Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks

If gratitude is good, why is it so hard to do? In Grateful, Diana Butler Bass untangles our conflicting understandings of gratitude and sets the table for a renewed practice of giving thanks.

We know that gratitude is good, but many of us find it hard to sustain a meaningful life of gratefulness. Most people report feeling gratitude on a regular basis, but those private feelings seem disconnected from the discontent that permeates modern society.

There is a gap, Bass argues, between our desire to be grateful and our ability to behave gratefully—a divide that influences our understanding of morality, worship, and institutional religion itself. In Grateful, Bass challenges readers to think about the impact gratitude has in our spiritual lives, and encourages us to make gratitude a "difficult and much-needed spiritual practice for our personal lives and to make a better world."

With honest stores and heartrending examples from history and her own life, Bass reclaims gratitude as a path to greater connections with God, with others, with the world, and with ourselves. Grateful offers up surprising, relevant, and powerful insights to practice gratitude. It's time to embrace a more radical practice of gratitude--the virtue that heals us and helps us thrive.