Product Description

Finding faith is not a leap in the dark that requires you to forsake truth and intellectual honesty. In two companion volumes, Brian McLaren affirms the needs of both your mind and your heart as he helps you to find a faith that is real, honest, good, enriching, transforming, and yours.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #321546 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

From the Back Cover
Does having faith mean abandoning reason? It’s easy to get that impression. Still, it seems reasonable that a supremely intelligent God would want you to use your God-given intellect on your spiritual journey as much as in any other aspect of your life. Faith may not stand on rational thinking alone, but a solid faith should walk hand in hand with intellectual integrity.

Does it really matter what I believe? What is the relationship between faith and knowledge? Why are there so many religions? Do all paths lead to the same God? This book helps you sort through the questions, objections, and concerns you can’t help but raise. A Search for What Makes Sense will help you think your way clearly and honestly to answers that satisfy because they’re your answers—conclusions you’ve arrived at personally without manipulation, coercion, or game-playing.

For faith to exist and grow it’s got to make sense—good sense, carefully-thought-out sense. And chances are it does.

FINDING FAITH

The Finding Faith books A Search for What Makes Sense and A Search for What Is Real don’t try to tell you what to believe; they are guides in learning how to believe. If you think the spiritual journey requires turning your back on honesty and intellectual integrity, these two companion volumes will speak to both your mind and your soul.

About the Author
Brian D. McLaren (MA, University of Maryland) is founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church, an innovative, nondenominational church in the Baltimore-Washington region. He's also a senior fellow with emergent (www.emergentvillage.org), a growing generative friendship of missional Christian leaders.

Customer Reviews

Starting with the Big Questions
While I agree with the reviewer below that the book would have been better packaged along with its companion, let me recomomend this first book as an outstanding contribution to exploring the big questions of life. It really does make sense!

The text is easily accessible; it's not a detailed analysis meant for specialists in philosophy of religion (like me). I plan to require it for my university students, but I think it will work especially well in my general theology courses aimed at adults who are not tightly connected with the Church.

My only substantive criticisms are that 1) I wish Brian had openly embraced evolutionary theory as compatible with belief in God. His general position in this book and others seems especially compatible with theistic evolution. Perhaps he wanted to side-step the complexities of the evolution controversy, but I think the book would have been stronger had he explored the issues directly. (He did mentioned that he enjoys the work of theistic evolutionist John Haught.)

I also think that 2) Brian's general position on the God-world relationship is a version of pan-en-theism (not pantheism). He doesn't address that possibility in the book -- again probably because it's aimed at a broad audience.

Having mentioned these minor criticisms, I should come clean and acknowledge that I'm willing to look past just about any differences of opinion upon learning that Brian likes listening to Bruce Cockburn! : ) (p. 117)

Thomas Jay Oord

Repackaging Finding Faith
If you've read Brian Mclaren's Finding Faith you've already read this book. It is a repackaging of Finding Faith into two separate books. I did like Finding Faith which I would have rated 5 stars. I give this book only 1 star not for the content but for misleading me into buying what I thought was a different book. Save yourself some $ and buy Finding Faith. A Search For What Makes Sense & A Search For What Is Real rolled into one book.

Balancing...
I don't think it's fair to lower a books rate just because you didn't read the back cover (another review here). It clearly says that it's a version of book that was split in two. Specially when that book is a good one.