Believing Again – Doubt and Faith in a Secular Age

Description

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.

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 in tension between faith and doubt. 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 discussion, 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.
Lundin, Roger, Author
Roger Lundin is the Blanchard Professor of English at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. His books include From Nature to Experience: The American Search for Cultural Authority.
Endorsement
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

“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