Paul Wilkes has written an elegant, prescriptive, secular book—a spiritual gem—that reinvents the power of confession for a contemporary audience. Confession is the foundation of religion, the essence of mental health. It is listening to the voice within to follow the path to honest and conscious living. And for thousands of years people have used the power of confession to find their best selves.

Liberating confession from the confessional, The Art of Confession draws on traditions as old as ancient Greece and as modern as psychoanalysis as diverse as Judaism, Catholicism, and Islam, to show readers how to incorporate a confessional practice into their daily lives. There are visualizations, spiritual exercises, prompts, and meditations; private confessions, direct confessions, psychological confessions.

Accompanied throughout by a wise “confessional chorus”—a rabbi, a priest, a psychiatrist, a nun, whose points-of-view complement and augment the text—The Art of Confession is an antidote to our age of oversharing, where we happily broadcast the minutest details of our lives in public, yet never find the time to discover the risk, relief, and ultimately the renewal that real, considered self-reflection offers.