Anne Lamott explores the concept of mercy in her enthralling and heartening book, Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy. She delves into the idea that mercy is radical kindness. It's the permission you give others—and yourself—to forgive a debt, to absolve the unabsolvable, to let go of the judgment and pain that make life so difficult.

In this profound and caring book, Lamott ventures to explore where to find meaning in life. She suggests we begin by facing a great big mess, especially the great big mess of ourselves. It's up to each of us to recognize the presence and importance of mercy everywhere—within us and outside us, all around us—and to use it to forge a deeper understanding of ourselves and more honest connections with each other.

While that can be difficult to do, Lamott argues that it's crucial, as kindness towards others, beginning with myself, buys us a shot at a warm and generous heart, the greatest prize of all. Full of Lamott’s trademark honesty, humor, and forthrightness, Hallelujah Anyway is a hopeful book of hands-on spirituality.

Life of Pi is a fantasy adventure novel by Yann Martel published in 2001. The protagonist, Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel, a Tamil boy from Pondicherry, explores issues of spirituality and practicality from an early age. He survives 227 days after a shipwreck while stranded on a boat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

Go Tell It on the Mountain, originally published in 1953, is James Baldwin's first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic. This novel chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem. This "truly extraordinary" novel (Chicago Sun-Times) opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

On a hilltop north of Seattle, overlooking the glorious vista of Puget Sound and the white-capped Olympics, stands Rosary Heights, the motherhouse of the Sisters of Saint Dominic of the Holy Cross. The story begins here, with a catastrophic storm that shifts the ground beneath the motherhouse and threatens to send it crashing into the waters below. In a single act of nature, a moment of truth, the order is forced to rethink its place in the world and its purpose.

With Rosary Heights as the backdrop, Catherine Whitney takes a personal journey inside the order that ran the school she attended as a child, the order that, for a short time, she contemplated entering herself. Her quest is to come to terms with what it means to be called to the religious life. What is the secret these women hold that makes them--no matter how diverse--perform common rituals, celebrate the same Mass, and serve the same God?

In The Calling, we meet several valiant women who struggle with the practicalities of the world around them as well as the complicating issues of the life of a nun. Each woman's story is compelling. Together, they form a dramatic human chronicle that is fascinating and revealing--a chronicle of a community that has existed for centuries but is still evolving and whose anxieties and joys are utterly relevant to all of us, regardless of our beliefs.