While the overall book market has gone flat in recent months, sales of books about religion continue to increase up nearly 9 percent in 1996.

This trend coincides with a study by the Princeton Religion Research Center showing weekly attendance at churches and synagogues at the lowest level since 1940.

The connection?

Lynn Garrett, religion editor of Publisher’s Weekly, speculates that “fascination with things spiritual” remains high, despite the decline in churchgoing, and that people are “more open than ever to dipping into traditions not our own and appropriating what we find useful.”

Books, rather than worship, have become guides for filling what Jean Paul Sartre called “a god-shaped hole,” a fundamental human yearning for the divine. That search, as is evident in a sampling of new and forthcoming books, includes reassessments of traditional texts and beliefs, as well as the exploration of new forms of spirituality.