Reading books written by and about today’s women of faith may induce spiritual whiplash. In new and forthcoming titles, women are portrayed as both blessed by God with love and courage and cursed by crushing workloads and unreasonable expectations. For every book encouraging and supporting their roles as leaders there’s another title from a get-real writer speaking from the trenches of sexism and misogyny.
In Front Porch Wisdom: Navigating Leadership Pressures and Barriers as a Woman of Color, out in June from IVP, Froswa’ Booker-Drew recognizes the significance of women of color’s perspectives in facing workplace issues. And coming in August from Thomas Nelson is Overbooked and Overwhelmed: How to Keep Up with God When You’re Just Trying to Keep Up with Life by podcaster Tara Sun, intended as a spiritual lifesaver to women drowning in chaos.
Women can also see their challenges and triumphs in new books about looking to the Gospels for strength and courage. Jenny Marrs, host of HGTV’s Fixer to Fabulous, shares how God restored her in times of pain and fear in her October title for Convergent, Trust God, Love People: Stories of My Openhanded Faith.
Singer-songwriter Nicole C. Mullen describes overcoming abuse and betrayal and adds encouragement from other women in It’s Never Wrong to Do the Right Thing: Outrageous Stories to Inspire Godly Decisions, a September release from Esther Press, the women’s imprint at David C Cook.
Rebecca Press, another woman-focused publisher, also explores the ties between women in a September title, The Skies Are Full of Us: A True Story of Speaking Up, Burning Down, and the Unbreakable Bond of Friendship. Authors Sarah Carter and Corinne Shark write about their experiences with corruption and sexual misconduct, and how they found defiant courage, hope, and spiritual healing.
Scarlet Hiltibidal, writing while also dealing with her mother’s cancer diagnosis, nonetheless adds laughter with Hopeful-ish: Sadness, Weariness, Donkey Attacks, More Sadness, and Other Stuff You Need the Gospel For. Ashley Gorman, who edited the October book for B&H, says, “She does treat sorrow with dignity, but humor and joy travel side by side.” This matters because “women are usually the ones picking up the pieces around heartache. Women have a harder time holding joy in their hands.”
For many women, their teen years in particular were a time of struggle during which they tried to find their identities and root their lives in the spiritual. Belle Point recently published Lauren Rhoades’s Split the Baby, a memoir of her experience being pulled between two strongly religious women, her Catholic stepmother and her Jewish biological mother. Publisher Casie Dodd says the book explores Rhoades’s search for identity and what it takes to become spiritually whole.
Susan Tjaden, VP and executive editor for PRH Christian imprint WaterBrook, highlights The Girl in the Middle (Sept.), a book with a strong spiritual message for young women in chaotic times. Author Emma Mae McDaniel, founder of Compelled Ministries, describes how she survived brutal cyberbullying in her youth by finding the courage to live for God amid hardship and disapproval.
In Eerdmans’s Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl (Dec.), Anna Rollins recounts her journey to loving her body and feeling beloved by God. Growing up in a conservative Christian tradition, Rollins writes, taught her “false promises of both purity and diet culture: That if she controlled her appetites, she would be righteous,” and safe from others’ desires.
Help in the Hardest Times
Tina Boesch, the manager for Bible Studies at Lifeway’s Women’s Ministry, says when it comes to life’s most difficult moments, “women who have walked our journey before us, are uniquely positioned to speak to the things that interfere with our joy.” Boesch acquired the Bible study Daring Joy: What Six Women in the Bible Teach Us About the Power of Celebration When It Feels Risky, Complicated, and Even Impossible (out now) by Nicole Zasowski, a therapist who experienced infertility and miscarriages.
In Cradled in Hope: Trusting Jesus to Heal Your Heart as He Holds Your Baby in Heaven—A Biblical Guide for Grieving Miscarriage, Stillbirth, and Infant Loss (July), Ashley Opliger “tenderly guides women to go to God with their anger, their frustration, their grave disappointment,” says Jennifer Dukes Lee, who acquired the book for Bethany. “God’s big shoulders can handle it all.”
Amber Emily Smith and her husband, musician-turned-minister Granger Smith, also found solace and strength in God when faced with the drowning death of their toddler son. Smith shares her struggle with trauma in The Girl on the Bathroom Floor: Held Together When Everything Is Falling Apart (Nelson, Oct.).
Counselor and therapist K.J. Ramsey documents a year of recovery from a life-threatening illness and complications that left her using a wheelchair in The Place Between Our Pains (Convergent, Apr. 2026). Her book, according to the publisher, calls for “embracing the lives we are given, even when they knock us off our feet.”
Ministry leader and author Lysa TerKeurst consults with a therapist and a theologian in Surviving an Unwanted Divorce: A Biblical, Practical Guide to Letting Go While Holding Yourself Together. The November title addresses tough questions that women might be afraid to ask because, Nelson executive editor Jessica Rogers says, “the stigma surrounding divorce in the church has resulted in very few helpful resources for the ones walking through it.”
Several new titles also see authors speaking to women staggering under outsize expectations. Let the Biscuits Burn: Cultivating Real-Life Hospitality in a World Craving Connection by Abby Kuykendall, due out in September from Nelson, steers women to focus on the spiritual discipline of “using kindness to bring us closer to God and to each other,” according to the publisher.
Lisa Hurley, who calls herself a burnout survivor, blends memoir, manifesto, and meditation techniques in a manual for finding spiritual well-being, Space to Exhale: A Handbook for Curating a Soft, Centered, Serene Life (Wiley, June).
And in a September release from Baker, What Comes Next: 40 Days of Healing After Heartbreak, Burnout, or Brokenness, Jess Connolly urges readers to let go of feeling put-upon and instead open up to God’s care and healing.
Buddhist Perspectives
Christian women are not alone in sharing spiritual advice. New and forthcoming books by Buddhist women point to ways the Eastern religion can ease suffering and even lead to enlightenment.
In The Wisdom of the Hive: What Honeybees Can Teach Us About Collective Wellbeing (Sounds True, out now), educators and beekeepers Michelle Cassandra Johnson and Amy Burtaine blend nature-based shamanistic practices, beekeeping, Buddhism, and spirituality.
Out in February 2026 from Shambhala, Women in Love with the Divine by Erica Bassani shares what the author learned about committing to a relationship with the sacred from a dozen women spiritual teachers in various traditions. And North Atlantic’s Emergent Dharma (Dec.) by feminist scholar Sharon Suh presents essays from 11 Asian American feminist Buddhists who, according to the publisher, want to correct teachings colored by “patriarchy, sexism, Orientalism, and our larger cultural context.”
Whether women today look to the Bible or to Eastern sages, they are not alone. They can find company in books by authors like themselves, linking them to the sisterhood of wise, brave, and funny women who came before.
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