Many of us have agonized over leaving the faith we held dear and clung on to for long periods of our life.  Most of us have never thought about what it would have been like for ancient peoples to leave *their* religions, not to move to agnosticism or atheism, but because a *different* religion was taking over.  That is part of what I address in my book The Triumph of Christianity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017). I have been providing posts summarizing the issues I address in my various popular books.  I'll continue to do that now with Triumph.  This is how I begin the book, not in a place one might expect!  But with one of the great poets of doubt in modernity... ****************************** In my junior year of college I took a course in English literature that made me understand for the first time how painful it can be to question your faith.  The course introduced me to poets of the nineteenth century who were struggling with religion.  Even though I was [...]

This past week I had a long talk with one of my bright undergraduates, a first-year student who had been raised in a Christian context but had come to have serious doubts driven in large part by the difficulty she had understanding how there could be suffering in a world controlled by an all-knowing and all-powerful God.  I naturally resonated with the question, since this is why I myself left the Christian faith. I get asked about that transition a lot, and it’s been five or six years since I’ve discussed it at any length on the blog.  So I thought I might return to it.  The one and only time I”ve talked about it at length is in my book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer (Oxford University Press, 2008).  Here is how I discuss it there, slightly edited.  (This will take several posts) ******************************* I think I know when suffering started to become a “problem” for me.  It was while I was still [...]

My beloved mom died last week.   She lived a long and good life; she brought a lot of good into the world and made many people very happy; and she died a good death – peaceful, in comfort, in the presence of family.  How good can it get? There are many things I have long been thankful for about my mom.  I would like to reflect on one of them here. Many years ago, when I left the Christian faith that my mom held so dear –  a faith that meant almost everything to her – it caused her a great deal of pain.  But she did not allow our stark differences to destroy our relationship.  We continued to love and honor each other even though we were deeply at odds on issues that both of us considered among the most important in our lives. My mom was not raised in a religious household.  She grew up in the small town of Burlington Kansas and her parents were not church people.   When she was in [...]