William Greenway – författare

"Insofar as the essence of this philosophical spirituality is continuous with the essence of Christian spirituality, I am able to specify how . . . we can be utterly confident that it is wholly reasonable and good to affirm, give thanks for, live, and testify to faith in God."< br />from the preface

While it''s clear that a lot of people believe in God, whether they should is a matter of loud debate. Since the Enlightenment, and especially in the last 150 years, a consensus has been building in Western philosophy that belief in a transcendent orderand especially in a supreme beingis unreasonable and should be abandoned. The result of this trend has been to delegitimize religious belief, to claim that those who believe do so against scientific evidence and rational thought.

In this confident and sensitive book, William Greenway carefully guides the reader through the developments in Western intellectual life that have led us to assume that belief is irrational. He starts by demonstrating that, along with belief in God, modern definitions of human rationality have also rejected free will and moral agency. He then questions the Cartesian assumption that it is our ability to think that makes us most human and most real. Instead, Greenway explains, it is our capacity to be grasped by the lives and needs of others that forms the heart of who we are. From that vantage point we can see that faith is not a choice we make in spite of evidence to the contrary; it is, rather, wholly rational and in keeping with that which makes us most human. Every person who either has faith or is contemplating faith can be assured that belief in God is both reasonable and good. Greenway embraces both contemporary philosophy and science, inviting readers into a more confident experience of their faith.

Belief in God in the face of suffering is one of the most intractable problems of Christian theology. Many respond to the spiritual challenge of evil by ignoring it, blaming God, or insisting on the inherent meaninglessness of life. In this book, William Greenway contends that we don''t have to deny our moral selves by either ignoring evil or abandoning our moral sensibilities toward it. We can open our eyes fully to suffering and evil, and our own complicity in them. We can do so because it is only in this full acceptance of the world''s guilt and our own that we make ourselves fully open to agape, to being seized by love of others and God. Inspired by the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and the Christian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Challenge of Evil lovingly explains how we can look squarely at the overwhelming suffering in the world and still, by grace, have faith in a good and loving God.