Why Are We Here? Everyday Questions and the Christian Life

Rating:
Summary: Theological depth and ready accessibility:a rare combination
Review: This book is an extraordinary find: a collection of theological essays that can be mined for equal profit by college and seminary students, church groups, and anyone interested in critically exploring how everyday life can be powerfully illuminated and reconfigured by the resources of the Christian tradition. Two features in particular distinguish this book and make it especially worthwhile. First is the clarity (and occasional elegance) of the writing -- no small feat considering the number of authorial voices and the depth of these compact essays. Identifying the book's second and most important virtue is a bit more complex. Organized around questions that might be asked by any reflective believer (and by others as well), the collection should prove inviting to non-specialist readers. Yet the essays don't condescend; rather they draw the thoughtful reader into a subtly sophisticated conversation about theology and the questions of our lives. Most remarkably, they do so while demonstrating a rich alternative to what might, too simply, be called a "correlationist" approach to theology. No prior systematic account of the human condition or human religiousness generates the chapter-title questions or orders the theological meditations prompted by them. Instead, each question is considered freshly by the theologian who takes it on. Although they spare readers arcane discussion of theological method (and cheerfully make ad hoc use of conceptual tools from various disciplines), the authors' diverse responses to the questions in fact make a cumulative case for the independent integrity and sense-making power of Christian affirmations and practices. (Here, one may surmise, is the legacy of the so-called "Yale school.") There's nothing else on the market quite like this book, at least as far as I can tell. I will use it with my own students. It's a pleasure to recommend it to others.