It’s about time The Future of Faith came to be selected a “Featured Book”! “With his typical brilliance and lively insight,” author Harvey Cox delivers “a dazzling blend of memoir, church history, and theological commentary,” Publishers Weekly whoops. “…his spirited portrait of our religious landscape challenges us to think in new ways about faith.”
Indeed, “the key idea of the book is the distinction between faith and belief, which many people erroneously assume are two words for the same thing,” the Journal of Religion and Health explains in its review. “Cox argues that we can believe something without it making much difference in our lives, but we put our faith only in something that is vital for the way we live.”
The book “explores three trends in Christianity’s 2,000 years,” Wikipedia reports. First came the Age of Faith, during which adherents lived out Jesus’s teachings; next came the centuries-long Age of Belief, in which “correct doctrine” mattered; and now, in the Age of the Spirit, spirituality is being embraced.
An ordained Baptist minister, Cox taught at Harvard Divinity School for 44 years, beginning in 1965, the year his book, The Secular City, was published, and became a rare theological bestseller.
The Future of Faith
By Harvey Cox
HarperCollins, 2009
The previous Featured Book, Tom Harpur’s For Christ’s Sake, is now available in the Library.
