Lights And Shadows In The Life Of Faith

"People don't abandon faith because they have doubts. People abandon faith because they think they're not allowed to have doubts." Too often, our honest questions about faith are met with cold confidence and easy answers. But false certitude doesn't result in strong faith—it results in disillusionment, or worse, in a dogmatic, overweening faith unable to see itself or its object clearly. Even as a pastor, Austin Fischer has experienced the shadows of doubt and disillusionment. In Faith in the Shadows, he leans into perennial questions about Christianity with raw and fearless integrity. He addresses contemporary science, the problem of evil, hell, God's silence, and other issues, offering not only fresh treatments of these questions but also a fresh paradigm for thinking about doubt itself. Doubt, Fischer contends, is no reason to leave the faith. Instead, it's an invitation to a more honest faith—a faith that's not in control, but that trusts more fully in its Lord.

The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Reformation, and the Renaissance popes conjure in the imagination a corrupt Roman Catholic clergy hungry for wealth and power. In this insightful, well researched work, the Vatican's chief historian, Fr. Walter Brandmuller, takes a thoughtful and understanding look at these and other important chapters in Church history. Without denying, or flinching at, the human capacity for folly, failure, and evil, Brandmuller moves beyond the caricatures and legends that often substitute for real history to reveal a Church, both human and divine, fulfilling its mission in every time and place. His goal is not to whitewash any of these past events or issues, but rather to illuminate them, and bring to them a more in-depth, comprehensive historical understanding on the basis of their causes, circumstances and effects. "Now let us take into consideration Church history from the theological viewpoint, highlighting another important aspect. Its essential duty, in fact, turns out to be the complex mission to investigate and clarify that process of reception and transmission, of paraleacute;psis and of paragrave;dosis, through which was substantiated, in the course of the ages, the Church's raison d'ecirc;tre. Indeed, it is beyond a doubt that the Church can draw inspiration for her choices by drawing on her centuries-old treasury of experience and memory." -Pope Benedict VXI, Address to the members of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences, March 7, 2008