Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Tuesday Tome - The Skeptical Believer

Scot McKnight posted about this book yesterday. It was already on my list of books to get and Scot's post was the final nudge I needed to get me to click the magic button that summons books to my door. Scot writes...
Doubt happens to faith and to believers, not so much to unbelievers. It’s struggling with faith and in the midst of faith, not denying faith. It’s seeking to make sense of faith. Taylor’s book is about “internal apologetics” (the battle within) more than “external apologetics” (the battle to convince others). Doubt is misgivings about truth claims, in this case about Christian truth claims.

From the publisher's description...
When it comes to God, there are believers and there are skeptics. But there are also Skeptical Believers, a particular kind of believer who lives with an Inner Atheist that is constantly raising objections. The Skeptical Believer is a book about making peace with your Inner Atheist, and about working out useful responses to questions that have no definitive answers. It steers a middle course between the modernist conviction that faith is agreement with a set of statements about God and the postmodernist assertion that religious faith is just one story among many, no more or less true than any other. The Skeptical Believer proposes that one can live a rich and meaningful life of faith without proof (and despite the weaknesses of the church) by seeing oneself as a character within an ancient story. As believers, skeptical or otherwise, always have.
The author, Daniel Taylor, lives in St. Paul, MN and taught at Bethel University for thirty three years.  He is married and is the father of four adult children.  Dr. Taylor is the author of ten books, including The Myth of Certainty, Letters to My Children, Tell Me A Story: The Life-Shaping Power of Our Stories, In Search of Sacred Places, and Creating a Spiritual Legacy. He is also co-founder of The Legacy Center, an organization helping people preserve the values and stories that have shaped their lives. He is also a contributing editor for Books and Culture magazine.

1 comment:

  1. The subtitle alone, "Telling Stories to Your Inner Atheist", is compelling enough to make me push the somewhat-but-not-completely-magic button that adds this to "My Wishlist" ;-)

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