Insurrection: To Believe is Human, to Doubt Divine by Peter Rollins
I have to admit -- I am immediately skeptical whenever an author calls themselves "controversial" on the back of their book. I know it's wrong, but I go into the book already pre-judging it.
Luckily, Rollins abated all of my initial pessimism. I rather loved most of the first half of the book where it's basically a primer on Christian Existentialism. It's pretty simple and easy to follow, and I rather enjoyed the logical steps that it took. The book begins with the basic idea that as humans, we have this need to believe in something. That there's more out there than what we can just see.
He argues because belief is so natural, a "belief" in God isn't so important. We're told to embrace the struggles, and the doubts- that those are essential Christianity as well.
One aspect of the book that I really enjoyed (ironically it's the part that I completely agree with) was what it meant to "believe" or "worship" God. He tries to replace our set of beliefs with actions -- that how we love people here on earth is precisely how we love God. Our role here on earth is not to just believe in something and convince others to believe too, but to bring Heaven to earth.
I'll stop there, but it was a fascinating book. I'm still turned off by the "controversial" label, but I'll definitely be keeping up with Rollins from time to time.
