Over the course of the previous two essays in this series (here and here, respectively), I have been making a case for more careful thinking about the nature of some of the doubts that so many of us seem to struggle with these days, especially those related to our faith and religious commitments.
In particular, I have attempted to show that many of our religious doubts or faith crises flow out of certain unrecognized assumptions we have about the nature of the world, ourselves, truth, and God—assumptions we tend to absorb from our larger culture by way of its many “secular liturgies.” Sadly, this usually happens without us ever fully realizing that our most basic understanding of ourselves and God is being shaped for us by these liturgies—or that this subtle process of secular self-formation has become an underlying source of our doubts about the truth of our faith and the meaning of our religious commitments.
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