Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

Reason is a crucial and irreplaceable way to help us weigh competing beliefs. But it is impossible to claim that we should believe only what is proven and that therefore, since religion can’t be proven, we shouldn’t embrace it. All of us have things we believe—including things we would sacrifice and even die for—that cannot be proven. We believe th

So created meanings work less rationally and communally than discovered meanings. They are also less durable, less able to get you through adversity and suffering.

If you see a large sailboat out on the water moving swiftly, it is because the sailor is honoring the boat’s design. If she tries to take it into water too shallow for it, the boat will be ruined. The sailor experiences the freedom of speed sailing only when she limits her boat to the proper depth of water and faces the wind at the proper angle. In

Haidt says that the answer—of the Buddha and Chinese sages like Lao Tzu in the East and the Greek Stoic philosophers in the West—constituted the “early happiness hypothesis” of ancient times. The principle was this: We are unhappy even in success because we seek happiness from success. Wealth, power, achievement, family, material comfort, and secur

Life isn’t simply what you make it. Often it is what it is. We are not fully free to impose our meanings on life. Rather we must honor life by discovering a meaning that fits in with the world as it

Studies find a very weak correlation between wealth and contentment, and the more prosperous a society grows, the more common is depression.3 The things that human beings think will bring fulfillment and contentment don’t.

Before we proceed, however, we should take a moment to explore how we will be using the word “secular.” There are at least three ways the word is used today. One applies the term to the social and political structure. A secular society is one in which there is a separation of religion and the state. No religious faith is privileged by the governmen

Unlike Buddhism, Christianity teaches that suffering is a terrible reality, not an illusion to be transcended with stoic detachment. Unlike ancient fatalism, such as the Greek Stoics, or other shame-and-honor cultures, Christianity finds nothing particularly noble about suffering—it should not be welcomed. Yet unlike secularism, Christianity teache

God repeatedly refuses to allow his gracious activity to run along the expected lines of worldly influence and privilege. He puts in the center the person whom the world would put on the periphery.

given the secular view of the universe, the conclusion of love or social justice is no more logical than the conclusion to hate or destroy. These two sets of beliefs—in a thorough-going scientific materialism and in a liberal humanism—simply do not fit with one another. Each set of beliefs is evidence against the other. Many would call this a deepl