Summary of Brian D. McLaren's Faith After Doubt

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 There are recovery programs for people who have lost a parent, sibling, or spouse. But no one has ever taught me how to grieve the loss of my faith. I was on my own.
#2 I have received hundreds of emails from people who were fired or disfellowshipped from their church, including the author Michael Walker. I met with him to discuss his experience.
#3 The small congregation that he was leading began growing numerically. But Michael began having doubts about the Bible, and he couldn’t suppress them. He began reading books that his tribe didn’t approve of, and he began secretly questioning his beliefs.
#4 Your path into doubt may be different from Michael’s and mine. You may be Catholic, and it was the pedophilia scandals that rocked you, or the male hierarchy’s obsession with controlling women’s bodies, or the sense that the church was more interested in taking offerings than offering help to those in need.

Sujets

• Catholicisme
• Spiritual

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 22 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669357087
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Brian D. McLaren's Faith After Doubt
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

There are recovery programs for people who have lost a parent, sibling, or spouse. But no one has ever taught me how to grieve the loss of my faith. I was on my own.

#2

I have received hundreds of emails from people who were fired or disfellowshipped from their church, including the author Michael Walker. I met with him to discuss his experience.

#3

The small congregation that he was leading began growing numerically. But Michael began having doubts about the Bible, and he couldn’t suppress them. He began reading books that his tribe didn’t approve of, and he began secretly questioning his beliefs.

#4

Your path into doubt may be different from Michael’s and mine. You may be Catholic, and it was the pedophilia scandals that rocked you, or the male hierarchy’s obsession with controlling women’s bodies, or the sense that the church was more interested in taking offerings than offering help to those in need.

#5

Doubt is the origin of the pain. It is the feeling that you are in two minds, one that believes and one that doesn’t. As soon as your trusted map stops matching reality, you feel disoriented.

#6

The loss of a religious worldview can create anxiety, and the loss of a religious worldview can also create the anxiety of losing God’s favor and protection.

#7

When we lose a loved one, we go through five stages of grief: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance. When we lose our faith, we go through the same stages, only backwards.

#8

To help you work through your doubts, you can start a journal and record your answers to the Reflection and Action questions at the end of each chapter.

#9

The horses I rode with years ago taught me that the best way to get away from other horses is to get away from them emotionally. You need to create some emotional distance from your clan, tribe, or herd in order to think freely.

#10

We all come equipped with an evolutionary predisposition to first learn and then obey the norms, rules, and agreements that we transmit to each other and impose on one another in our primary groups.

#11

The three members of your brain committee are the instinctive brain, the intuitive brain, and the intellectual brain. They are engaged in constant negotiations that shift power between them. When you are born, your instinctive and intuitive brains are already hard at work, forming connections, learning to work together, and keeping you safe.

#12

When it comes to intellectual doubt, you’re dealing with your meaning module, which is the part of your brain committee that critically and analytically thinks. But your meaning module’s independent thought processes are constantly being monitored and even censored by your belonging and survival modules.

#13

When the meaning and belonging modules are out of alignment, with one feeling safe and the other feeling insecure, you can be sure that your survival module, the third and senior member of your brain committee, is reflexively emitting stress hormones like adrenaline, cortisol, and norepinephrine.

#14

The tension between your survival and belonging modules is constantly tugging you in different directions. You can’t choose your beliefs, but you can choose to profess them. Whether you actually and authentically believe something is less choosable than it seems.

#15

Religious doubt is difficult because it involves questioning your own beliefs, and in almost every religious community, the box of normative beliefs contains beliefs of each kind - personal, historical, aesthetic, scientific, moral, and dispositional. It is seldom clear how a faith community expects you to hold these beliefs.

#16

The challenge of being a pastor is to help the community stay unified, while also teaching individuals to be honest and have integrity as a moral duty. It is not easy for herd creatures like us to navigate these pressures and burdens, especially since our brain committees and social networks are far more complex than those of horses.

#17

Thinking and believing are social acts, not just individual acts. We have many implicit and unspoken beliefs that are normative in a religious group, like Organ music is what brings us closest to God.

#18

I was a literature teacher who invited people over for dinner, and then drew dinner guests into deeper-than-average conversations. I didn’t plan on becoming a pastor, but that evolved gradually.