Kimberley C. Patton

Exploring Doubt

Christian Living

“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.”