Finding Answers To Hard Questions About Faith: A New Book For You

For a couple of years, it was possible from this website to access a book-length collection of short studies that I wrote under the title: Explorations in Faith and Belief. During the time that this material was up and running, I received a number of e-mails from readers that I found gratifying and challenging, and that encouraged me specifically to refine and focus the material around a better defined and more consistently carried out theme. With the technical help of Ms. Chris Guldi, who created and who has managed this website from its beginning over seven years ago, I have re-fashioned some of the original essays and a lot of new material into a very different kind of book that I hope you will find interesting and helpful.

If you will look on the right side of this page, you will see a link to this just finished book, whose title I have reproduced above. There are several ways for you to make it your own. The first is by reading it online, and/or downloading parts or all of it to your computer, from which you may then read, reproduce, and distribute it free of charge. (I keep having to remind myself, though, that printing downloaded material does not come cheap, at least as long as I continue to rely on desktop printers that drink ink as fast as I drink bottled water.)

If you would like this material to have and to hold in more traditional book form, Chris has made this possible, too. A CreateSpace paperback edition is now available through a direct link that she has provided. And soon, Kindle owners can order it directly for download through Amazon. (Needless to say, I never could have figured out how to provide these options on my own.) Together, these access points have drawn my writing completely into Cyberspace, where some readers have waggishly suggested my thinking has been for a long time.

The organization of Explorations … came about originally as a response to readers of Howe About who had been either intrigued, put off, or both by my opinions and who wanted to know more about the theological method and principles that inform them. Several correspondents wondered whether my approach to theology can be defended as an adequate way of representing the Christian message in the present-day, and if so, how? Their questions were legitimate and important, and Explorations sought to answer them respectfully and as completely as I could. One response to my efforts that especially caught my interest came in the form of a question that has occupied my attention ever since: How can we use these discussions of theological fine points in everyday conversations with everyday people about their very personal struggles with faith?

It did not take me long to realize that this question has been at the heart of my pastoral and academic ministry across a professional lifetime, and that I may have developed a perspective on it that is worth sharing with more than just my own students, parishioners, counselees, and fellow church members. The perspective is anchored in the fundamental conviction that when we are struggling with faith-issues, what we need most is to be surrounded by fellow believers and strugglers who listen well, who can resist the temptation to impose their own opinions on us, and who encourage us to seek answers to our questions that are acceptably Christian but at the same time congruent with the dictates of our own conscience. A major corollary of this conviction is that the process by which we arrive at answers is as important as the answers to which the process leads us.

One hope that I have for this book is that all of its readers will find in it resources for nurturing their own spiritual growth. A second is that those who are engaged in the ministry of listening and guiding will find in it some very practical help for working with people whose life-issues are being made more complicated by their faith-issues. Thirdly, I hope that this book will add an important and needed dimension to my previous books on lay shepherding, and to the lay Christians who continue to read and use them in their own congregations. And finally, I hope that I will hear from you about how to make my on-going thinking about the book’s subject a more helpful account of how struggling with questions about faith is also a witness of faith.