Exploring Doubt

“At a time when the public debate on religious faith seems to be more about conviction and ideology than about doubt and ambiguity, this book offers a personal and often moving account of the value of uncertainty. Alex Wright observes the beauty of the physical landscape and combines observation and reflection with memories of human turmoil. His unfolding narrative will take you gently inside yourself.”

Mona Siddiqui

“Three braids of enquiry are woven together in this book: an evocative depiction of the north Norfolk landscape; a lingering reflection on the breakup of a marriage; and a theological enquiry into the importance of not being certain. What emerges is a profound study of the deep relations that bind place, people and Christian believing. It is as much a composition – the writing poetic, sinuous and subtle – as a study of the fragility, evanescence and spirituality of human belonging. The book is a wonderful and imaginative piece of work that lingers long after it has been put aside and resonates with the authenticity of a true writer’s voice.”

Graham Ward

“John Henry Newman once sought to comfort a bereaved friend by noting how the dead can seem more real to us than when they were alive, more present in their absence than when in the flesh. This apparent paradox – of presence in absence – is the theme of Alex Wright’s remarkable book. It is a book of bereavements, personal and cultural. Wright weaves together a set of reflections on the loss and remaining of faith in our times with the loss of his first marriage, setting both in the landscape – the seascape – of the North Norfolk coast. For it was there that his marriage both flowered and faded, in a place where the distinction between land and sea is both lost and remembered in the ceaseless flow of the tides. There is a revelation in the sea’s withdrawing, a renewal in the passing of relationships, and it is the finding of such returns that Wright’s book delivers: a calm, cultured, beguiling – if sometimes unsettling – meditation that will resonate with many, in many different ways. A wonderful and profound book.”

Gerard Loughlin

“Why should the highways and byways of our lives be clearly laid out? Why should our routes and stories be maps that are straightforward to read and decipher? Similarly, why should the boundaries between faith and unbelief be instantly recognizable? The landscapes of longing are not so easily charted or defined.” At a time when public discourse about religion in the West seems convulsed between the sterile poles of certainty and atheism, contemporary spiritual writer Alex Wright dares to lift up doubt — not as the opposite of faith, but rather as the path to its deepest heart and greatest transformative potential. Written in beautiful, elegiac prose, the insights of Exploring Doubt emerge from a searingly personal, yet recognisably universal, story of loss: of a marriage, a beloved home, and the ancient, mutable landscape of Norfolk in which the author’s life was anchored. Instead of pivoting to a sanguine theology of transcendence as a balm, Wright meditates instead on the unceasing change and unknowing that landscape evokes: centuries of coastal lives, the witness of medieval devotion, and the sparkling, ephemeral, yet eternal cycles of the natural world, especially the migratory birds in their homeless flight. This masterful, generous book, richly fed by the wellsprings of both natural and human history, tenderly invites us back to “the places where we have suffered the greatest losses and the most uncertainty” – to flux, doubt, and mystery: all the landscapes our distracted world urges that we avoid – and shows us the brilliant clarity that may paradoxically await us there. Exploring Doubt is a prayer for our time.”

Kimberley C. Patton