Spiritual book roundup

“Sin Bravely” by Maggie Rowe, Soft Skull, 225 pages, $16.95

Admittedly, the “religious humor” section of the bookshelf is markedly sparse. Yet that’s where you’ll find “Sin Bravely: A Memoir of Spiritual Disobedience” from comedy writer Maggie Rowe, who’s written for stage and screen, including scripts for “Arrested Development” and Netflix’s “Flaked.” Since 2002, she’s been performing in and producing the Comedy Central stage show “sit ’n spin,” Los Angeles’ longestrunning spoken-word extravaganza, described as “part theatre, part 12-step meeting, part tent revival.”

Don’t let the funnies fool you: It’s an unflinching examination of the dangers of literalism in the religion department.

As early as 6 years old, Rowe found herself obsessed with a fear of going to hell, one so extreme it drove her to become “an outrageously dedicated” born-again Christian. At 19, Rowe checked herself into an evangelical psychiatric facility, where a ragtag cast of lovably kooky characters proved prescriptive.

It’s there that Rowe launches her anti-damnation campaign, finally subscribing to her version of Martin Luther’s admonition: “Sin bravely in order to know the forgiveness of God.” And she tests her newfound theology in, of all places, a strip club’s amateur night.

“Liturgy of the Ordinary” by Tish Harrison Warren, IVP, 184 pages, $16

Tish Harrison Warren’s debut work, “Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life,” is rooted in the humble humdrum of day-after-day existence. This is spiritual guidance for the bed-maker, the teeth-brusher, the trafficsnarled among us. This is one ordinary day turned inside out, its hallowed script revealed, liturgical underpinnings exposed.

Warren, an Anglican priest, campus minister, writer, wife and mother of two, unlocks “a practical theology of the everyday,” and she does so by seamlessly coupling ordinary moments — awaking, brushing teeth, losing keys, eating leftovers, sitting in traffic, checking emails — with the sacred.

She beautifully ties making the bed to the creation story, to God’s making beauty from chaos. In a consideration of tooth brushing, she draws us into a meditation on Christianity as an embodied faith, one in which our senses — our physical pleasures — draw us closer, more emphatically to the divine. Even a fight with her husband becomes a platform for seeking shalom.

The purity of her vision, the clarity of her writing, make effortless work of the notion that the small acts of our everydays are what shape us into the sacred vessels we are meant to be.