The Empty Box and Other Stories for Reluctant Unbelievers

This book consists of a discrete series of short essays based mainly on sermons, preached over the course of 30 years in a variety of church settings ranging from Pentecostal to Episcopal, and public addresses at various venues including college campuses, and at faith-based conferences and conventions. The sermons and addresses were unconventional with themes drawn from Scripture, literature, and deal with topics of importance for the life of faith and the life of the mind. Together they amount to a series of reflections on faith, living, and learning that offers a challenge both to "easy belief" systems and equally "easy doubt" commitments and calls the reader to find his or her own voice and to search one's own experience for the seeds of faith. The book offers an alternative to the churches and those forms of Christianity that too often produce only carbon copies of its ministers. The various chapters use the medium of story to engage readers, to communicate core values, and to function as a premise for posing hard questions and drawing the readers' attention to salient points.

The core theme is around the idea of reluctant unbelievers; those who want to have faith but cannot seem to bring themselves to believe; those who struggle with doubt; those who may identify as Christian but who privately question or wonder about how the rhetoric of the church relates honestly to the challenges of life. It is aimed at believers who do not go to church and to reluctant unbelievers who do. The arguments mounted revolve around the conviction that doubt is not negative, that often there is loss, pain, suffering, and failure in the lives of those committed to salutary purposes. The goal of the book is to address these challenges without adopting easy answers, or reverting to pious platitudes, or backing into a corner of having to defend the indefensible or arriving at an official (or endorsed) perspective. The topics of the book are suggested in the list of titles below. They are designed to be engaging and provocative while committed to something meaningful and relevant to the various dimensions of faith. Each in different ways explores the relation of faith and doubt suggesting the two are not mutually exclusive. The book endeavors to see God in the ordinariness of life without making assumptions about what must be true or untrue and avoids easy answers and simple steps. The book offers a call to its readers to avoid resignation to conformity with popular ideas, traditions, church-speak, and the pattern of reading and seeing things in the same way we/they always have. It is an invitation to embrace the unforeseen; to forsake the pasture and take to the pathways; and a summons to the life of a pilgrim rather than the existence of a settler. In this sense, the book is a bridge not a destination.