f2PointEight

Recently, a friend posted in the group chat and asked if anyone could recommend any good books on Christian apologetics.

It was a sincere question. There was no edge to it, just the familiar posture of someone who wants to think well about what they believe. It was the sort of question that once would have drawn me out immediately. Titles would have come to mind without effort, arguments neatly arranged behind them, each book occupying its place in a mental library built over years of listening, reading, and learning how to defend what I believed.

This time, I didn’t reply in the group. I sent him a private message instead because apologetics has always functioned on the assumption that the work of thinking begins with finding the right arguments. It thrives on the belief that faith is something to be defended, objections anticipated and met before they can gather force. It belongs, almost instinctively, to spaces where belief is performed as much as it is examined.

I paused longer than I expected. Not because I couldn’t think of names. I could. I spent my early twenties immersed in them. I knew the canon by heart. What slowed me down was the recognition that what I wanted to say didn’t belong in that space, and perhaps couldn’t be said there at all.

Continued on Substack. Click here to read the rest…