None of these recommendations are sponsored. They are simply work that I have enjoyed and that I believe will be enjoyed by others.
Queer Nonfiction
The Queer Mental Health Workbook
by Dr Brendan J Dunlop
“Using a range of therapeutic approaches, this comprehensive, down-to-earth self-help workbook is designed to be your personal mental health resource. It is filled with techniques and activities you can read, tailor and ‘pick and mix’ to improve your wellbeing as a queer person, at your pace.”
Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex
by Angela Chen
“What exactly is sexual attraction and what is it like to go through life not experiencing it? What does asexuality reveal about gender roles, about romance and consent, and the pressures of society? This accessible examination of asexuality shows that the issues that aces face—confusion around sexual activity, the intersection of sexuality and identity, navigating different needs in relationships—are the same conflicts that nearly all of us will experience.Through a blend of reporting, cultural criticism, and memoir, Ace addresses the misconceptions around the “A” of LGBTQIA and invites everyone to rethink pleasure and intimacy.”
Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire
by Lisa Diamond
“Having tracked one hundred women for more than ten years, Lisa M. Diamond argues that for some women love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual, but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups and, most importantly, different love relationships.”
Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive
by Julia Serano
“As a trans woman, bisexual, and femme activist, Julia Serano has spent much of the last ten years challenging various forms of exclusion within feminist and queer/LGBTQ movements. In Excluded, she chronicles many of these instances of exclusion and argues that marginalizing others often stems from a handful of assumptions that are routinely made about gender and sexuality. These false assumptions infect theories, activism, organizations, and communities — and worse, they enable people to vigorously protest certain forms of sexism while simultaneously ignoring and even perpetuating others.”
Exploring Faith Nonfiction
Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation
by Kristin Kobes Du Mez
“Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping account of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, showing how American evangelicals have worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism, or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.” As Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the role of culture in modern American evangelicalism.”
Unfollow: A Journey from Hatred to Hope
by Megan Phelps-Roper
“Megan Phelps-Roper was raised in the Westboro Baptist Church – the fire-and-brimstone religious sect at once aggressively homophobic and anti-Semitic, rejoiceful for AIDS and natural disasters, and notorious for its picketing the funerals of American soldiers… In November 2012, at the age of twenty-six, she left the church, her family, and her life behind. Unfollow is a story about the rarest thing of all: a person changing their mind.”
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
by Jonathan Haidt
“In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding. His starting point is moral intuition—the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right.”
Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church
by Rachel Held Evans
“Like millions of her millennial peers, Rachel Held Evans didn’t want to go to church anymore. The hypocrisy, the politics, the gargantuan building budgets, the scandals–church culture seemed so far removed from Jesus. Yet, despite her cynicism and misgivings, something kept drawing her back to Church. And so she set out on a journey to understand Church and to find her place in it.”
I respectfully acknowledge that I operate on traditional ancestral unceded Coast Salish Territories of the
xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
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