Doubt

A day with few visitors presents an opportunity.

Saint Agnostica is a chronicle of grief, love, and mystery.

Brian McLaren says religious doubt isn't the death of faith. It's the birth of faith beyond belief.

Daniel Hornsby’s debut novel has a wonderful road-trippy feeling.

Massive struggle, intense suffering, and abundant joy

A pet topic of mine is the tendency of some Christians to fixate on belief and its boundaries. You can't just state why you think belief in x, y, and z is important to Christian faith and life; you have to claim that those who believe x and y but not so much z are not real Christians. You can't just disagree with someone with a different view from yours; you have to stage an inquisition.

It frustrates me to see this all-belief-all-the-time orientation used to frame things as us real Christians vs. them fake ones. When people take a similar approach in drawing themselves outside the circle, it just makes me sad.

Most spiritual leaders have wrestled with faith. Most of your pastors and most of the people that you look up to have questioned their faith and doubted God. It’s just that when we do it, we call it fancy, poetic things, like, “The dark night of the soul.”

I entered divinity school assuming that Christians ought to believe something is seriously wrong with the world. But I also loved the world.

There is no denying that in today’s world a culture of loneliness and isolation plagues individuals of every age, race and socioeconomic status. Although the church provides a sacred community that may help combat this loneliness, even the most devout believers have, at one time or another, questioned how or even if God is present in their suffering.

The appearance of a ghost can be explained in all sorts of ways. But when Jesus appears—bearing scars and hungry for a nice piece of tilapia—then we have to do more than merely rearrange some intellectual furniture.

Seekers often want Christianity to be a set of ideas one knows to be true, or at least to provide a feeling of certainty.

I have never felt comfortable praying. I almost feel I should put the word in quotes, as I'm never quite sure that what I do deserves the name.

Mary can’t experience the resurrected Jesus for the disciples, and the disciples can’t experience Jesus for Thomas.