I owe Pete Enns a lot. Reading his books in the years before I hit a faith crisis helped that experience go a lot more smoothly, as did continuing to read his stuff and listen to his podcasts during the process of faith transition.

Around the time this book was coming out, though, I needed a break. I felt like I knew most of his stuff, his media efforts felt like they were getting bigger and more corporate, and as much as I owed him, I wasn’t feeling it anymore. I even wondered what I could possibly get from another book and avoided this one for a while.

In a recent book lull, I saw that the audiobook was short and decided to give it a try. This might now be my favorite of his books—or at least, this is the one that speaks to me where I am now. It picks up on Tillich’s ideas in a more accessible way, it speaks to non-literalism and existential anxiety in a way that I need, and it does a good job of speaking to the way I see Christianity today. He almost lost me in the chapter talking about near-death experiences, but he wasn’t doing it in a weird “heaven is real” kind of way so much as insisting that we have a lot we don’t know about this weird universe we live in. I guess I can get behind that.

Anyway, I liked this enough that I’m planning to get a print copy of my own sometime soon, though I’ll note that his recording his own audiobook (after years of podcasting experience) is a nice touch.

• Curveball
• Peter Enns
• faith crisis
• faith transition
• existential
• non-theism
• Paul Tillich