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Skeptics and Believers, not a book but another of The Great Courses’ DVD-based studies, and new to the SSUC Library’s A/V collection, is an intellectual and philosophical exploration of the debate in the Western world about the nature of religious faith and its compatibility with reason. Well-regarded, half of its students awarded it five stars out of five. Read what the learners had to say about the course and its instructor, Tyler Roberts:

“An excellent overview of the religious and philosophical debate sparked by ‘modernity’”; “Roberts provides the best explanations of the ideas of many key Western intellectual figures”; “He makes the complicated and abstract views discussed as clear as I believe can be done”; what he examines “is an area fraught with the perils of bias and offence, which he deftly avoids”. So, one viewer concludes, speaking of the DVD set, “I recommend it to both skeptics and believers.”

Roberts taught religious studies at Iowa’s Grinnell College from 1998 until his untimely death in 2021—he was just 61. There he had, as a colleague noted, an “outsized presence.” This scholar pointed up Roberts’ “bad-boy attitude of crossing boundaries between the study of religion and au courant European philosophy.” 

Skeptics and Believers: Religious Debate in the Western Intellectual Tradition 
By Tyler Roberts
The Great Courses, 2009