worldview and perspective on Faith in the Dark

When most of us grow up in a faith tradition, we begin with an assumption that faith is good, while having doubts is bad. As we mature however, we realize that faith and doubt are not opposites, but i...

People...think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross...You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don’t expect faith to clea...

Faithful God, our Father, Lord and Counselor: By your grace you know our names before we are even born. By your grace you call us your own sons and daughters. By your grace you give us an eternal purp...

God–Father, Son and Holy Spirit–You know what it’s like to be many and one at the same time. In You, we too are many ... yet one. You’ve made us one body—a single family unified for one purpose; with ...

From a historical perspective it is atheism that was old and the Christian faith and its good news that burst on the world as new. Once commonly called “atomism,” the genealogy of atheism can be trace...

God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—our Loving Creator, Redeemer and Guide: We praise and thank You for being with us wherever we are on the journey of faith; whether we feel You or not—You are here wit...

And I was reminded of an event from my father’s childhood: He was in a Sunday school class, listening to his teacher expound on Genesis 1 and a young earth, and asked his teacher how to make sense o...

The journalist Andrew Sullivan has some strong words of advice for the modern church,  If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, p...

In early 2017, less than a month after Donald Trump was inaugurated as the president of the United States, the Washington Post adopted a new slogan: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” There is of course a ...

The famous American psychotherapist M. Scott Peck was for many years an agnostic. He learned his psychiatry according to the standard model in which there was no such thing as evil. But at around the ...

Lord Jesus–You’ve come, are coming and will come again. Whether we know it or not, we live on the edge of Your advent every moment of every day either with anticipation or with anxiety. As if stumblin...

Faith is seeing the invisible, but not the nonexistent.

Prayer of Adoration Loving God—Father Son and Holy Spirit— we come today as thirsty people to You who are the Spring of Living Water. We come as hungry people to You who are the Bread of Heaven. We ...

Faith is a redirecting of our sight, a getting out of the focus of our own vision and getting God into focus.

All: Gracious God, you promise that your light drowns out darkness, yet the darkness is so persistent. We cannot see in front of us, so we look to our own knowledge and ways. Forgive us for turning to...

The truth is simpler… and more alarming. [This] is the end of religious experience, the very opposite of mysticism…. We have been going round the paths, and suddenly we see our path goes round a hole,...

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

For some, faith begins with a hard shell, a rigid set of answers and platitudes that keep them safe but eventually prevent them from growing into who they could be. The system that was initially prote...

[If] your imagination of God is starved then when you come up against difficulties, you have no power, you can only endure in darkness.

Faith is required of thee, and a sincere life, not loftiness of intellect, nor deepness in the mysteries of God.

Faith is not something that goes against the evidence, it goes beyond it. The evidence is saying to us, 'There is another country. There is something beyond mere reason'.

In ordinary times we get along surprisingly well, on the whole, without ever discovering what our faith really is. If, now and again, this remote and academic problem is so unmannerly as to thrust its...

A few years ago, a journalist named Joseph Blackman wrote an Op Ed on an interesting subject, “Why Clubs are Dark.” That is, why is it when you walk into a nightclub or a bar, the lights are off, or a...

The man of pseudo-faith will fight for his verbal creed but refuse flatly to allow himself to get in a predicament where his future must depend upon that creed being true. He always provides himself w...

I believe though I do not comprehend, and I hold by faith what I cannot grasp with the mind.

There are many ways to be a saint, and at times our fidelity may look like betrayal. We may have to become “saints of darkness.” We may have to be saints whose light seems to go out as we wander in th...

God, our rock and refuge, there are plenty of things that we allow to erode our faith in you. When life gets stormy, we let our uncertainty cloud our trust in you. We think we know better and start re...

In a quiet hospital room in North Carolina, an eager young doctor with a bright future evaluates his elderly patient with not much future left at all. She has a terminal heart condition, inoperable. A...

It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil,...

Heavenly Father, we confess that we often take stock of your work and your goodness based on what we have and see in a particular moment. We follow the desires and encouragements of crowds rather than...