Reviews for Reverend Joseph Tarkington, Methodist Circuit Rider From Frontier Evangelism to Refined Reli...

The average rating for Reverend Joseph Tarkington, Methodist Circuit Rider From Frontier Evangelism to Refined Reli... based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-12-20 00:00:00 Brian Morrill Technically this book doesn’t exactly qualify as “spiritual reading” and yet as far as I’m concerned it’s one of the best “spiritual” books I’ve read in a long time. Possibly because Raymo sees things of the spirit as being firmly connected to everything else about the world in which we live. But the problem, according to Raymo, is that religion, with its deplorable history of rejecting what science keeps discovering, has made it difficult to keep that in mind. While not much of a scientist, I tend to agree with him (which is why I kept underlining and highlighting so much of this book!) Raymo expands upon the title of his book by examining two separate ways of dealing with our questions of faith. The first is the way of the Skeptics - those who, despite a deep-seated sense of “something” mysterious and profound at work in the evolution of the universe, have a hard time accepting the black and white answers that have been handed down for generations by the catechisms and doctrines religion espouses, preferring to trust that the human mind’s ability to try making sense of the world is part of “God’s plan.” And so skeptics are comfortable looking at the world in shades of gray even though it means they are continually struggling with issues of faith and plagued by doubts. “True believers” on the other hand need to cling to the simple and certain truths that dogmas and doctrines provide and so anything that threatens that certainty is rejected – even though it often means ignoring physical evidence that what they insist on believing is contrary to the laws of nature and science. Raymo identifies himself as belonging to the former group, adding that he “…believes words like God, soul, sacred, spirituality, sacrament and grace can retain currency in an age of science, once we strip them of outworn overlays. . .” His book looks at the difference between the way we tend to know things and the way we go about continuing to insist on believing things even though there is evidence to the contrary. But at the same time he is passionate in insisting that science can enhance rather than diminish what we can know of the sacred. “Can we remain alive to the sacredness of nature and the specialness of human creation? Yes. Can we collectively worship an Absolute that exists beyond all possibility of human knowing, that creates and animates the universe? Yes. Can we live morally, with a shared sense of responsibility to each other and to the planet? Yes. But only if we begin with what reason tells us to be true and redeem our knowledge by our wisdom and our art, accepting the unalterable consistency of fact and meaning.” For those of us who resonate with this view Chet Raymo’s candid approach to the kinds of questions and doubts that plague us is a wonderful blend of skepticism and reverence. I’m convinced that a healthy spiritual life depends on both.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-07-06 00:00:00 Bernice Aldrich The author is a little too smug for me. And he's so definite skeptics are the best and true believers are fools who believe in anything. I was hoping for a better examination of faith and science and the interplays, instead I got a book bashing religion and people who believe in religion.