, from the host of Believer
 
Two thousand years ago, an itinerant Jewish preacher walked across the Galilee, gathering followers to establish what he called the “Kingdom of God.” The revolutionary movement he launched was so threatening to the established...

What if our beliefs were not what divided us, but what pulled us together?
In Have a Little Faith, Mitch Albom offers a beautifully written story of a remarkable eight-year journey between two worlds — two men, two faiths, two communities — that will inspire readers everywhere. Albom's first nonfiction book since Tuesdays with Morrie, Have a Little Faith begins with an unusual request: an eighty-two-year-old rabbi from...

"Modern science teaches us that anything can be explained in terms of atoms and forces, including the inner workings of the brain. But certain personal experiences can challenge the idea that there's nothing beyond inert matter. Communing with nature, working through a complex problem, or experiencing a piece of art, we sometimes feel a powerful sense of transcendence, of connecting with a cosmic unity that may seem unexplainable by science. But according...

Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and other prominent secularist thinkers ponder questions of awe, spirituality, consciousness and science against the dramatic back-drop of a Christian youth retreat.

In the early 1960s Harvard psychology professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert began probing the edges of consciousness through their experiments with psychedelics. Leary became a missionary for mind altering drugs, asking us to think for ourselves, igniting a global counter-culture movement, landing in prison after Nixon called him “the most dangerous man in America”. Alpert journeyed to the East becoming Ram Dass, a spiritual teacher continuing...

Each year, hundreds of thousands of Chinese students arrive in the United States to attend college, making up one-third of international students. After arriving, they are often confronted with loneliness and culture-shock. The resulting isolation makes them particularly susceptible to outside influences, and consequently thousands of these young arrivals convert to Christianity. Arriving in North Carolina to study filmmaking, Director Hao Zhang is...

The Kumbh Mela is the biggest gathering of people in the history of humanity – although few in the West have ever heard of it. More than 70 million pilgrims attend this extraordinary spiritual festival, which has been held every 12 years near Allahabad, India, for over two millennia. SHORT CUT TO NIRVANA takes a voyage of discovery through this vivid and vibrant world, accompanied by an irrepressible young Hindu monk, Swami Krishnanand, and several...

Founded in 1966 in California by a former organist and lion tamer named Anton Szandor LaVey, the Church of Satan has often been surrounded by mysteries, scandals and moral panics. Some of today’s active members of the church and other free-styled Satanists will share their views, memories, ritual practices and personal stories about how they got involved with Satanism, discussing the false myths that still surround the movement. An immersive journey...