It is widely assumed that science represents the enemy of religious faith. The Soul of Doubt proposes an alternative cause of unbelief: the Christian conscience. Dominic Erdozain argues that the real solvents of orthodoxy in the modern period have been concepts of moral equity and personal freedom generated by Christianity itself.

Ortberg demonstrates how doubt is very much a part of faith and how uncertainty can lead to trust. "The beliefs that really matter," he writes, "are the ones that guide our behavior. We cannot hope without faith, and so we must not hope for something but someone--Jesus Christ.

The freedom to question—asking and being asked—is an indispensable and sacred practice that is absolutely vital to the health of our communities.According to author David Dark, when religion won’t tolerate questions, objections, or differences of opinion, and when it only brings to the table threats of excommunication, violence, and hellfire, it does not allow people to discover for themselves what they truly believe.The God of the Bible not only encourages questions; the God of the Bible demands them. If that were not so, we wouldn’t live in a world of such rich, God-given complexity in which wide-eyed wonder is part and parcel of the human condition. Dark contends that it’s OK to question life, the Bible, faith, the media, emotions, language, government—everything. God has nothing to hide. And neither should people of faith.The Sacredness of Questioning offers a wide-ranging, insightful, and often entertaining discussion that draws on a variety of sources, including religious texts and popular culture. It is a book that readers will likely cherish—and recommend—for years to come.

Is there a way to walk faithfully through doubt and come out the other side with a deeper love for Jesus, the church, and its tradition? Can we question our faith without losing it? Award-winning author, pastor, and professor A. J. Swoboda has witnessed many young people wrestle with their core Christian beliefs. Too often, what begins as a set of critical and important questions turns to resentment and faith abandonment. Unfortunately, the church has largely ignored its task of serving people along their journey of questioning. The local church must walk alongside those who are deconstructing their faith and show them how to reconstruct it. Drawing on his own experience of deconstruction, Swoboda offers tools to help emerging adults navigate their faith in a hostile landscape. Doubt is a part of our natural spiritual journey, says Swoboda, and deconstruction is a legitimate space to encounter the living God. After Doubt offers a hopeful, practical vision of spiritual formation for those in the process of faith deconstruction and those who serve them. Foreword by pastor and author John Mark Comer.

In Benefit of the Doubt, influential theologian, pastor, and bestselling author Gregory Boyd invites readers to embrace a faith that doesn't strive for certainty, but rather for commitment in the midst of uncertainty. Boyd rejects the idea that a person's faith is as strong as it is certain. In fact, he makes the case that doubt can enhance faith and that seeking certainty is harming many in today's church. Readers who wrestle with their faith will welcome Boyd's message that experiencing a life-transforming relationship with Christ is possible, even with unresolved questions about the Bible, theology, and ethics. Boyd shares stories of his own painful journey, and stories of those to whom he has ministered, with a poignant honesty that will resonate with readers of all ages.

We live in an age of skepticism. Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it’s easy to wonder: Why should anyone believe in Christianity? What role can faith and religion play in our modern lives? In this thoughtful and inspiring new book, pastor and New York Times bestselling author Timothy Keller invites skeptics to consider that Christianity is more relevant now than ever. As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. Christianity provides us with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. Written for both the ardent believer and the skeptic, Making Sense of God shines a light on the profound value and importance of Christianity in our lives.

A devotional for those who struggle with normal Christianity.

“How has unbelief come to dominate so many Western societies? The usual account invokes the advance of science and rational knowledge. Ryrie’s alternative, in which emotions are the driving force, offers new and interesting insights into our past and present.” —Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age Why have societies that were once overwhelmingly Christian become so secular? We think we know the answer, pointing to science and reason as the twin culprits, but in this lively, startlingly original reconsideration, Alec Ryrie argues that people embraced unbelief much as they have always chosen their worldviews: through the heart more than the mind. Looking back to the crisis of the Reformation and beyond, he shows how, long before philosophers started to make the case for atheism, powerful cultural currents were challenging traditional faith. As Protestant radicals eroded time-honored certainties and ushered in an age of anger and anxiety, some defended their faith by redefining it in terms of ethics, setting in motion secularizing forces that soon became transformational. Unbelievers tells a powerful emotional history of doubt with potent lessons for our own angry and anxious times. “Well-researched and thought-provoking...Ryrie is definitely on to something right and important.” —Christianity Today “A beautifully crafted history of early doubt...Unbelievers covers much ground in a short space with deep erudition and considerable wit.” —The Spectator “Ryrie traces the root of religious skepticism to the anger, the anxiety, and the ‘desperate search for certainty’ that drove thinkers like...John Donne to grapple with church dogma.” —New Yorker

Kierkegaard said that faith without doubt is simply credulity, the will to believe too readily, especially without adequate evidence, and that "in Doubt can Faith begin." All people involved in spiritual practice, of whatever persuasion, must confront doubt at one time or another, and find a way beyond it to belief, however temporary. But "faith is not equivalent to mere belief. Faith is the condition of ultimate confidence that we have the capacity to follow the path of doubt to its end. And courage." In this engaging spiritual memoir, Stephen Batchelor describes his own training, first as a Tibetan Buddhist and then as a Zen practitioner, and his own direct struggles along his path. "It is most uncanny that we are able to ask questions, for to question means to acknowledge that we do not know something. But it is more than an acknowledgement: it includes a yearning to confront an unknown and illuminate it through understanding. Questioning is a quest." Batchelor is a contemporary Buddhist teacher and writer, best known for his secular or agnostic approach to Buddhism. He considers Buddhism to be a constantly evolving culture of awakening rather than a religious system based on immutable dogmas and beliefs. Buddhism has survived for the past 2,500 years because of its capacity to reinvent itself in accord with the needs of the different Asian societies with which it has creatively interacted throughout its history. As Buddhism encounters modernity, it enters a vital new phase of its development. Through his writings, translations and teaching, Stephen engages in a critical exploration of Buddhism's role in the modern world, which has earned him both condemnation as a heretic and praise as a reformer.

Vincent Bugliosi, whom many view as the nation's foremost prosecutor, has successfully taken on, in court or on the pages of his books, the most notorious murderers of the last half century--Charles Manson, O.J. Simpson, and Lee Harvey Oswald. Now, in the most controversial book of his celebrated career, he turns his incomparable prosecutorial eye on the greatest target of all: God. In making his case for agnosticism, Bugliosi has very arguably written the most powerful indictment ever of God, organized religion, theism, and atheism. Theists will be left reeling by the commanding nature of Bugliosi's extraordinary arguments against them. And, with his trademark incisive logic and devastating wit, he exposes the intellectual poverty of atheism and skewers its leading popularizers--Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins. Joining a 2,000-year-old conversation which no one has contributed anything significant to for years, Bugliosi, in addition to destroying the all-important Christian argument of intelligent design, remarkably--yes, scarily--shakes the very foundations of Christianity by establishing that Jesus was not born of a virgin, and hence was not the son of God, that scripture in reality supports the notion of no free will, and that the immortality of the soul was a pure invention of Plato that Judaism and Christianity were forced to embrace because without it there is no life after death. Destined to be an all-time classic, Bugliosi's Divinity of Doubt sets a new course amid the explosion of bestselling books on atheism and theism--the middle path of agnosticism. In recognizing the limits of what we know, Bugliosi demonstrates that agnosticism is he most intelligent and responsible position to take on the eternal question of God's existence.