Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

We need “devotion to something more than ourselves for our lives to be endurable. Without it, we have only our desires to guide us, and they are fleeting, capricious, and insatiable.”

Cambridge historian Henry Chadwick argued that Augustine “marks an epoch in the history of human moral consciousness.”47 For the first time the supreme goal of life was not self-control and rationality but love. Love was required to redirect the human person away from self-centeredness toward serving God and others. Augustine’s Confessions laid the

Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian playwright, helps us understand what happened to Heimel’s friends. “If you take away the life-illusion from an average man, you take away his happiness as well.”18 Within Ibsen’s play The Wild Duck, a life illusion is the belief that some object or condition will finally bring you the satisfaction for which you long. But

Life isn’t simply what you make it. Often it is what it is. We are not fully free to impose our meanings on life. Rather we must honor life by discovering a meaning that fits in with the world as it

In hospitals the seriously ill are, not surprisingly, quite willing to talk to the clergy. Even those who have no belief in God or the afterlife feel compelled to examine themselves, to ask, “Have I been loving enough to my friends and family? Have I been generous enough with my money? Have I continually postponed changes I knew should be made in m

What is going on? You have two human beings who are experiencing identical circumstances in radically different ways. What makes the difference? It is their expectation of the future. This illustration is not intended to say that all we need is a good income. It does, however, show that what we believe about our future completely controls how we ar

Studies find a very weak correlation between wealth and contentment, and the more prosperous a society grows, the more common is depression.3 The things that human beings think will bring fulfillment and contentment don’t.

The other problem we have addressed is that many secular people base their nonbelief on a rigid and simplistic view of reason. They will not acknowledge that there are different, contested approaches to rationality and that all of them include the exercise of faith.

Therefore, the unhappiness and disorder of our lives are caused by the disorder of our loves. A just and good person “is also a person who has [rightly] ordered his love, so that he does not love what it is wrong to love, or fail to love what should be loved, or love too much what should be loved less (or love too little what should be loved more).