Penguin's yearly offering of outstanding essays and poetry on faith and spirituality. Every year, the acclaimed Best Spiritual Writing series offers readers the opportunity to explore the most intriguing work on spirituality published in the past year. Featuring a splendid and varied selection, The Best Spiritual Writing 2012 is an elegant collection that gathers intimate, thought-provoking work by some of the nation's most esteemed writers, including Philip Yancey, Richard Rodriguez, and Robert Bly. Culled from a wide range of journals and magazines, these spiritual perspectives are expressed in pieces as diverse as the sources from which they've come. A favorite of book clubs, this makes a perfect gift for the holidays or special occasions.

Best Catholic Spirituality Writing 2012 is a compilation of 30 essays published in the National Catholic Reporter. Since its founding in 1964, NCR has published many well-known authors of Catholic spiritual writing. This collection features works from Michael Leach, John Dear, Kathy Coffey, Michael Sean Winters, Joe McHugh, Melissa Nussbaum, Michael Morwood, Robert McAllister, James Behrens, Miriam Therese Winter, Heidi Schlumpf, Sidney Callahan, Joyce Rupp, Claire Bangasser, Sharon Abercrombie, Fran Rossi Szpylczyn, Nicole Sotelo, Tina Beattie, Jay Cormier, James Martin and Marty Haugen. From prayer to creation spirituality; the legacy of the Second Vatican Council to Facebook, NCR’s Best Catholic Spirituality Writing 2012 takes you through the Catholic liturgical year with reflections from 21 authors.

While doomsayers look to the year 2012 as the end of life, authors Kaa and Raa see humanity on the brink of a new horizon. Together, they have created a guidebook for the soul that can lead to a spiritual awakening and a life based on truth and joy.

A new volume of the critically acclaimed spiritual writing series, with an introduction by bestselling author Stephen Prothero Boasting an impressive selection of personal essays, articles, and poems by today's leading luminaries, The Best Spiritual Writing 2013 captures our nation's spiritual pulse and offers readers an opportunity to explore the most nourishing writings on spirituality published in the past year. As in previous editions, Philip Zaleski draws from a wide range of journals and magazines to build an anthology of stimulating works by some of the nation's most esteemed writers such as Adam Gopnik, Edward Hirsch, and Melissa Range. The result is a book, ideal for gift giving, that will appeal to religious thinkers, atheists, and people of all faiths and beliefs.

What are the pathways that lead us to God? In this book Helen Cepero leads you through the journey beginning with three ways of love, then three ways of continuing in faith, and then lastly, three ways of living in hope. These nine pathways will lead you into deeper life with Christ.

The renowned nonfiction annual makes its Penguin debut For more than a decade, Philip Zaleski has collected into a single volume the best spiritual essays and poetry of the year. The Best Spiritual Writing 2010, featuring essays by John Updike and Diane Ackerman, poems from Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney and Pulitzer Prize-winner Louise Glück, and personal reflections by Richard Rodriguez and Leon Wieseltier, is sure to expand on the series' already wide recognition and reach the growing audience of readers searching for unsurpassed spiritual writing. Contributors include: Mary Jo Bang, Jane Hirshfield, Melissa Range, Rick Bass, Paula Huston, Pattiann Rogers, David Berlinski, Pico Iyer, Amanda Shaw, Joseph Bottum, Charles Johnson, Master Sheng Yen, Nicholas Carr, Jon D. Levenson, Floyd Skloot, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Philip Levine, Meir Soloveichik, Billy Collins, Wilfred M. McClay, Richard Wilbur, Chrisi Cox, Richard John Neuhaus, Seamus Heaney, Robert Pinsky

Writing the Sacred Journey shows readers how to write about spirituality and the interior life with heart and flair. It helps readers get motivated, generate materials, move swiftly through drafts, and gain confidence and ease in their writing. Writing the Sacred Journey helps readers to uncover and honor the sacred within their own life stories. Elizabeth Andrew, an experienced writing instructor and spiritual director, gently guides readers through the spiritual writing process from concept to finished manuscript. She identifies some of the initial hurdles writers face in describing the interior, spiritual life and offers practical tips about how to overcome them. Writing the Sacred Journey also explores themes that commonly appear in spiritual memoir, as well as the all-important issue of writing as craft. Readers will learn new and practical skills for every stage of the writing process. Sprinkled throughout the book, these thoughtful activities teach readers new writing techniques and avenues into the creative process.

An incandescent collection from one of American poetry's most distinctive and essential voices The Beauty opens with a series of dappled, ranging "My" poems--"My Skeleton," "My Corkboard," "My Species," "My Weather"--in which Hirshfield uses materials both familiar and unexpected to explore the magnitude, singularity, and permeability of our shared existence. Of her memory, she writes, "Like the small soaps and shampoos / a traveler brings home / then won't use, / you, memory, / almost weightless / this morning inside me." With a pen faithful to the actual yet dipped at times in the ink of the surreal, Hirshfield cuts, as always, directly to the heart of human experience. Her robust affirmation of choice even amid inevitability and her contemplation of our moral, societal, and biological intertwinings sustain poems that tune and retune the keys of a life. For Hirshfield, "Zero Plus Anything Is a World." Her recipes for that world ("add salt to hunger," "add time to trees") offer an altered understanding of our lives' losses and additions, and of the small and larger beauties we so often miss.

A Buddhist nun goes AWOL to roam the French countryside and discovers a wild spirituality. A hellish trip through the mountains of Peru turns mystical and offers a vision. More than just adventure, the writing in A Woman's Path shares the unforgettable moments when a journey opens a traveler's eyes and profoundly alters who she is. Around the globe and across all religions, these tales of discovery offer an uncommon look at personal transformation, whether by the trials of stolen luggage and harrowing rides or the joys of seeking out extraordinary people, places, and experiences. Inspiring and insightful, this illustrated collection invites all women to step outside their everyday lives and welcome an awakening. Contributors include Anne Lamott, Maya Angelou, Linda Ellerbee, Kim Chernin, and Natalie Goldberg, among others.

"Radical, before it meant a person who advocates strong political reform, meant getting to the root of things, the origin. It comes from the Latin radix, radicis,, meaning radish, a root vegetable."—BK Loren These meditative essays range in subjects from a transcendental encounter with a pack of coyotes ironically juxtaposed with her neighbor's claim that nature "has gone out of vogue," to Loren's mother's slow yet all–encompassing deterioration from Parkinson's, and the unexpected way the Loma Prieta earthquake eroded her depression by offering the author a sense of her small place in a wild and worthwhile world. Loren has an empathetic and gentle approach to the world. In detailing the intricacies of human relationships and consciousness—fear of death and time, cooperation born of clashing viewpoints, tradition's beauty even when destructive, a love of language, a sense of loss amid the fast–paced materialistic world—she peels back the film of popular thinking in order to expose herself to the secrets so few of us ever see.