The divide between faith and doubt in a secular world...There are those persons of faith who feel firmly grounded in their beliefs arising from to some powerful life-altering event, a conversion experience perhaps or a mystical encounter in Nature, a solid upbringing or otherwise from being grounded in a particular tradition, a faith-community - a way of reading scripture...Once your faith has been secured in this manner, it can be hard to grasp how others fail to find faith...Imagine the person who wants to have a religious experience of the kind that William James wrote about, but cannot find anything within his life-history that qualifies as a massively life-altering event. Or consider the student of religion who performs the requisite research hoping to stumble upon an overlooked yet compelling paradigm, who is nevertheless put off by what appear to be obscure or implausible claims, who despite their best effort is simply unable to "think through" these orthodox tenets or
(...A SEQUENCE OF RANDOM THOUGHTS ON TOPICS DU JOUR...)