Introduction to the Devout Life
by Francis de Sales | 
Thus Spake Zarathustra
by Friedrich Nietzsche | 
Varieties of Religious Experience
by William James | 
The Guide for the Perplexed
by Moses Maimonides | 
The Elements of Style
by William Strunk | 
The Power and the Glory
by Graham Greene | 
A Night to Remember
by Walter Lord | 
The Story Of The Other Wise Man
by Henry van Dyke | 
Earthly Powers
by Anthony Burgess | 
Elmer Gantry
by Sinclair Lewis | 
A Clergyman's Daughter
by George Orwell | 
The Damnation of Theron Ware
by Harold Frederic | 
The Weight of Glory
by C. S. Lewis | 
Summa Theologica
by Thomas Aquinas | 
The Heart of the Matter
by Graham Greene | 
Go Tell it on the Mountain
by James Baldwin | 
The Slave
by Isaac Bashevis Singer | 
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
by Brian Moore | 
Strait is the Gate
by Andre Gide | 
The French Revolution
by Thomas Carlyle |
Only the Bible has been more influential as a source of Christian devotional reading than The Imitation of Christ. This meditation on the spiritual life has inspired readers from Thomas More and St. Ignatius Loyola to Thomas Merton and Pope John Paul I. Written by the Augustinian monk Thomas à Kempis between 1420 and 1427, it contains clear instructions for renouncing wordly vanities and locating eternal truths. No book has more explicitly and movingly described the Christian ideal: "My son, to the degree that you can leave yourself behind, to that degree will you be able to enter into Me." With a new Preface by Sally Cunneen, author of In Search of Mary: The Woman and the Symbol.