In the 1990s, a “purity industry” emerged out of the white evangelical Christian culture. Purity rings, purity pledges, and purity balls came with a dangerous message: girls are potential sexual “stumbling blocks” for boys and men, and any expression of a girl’s sexuality could reflect the corruption of her character. This message traumatized many girls - resulting in anxiety, fear, and experiences that mimicked the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder - and trapped them in a cycle of shame.

Rooted in her experiences growing up in an evangelical Christian family, Jamie Lee Finch’s You Are Your Own offers an overview of evangelicalism and the painful confusion and anxiety experienced under its demands. Finch explores the mechanisms of trauma and how fundamentalist denominations match the patterns connected with PTSD. She elaborates on the doubt, guilt, fear, and grief that haunt those leaving the evangelical faith and offers an approach to help them recover healthy self-worth and resilience.

While patriarchy and misogyny are problems everywhere, they take on a particularly pernicious form in Christian churches, where those with power have been insisting, since many decades before #MeToo, that this sexually dysfunctional environment is, in fact, exactly how God wants it to be. #ChurchToo turns over the rocks of the church's sexual dysfunction, revealing just what makes sexualized violence in religious contexts both ubiquitous and uniquely traumatizing. 

Bad theology nearly took Kevin's life. They believed that God could never love them because they were queer, leading to a deadly shame that nearly took Kevin's life. Kevin felt trapped by fear. Fear of losing their community, their family, and even their connection to God.

Dr. Laura Anderson takes an honest look at a side of religion that few like to talk about. Drawing from her own life and therapy practice, she helps listeners understand what religious trauma is and isn't, and how high-control churches can be harmful and abusive, often resulting in trauma. She shows how elements of fundamentalist church life—such as fear of hell, purity culture, corporal punishment, and authoritarian leaders—can cause psychological, relational, physical, and spiritual damage.

Angela Parker wasn’t just trained to be a biblical scholar; she was trained to be a White male biblical scholar. She is neither White nor male. Dr. Parker’s experience of being taught to forsake her embodied identity in order to contort herself into the stifling construct of Whiteness is common among American Christians, regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. This book calls the power structure behind this experience what it is: White supremacist authoritarianism.

For years, Christians have argued, debated, and fought one another while "speaking the truth in love," yet we are no closer to the grace-filled life Jesus modeled. Biblical scholar and popular podcast host of The Bible for Normal People, Jared Byas casts a new vision for the Christian life that's built not on certainty, but on the risk of love.

As a twenty-three-year-old singer and the soon-to-be wife of youth pastor Joshua Harris, nothing in Shannon Harris's secular upbringing prepared her to enter the world of conservative Christianity. Soon Joshua's bestselling book I Kissed Dating Goodbye helped inspire a national purity movement, and Shannon's identity became "pastor's wife." The Woman They Wanted recounts Shannon's remarkable experience inside Big Church—where she was asked to live within a narrow definition of womanhood for almost two decades—and her journey out of that world and into a more authentic version of herself.

Sharing her experiences as a life coach and recovering perfectionist, Caroline Garnet McGraw shows us how we can free ourselves from the weight of expectations and encourages us to move our lives forward without apology. Inspired by her viral essay "You Don't Owe Anyone an Interaction", this book invites us to make surprising choices that can help us get unstuck. Rather than offering more ways to effect change through sheer effort, these personal stories serve as a compassionate witness, a reflection of our own perfectionistic tendencies.

Gaslighted by God is not a book of easy answers—it’s a companion for those mourning the loss of a belief system who need their pain recognized and legitimized. Tiffany Yecke Brooks shows—through stories from her own life, conversations with Christians from a variety of backgrounds, historical anecdotes, and messy episodes from Scripture—that there can be faith after disillusionment. 

We all experience moments when God's love and presence are tangible. But we also experience feeling utterly abandoned by God. Why? The answer is found when you take a deep look at the other important relationships in your life and understand your attachment style. Through his years working in trauma recovery programs, extensive research into attachment science, and personal experiences with spiritual striving and abuse, licensed therapist Krispin Mayfield has learned to answer the question: Why do I feel so far from God?

How do we effectively confront racial injustice? We need to move beyond talking about racism and start equipping ourselves to fight against it. In this follow-up to the New York Times bestseller The Color of Compromise, Jemar Tisby offers an array of actionable items to confront racism. How to Fight Racism introduces a simple framework—the A.R.C. Of Racial Justice—that teaches listeners to consistently interrogate their own actions and maintain a consistent posture of anti-racist behavior.

How can an evangelical view of Scripture be reconciled with modern biblical scholarship? In this book Peter Enns, an expert in biblical interpretation, addresses Old Testament phenomena that challenge traditional evangelical perspectives on Scripture. He then suggests a way forward, proposing an incarnational model of biblical inspiration that takes seriously both the divine and the human aspects of Scripture.

Changing Our Mind has helped thousands of families and congregations carefully and compassionately rethink traditional religious teachings about full LGBTQ inclusion. With growing scientific evidence, our wider society has taken big steps, but too many religious families and communities have not kept up. Dr. David Gushee offers a powerful, inspiring message of hope and healing by helping Christians to return to Bible study, prayer, and reflection in a way that creates a vision for a more inclusive church. 

An exploration of how we can be transformed by the God who gives abundantly and who forgives unconditionally.