“After a lifetime of being a God-obsessed Christian struggling with my doubts about some of the ‘truths’ with which I was raised, it was time to put on paper something that was composting within me,” Val Webb wrote for Insights, the Uniting Church of Australia’s magazine. Her doubts, she argued, were “signs of health, divine catalysts urging me to more mature thinking…[not] shameful secrets to hide…while squeezing my feet into someone else’s certainty.”
And so she wrote, in 1995, her welcomed In Defence of Doubt. “I was swamped with responses,” she told journeyonline.com.au, “because people were waiting for something that gave them permission to doubt.” As she declares in the book, “Doubt is the grace that allows us to escape from prisons of inadequate belief systems.” Australia’s Revive Magazine points out in its review of the book’s second edition, “Without doubt and questioning, we would have no new knowledge or human progress. And yet so many in the church seem to fear it.”
Born in Brisbane, Webb, trained as a scientist. In mid-life, she completed a PhD in theology in Minnesota—she’d married a Mayo Clinic surgeon—and went on to teach in universities in America and Australia.
In Defence of Doubt: An Invitation to Adventure, 2nd edition
By Val Webb
Mosaic Press, 2012
[The previous Featured Book, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, by don Miguel Ruiz, is now available in the Library.]
