Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in a Secular Age
Overview
The Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year (2009)
In Believing Again Roger Lundin brilliantly explores the cultural consequences of the rather sudden nineteenth-century emergence of unbelief as a widespread social and intellectual option in the English- speaking world.
Lundin’s narrative focuses on key poets and novelists from the past two centuries—Dostoevsky, Dickinson, Melville, Auden, and more—showing how they portray the modern mind and heart balancing between belief and unbelief. Lundin engages these literary luminaries through chapters on a series of vital subjects, from history and interpretation to beauty and memory. Such theologians as Barth and Balthasar also enter the fray, facing the challenge of modern unbelief with a creative brilliance that has gone largely unnoticed outside the world of faith. Lundin’s Believing Again is a beautifully written, erudite examination of the drama and dynamics of belief in the modern world.
- Investigates the origins and consequences of the emergence of unbelief in the nineteenth century
- Examines the modern intersection between science, literature, and religion
- Explores themes of beauty, story, and memory
- History
- Science
- Belief
- Interpretation
- Reading
- Beauty
- Story
- Conclusion: Memory
This book reminds us that the iniquities and inquiries alike of the (nineteenth-century) fathers have been visited on the children of modernity. We are all products, conscious or not, of a powerful cultural sea change that has made belief in God difficult and supernaturalism hard to imagine. Roger Lundin features poets, novelists, and theologians who not only express this difficulty but chart a way through it. This is not a book for specialists, however, but for all wide-awake Christians who have wondered how we came to be where we are and what we can do to renew the sea of faith at a time of its low Western tide.
—Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
Remarkable. . . . A masterly exploration of the belief-unbelief debate in modern times, this book clearly and elegantly brings out what the main contributors—poets, philosophers, and theologians — have to say. There is no more appropriate companion to Charles Taylor’s magisterial A Secular Age.
—David Martin, London School of Economics
Roger Lundin’s Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in a Secular Age scrutinizes the sources of modern disbelief through the lens provided by literary figures from Dostoevsky to Auden, and theologians like Barth and Balthasar. It provides a major complement to Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.
—The Times Literary Supplement
- Title: Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in a Secular Age
- Author: Roger Lundin
- Publisher: Eerdmans
- Publication Date: 2009
- Pages: 302
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Topic: Theology