Anyone who has reading suggestions for members of UFMBoro may send them to your faithful Web Goddess at epondillo@aol.com and I will get them in as quickly as possible.  Remember, we have fiction lovers as well as nonfiction lovers!

Book suggestions from members:

The Zen Teachings of Jesus 

The Gospel of Jesus: According to the Jesus Seminar
 
The Jesus Seminar and Its Critics
 
A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini

The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho

Under a Sickle Moon, by Peregrine Hodson (Non-Fiction)

Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl (Non-Fiction)

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson Hawaii, by James Michener

**Jesus for the Non-Religious by John Shelby Spong
 http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Non-Religious-John-Shelby-Spong/dp/0060762071/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-9954097-4024148?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182710943&sr=1-1+ 
   Spong, the iconoclastic former Episcopal bishop of Newark, details in this impassioned work both his "deep commitment to Jesus of Nazareth" and his "deep alienation from the traditional symbols" that surround Jesus. 
   For Spong, scholarship on the Bible and a modern scientific worldview demonstrates that traditional teachings like the Trinity and prayer for divine intervention must be debunked as the mythological trappings of a primitive worldview. These are so much "religion," which was devised by our evolutionary forebears to head off existential anxiety in the face of death.
   What's left? The power of the "Christ experience," in which Jesus transcends tribal notions of the deity and reaches out to all people. Spong says Jesus had such great "energy" and "integrity" about him that his followers inflated to the point of describing him as a deity masquerading in human form; however, we can still get at the historical origin of these myths by returning to Jesus' humanity, especially his Jewishness. – Publishers Weekly

**Christianity without God by Lloyd Geering
 http://www.amazon.com/Christianity-without-God-Lloyd-Geering/dp/0944344925/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b/102-9954097-4024148?ie=UTF8&qid=1182711857&sr=1-2+ 
   Belief in God — understood as a supernatural spiritual being who created the universe and continues to sustain it — has long been assumed to be the irreplaceable foundation of the three monotheistic religions. But just as the bible ceased, in the nineteenth century, to be convincing as the repository of divinely revealed knowledge, so the twentieth century witnessed the death of the conventional image of God. 
   Lloyd Geering asks whether this "death of God" spells the imminent death of the whole Christian tradition or simply means the end of conventional Christian doctrine.

The Once & Future Faith by Don Cupitt et al., Karen Armstrong, editor http://www.amazon.com/Once-Future-Faith-Don-Cupitt/dp/0944344852/ref=sr_1_2/102-9954097-4024148?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182711857&sr=1-2+ 
   Scientific knowledge has stripped Christianity of the mythical matrix in which the creeds were conceived. The historical study of the Bible and the quest for the historical Jesus have raised the future of the faith to crisis level. At its Once & Future Faith conference in March 2001, four world class thinkers - Don Cupitt, Karen Armstrong, John Shelby Spong, and Lloyd Geering - joined Robert Funk and the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar to sort through the issues and attempt to form an agenda for the reinvention of Christianity. 
   Their suggestions - on questions such as life after death, the meaning of God, apocalypticism, and the significance of Jesus' death - fill the pages of this book.

What’s It All About? A Guide to Life’s Basic Questions and Answers by Richard de la Chaumiere
 http://www.amazon.com/Whats-About-Guide-Questions-Answers/dp/097257770X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-9954097-4024148?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182712843&sr=1-1 
    An engaging and impartial guide for readers who want to make up their own minds about some of the big questions of life, and would like to learn many of the diverse answers from philosophy, science, psychology, and Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. Lucid and lively, the book is written in a style understandable and appealing to the general reader.

Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900 by Jack Beatty
 http://www.amazon.com/Age-Betrayal-Triumph-America-1865-1900/dp/1400040280/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-9954097-4024148?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182712648&sr=1-1 
   "Having redeemed democracy in the Civil War," laments Jack Beatty, "America betrayed it in the Gilded Age." These opening words neatly capture the premise and promise of Age of Betrayal, an ambitious and politically charged work that spans far more terrain than its subtitle suggests. The redemption, of course, is the demise of American slavery. The betrayal, however, is the rise of rapacious industrial corporations in the decades immediately following the war -- a rise Beatty believes merely distributed inequality and injustice more equitably. 
   The ascent of such business interests, he contends, was enabled by corrupt governments, a pliant judiciary and a malleable populace that, with the exception of the Populist movement, remained too traumatized and divided by the war to put up much of a fight. -- The Washington Post's Book World

The Many Faces of God: Science's 400-Year Quest for Images of the Divine
http://www.amazon.com/Many-Faces-God-Sciences-400-Year/dp/0393061795/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-9954097-4024148?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182712442&sr=1-1 
by Jeremy Campbell    A grand work of philosophy and history, The Many Faces of God shows how our religious conceptions have been shaped by advances in technology and science. Beginning his narrative in the 1600s and concluding with the fervor of the millennium, Jeremy Campbell shows how Isaac Newton and his generation altered the medieval definition of God from one interpreted through divine messengers to an all-knowing, autocratic God who watched over the scientific wonders of the universe. Arguing that religions harbor a secret fear that science may one day explain God away, Campbell masterfully shows how twentieth-century technology and theology have become intertwined, often to the detriment of both disciplines. 
   Illuminating the writings of such intellectual luminaries as Calvin, Luther, and Einstein, all the way up to John Updike, The Many Faces of God is a sweeping history of religious and scientific thought in the Western world.

Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation by Dale B. Martin
http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Single-Savior-Sexuality-Interpretation/dp/0664230466/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-9954097-4024148?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182712157&sr=1-1 
   
   Probing into many questions about gender and sexuality, Dale Martin delves into biblical texts anew and unearths surprising findings. In all of these essays, however, Martin argues for engaging Scripture in a way that goes beyond the standard historical-critical questions and the assumptions of textual agency in order to find a faith that has no foundations other than Jesus Christ.

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b/102-9954097-4024148?url=search-alias=stripbooks&field-keywords=God+is+Not+Great&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Go 
    Hitchens, one of our great political pugilists, delivers the best of the recent rash of atheist manifestos. The same contrarian spirit that makes him delightful reading as a political commentator, even (or especially) when he's completely wrong, makes him an entertaining huckster prosecutor once he has God placed in the dock. And can he turn a phrase!: "monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents." Hitchens's one-liners bear the marks of considerable sparring practice with believers. Yet few believers will recognize themselves as Hitchens associates all of them for all time with the worst of history's theocratic and inquisitional moments. All the same, this is salutary reading as a means of culling believers' weaker arguments: that faith offers comfort (false comfort is none at all), or has provided a historical hedge against fascism (it mostly hasn't), or that "Eastern" religions are better (nope)…. - Publishers Weekly

Jesus and the Lost Goddess: The Secret Teachings of the Original Christians by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy
http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Lost-Goddess-Teachings-Christians/dp/1400045940/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-9954097-4024148?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182711276&sr=1-1 
    Why Were the Teachings of the Original Christians Brutally Suppressed by the Roman Church? • Because they portray Jesus and Mary Magdalene as mythic figures based on the Pagan Godman and Goddess • Because they show that the gospel story is a spiritual allegory encapsulating a profound philosophy that leads to mythical enlightenment • Because they have the power to turn the world inside out and transform life into an exploration of consciousness Drawing on modern scholarship, the authors of the international bestseller The Jesus Mysteries decode the secret teachings of the original Christians for the first time in almost two millennia and theorize about who the original Christians really were and what they actually taught. In addition, the book explores the many myths of Jesus and the Goddess and unlocks the lost secret teachings of Christian mysticism, which promise happiness and immortality to those who attain the state of Gnosis, or enlightenment. This daring and controversial book recovers the ancient wisdom of the original Christians and demonstrates its relevance to us today. - Inside the Flap Copy Reading

Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity by Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King
http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Judas-Gospel-Shaping-Christianity/dp/0670038458/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-9954097-4024148?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182710643&sr=1-1 
   In fall 2006, the National Geographic Society made quite a splash, bringing to light the discovery of a new gospel in the Gnostic tradition told from Judas' point of view. There have already been several books on the subject, including one by Bart Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot (2006), which provided an overview and placed the book in its historical and religious contexts. Now come two premier names in the field of religious writing to take a more intimate look at the gospel. Pagels, author of the classic Gnostic Gospels (2004), teams with translator extraordinaire King for a compact reader's guide into the heart of the new gospel. The Gospel of Judas can be a convoluted, even bizarre, reading experience, but the combination of King's translation, which appears at the end of the book, and Pagels' text will help general readers get past the difficulties and into the fascinating message, which emphasizes spiritual rather than physical resurrection for both Jesus and his followers. Pagels also shows why this message was so noxious to church leaders and explains how the gospel fits into the body of noncanonical literature. By showing how Judas' vision of life after death should be understood, this elegantly written book makes clear the relevance of a centuries-old text for a contemporary audience.