Faith

Dennis Covington is famous for seeking faith in extreme places. Twenty years ago it was the snake-handling, poison-drinking Christians of southern Appa­lachia.

We wish something would prove beyond doubt that Someone obliged us large-brained, bipedal primates with a breath of consciousness.

Are science and religion enemies or friends? Neither, says Peter Harrison—but they're both forms of virtue.

Jesus went slowly, purposefully into the eye of the storm. Only through the storm would he find what he was looking for.

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.”

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.

My grandfather was the Reverend Calvin Titus Perkins, known as C.T. He was a Southern Baptist evangelist—a traveling preacher in Oklahoma, the former Indian Territory. He arrived in a covered wagon as a very young boy, and the famous Oklahoma dust seems embedded in the black-and-white photos I’ve seen of him. He was a man of passion but also a lover of order, a believer in rules. The bare bones Calvinism that flourished on the frontier offered him not only a faith but a way out of chaos and poverty.

Only Peter stands up to answer Jesus' question.

An unconfident reader