The Little Friar

Literature, I think, helps us ask questions about our lives and the things we believe, often in ways that other kinds of books simply can't.  That's because literature opens up our imaginations and language to explore the depths of our soul.  To that end, then, I want to offer a list of those books that have helped me to give words to faith, and sometimes even doubts, of my life.  There's enough diversity here that everyone should be able to find some connections with their lives: Voltaire, Candide (1759) Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851) George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871) Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895) Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899) James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) Franz Kafka, The Castle (1926) Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927) Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (1947) Albert Camus, The Plague (1947) Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951) Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952) Peter de Vries, The Bloo...

Doubt matters.  As I've written here often, I don't think doubt is nearly as destructive to Christian faith as some do.  Several of my friends are currently in a season of doubt.  They're not sure what those doubts mean.  When I then encourage them to follow those doubts, they're not sure why I -- a pastor and theologian by vocation -- wouldn't simply denounce doubt and insist on faith.  So let me lay out why that is.  And I want to begin with a quote from  Wendell Berry: [T]here are an enormous number of people -- and I am one of them -- whose native religion, for better or worse, is Christianity.  We were born to it; we began to learn about it before we became conscious; it is, whatever we think of it, an intimate belonging of our being; it informs our consciousness, our language, and our dreams.  We can turn away from it or against it, but that will only bind us tightly to a reduced version of it.  A better possibility is that this, o...

I'm a Christian who struggles with lots of doubts.  So I'm very sympathetic to those who struggle with doubts.  Whether it's other Christians or those outside the faith who wrestle with their own doubts about becoming Christian.  But there's also something I've begun noticing in myself that gives me pause.  Judgementalism.  I've detected this not because I have a window into another's soul.  It's my own darkness.  I'm guilty.   I've detected this because it's a sin I've succumbed to.  You look at people who don't struggle with doubts -- don't struggle with the reality of horrific suffering or problems with the biblical text -- and wonder if there isn't something wrong with them.  Maybe they are just too fearful.  Maybe they just aren't smart enough.  Me?  Well, I'm smart and  courageous. So I doubt.  I'm tempted here to go off into another riff about how we tend to build our self-esteem over against others. ...

Any number of my friends lately have been dealing existentially with the effects of what I call "the intellectual turn" in Christianity.  The intellectual turn  has to do with the intellectualizing of Christianity, and its correlative trouble dealing with doubt.  Intellectual  doubt is less about lament and the absence of God than it is about intellectual skepticism, having difficulty believing, epistemologically speaking, in the existence of God.  Such intellectual doubt has become particularly acute for them because that there's been a hollowing out of faith in many sectors of Christianity.   More specifically, for lots of folks, faith simply means belief .  Further, "belief" is taken to mean "I think proposition x is true".  Thus, having faith means something like "I believe God exists".  While atheists are defined as those who say "I don't believe that God exists".  Faith becomes reduced to asserting (or denying) propositi...