What better gift to give friends and loved ones than stories of grasping at the impossible?

According to the Los Angeles Review of Books, God in Proof “breathes life back into proofs” and is “entertaining, well written, and historically comprehensive.” Says former Washington Post columnist and peace educator Colman McCarthy, Thank You, Anarchy is “rich with metaphors, historical allusions and clearheaded reflections.”

Buy direct from University of California Press

Use discount code 13M4225 for 20% off the list price

You can also get both books pretty much anywhere else if you ask for them. Try your local bookstore. And don’t forget to share your reaction on Amazon or Goodreads.

Sleigh-bells a-ringing

In the coming months, I’ll be making the following live appearances:

• 12/8, Washington, DC: Center for Inquiry lecture
• 1/15, New York, NY: Rubin Museum screening of Miracle of Weebosch
• 2/16, Pasadena, CA: All Saints Church
• 2/22, San Francisco, CA: The Green Arcade
• 2/24, Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University
• 3/1, Seattle, WA: AWP conference panel: “Doubt Is My Revelation”

Other great gift ideas

• Contribute to the online communities that made these books possible, and which support countless other writers in doing uncommon work—give the gift of membership to Waging Nonviolence, which covers movements for justice and peace around the world, or Killing the Buddha, a literary magazine of religion, politics, and culture. Both are 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations, and membership dues are tax-deductible.
• Last month, The New Press published a new edition of Noam Chomsky’s anarchist writings, On Anarchism, and they asked me to write the introduction. The result is a slim, sweet little stocking-stuffer that presents anarchism as a tradition with both a long history and particular relevance today.
• The growing revival of interest in my favorite theologian, William Stringfellow, continues with a new reader published by Orbis and edited by Bill Wylie-Kellerman. It’s the best introduction yet to a thinker who will turn your cosmic situation upside down.

Thank you, as always, for reading!

The pope is not the church.

It’s going to be very tempting to forget this fact over the next few days. The pundits, Catholic and otherwise, have been rapt in the suspense of awaiting the arrival of Pope Francis. We heard a lot of impossible hopes for who the next pope would be, along with the less thrilling reality of the actual candidates. But Catholics, along with the masses who have been suddenly and momentarily interested in Catholic affairs, should remember that the papacy is not to be confused with the church itself. At no time should this have been more clear than those strange and special few days when the Catholic Church was a people—an assembly, a community, a mystical body—without a pope.

Read the rest at Religion Dispatches.

Greif writes in the moment of a liberal president who has embraced the right’s narrative about abortion (i.e., that it is bad) and a LGBTQ movement that has succumbed to straight culture’s late-capitalist worship of marriage. Abortion is “tragic,” then, and marriage (even the sequence of “serial marriage” that we more likely practice today) is the imprimatur of sexual legitimacy and, worse, the all-in-one fixer of our unbearable anomie. Such compromise, Greif suggests, represents a betrayal of the promise that safe abortion and gay-rights stand to offer.

He prefers to phrase abortion as “freedom” rather than “choice”—the former being a rather more effulgent sensation that is self-justifying and infinitely entitling, as we learned from the last president’s use of the word in foreign affairs. Abortion is good, and we should have lots of it. He imagines public service announcements with children saying, “Thank God my Mom had me when she could afford to care for me.” It is a welcome reminder of how God has so abhorrently and so often been proclaimed an enemy of sensible family planning.

Gay marriage, in turn, “is a preparation for institutions beyond marriage.” Gay sexuality (excepting what he hideously terms “the brief shifting of gravity during the AIDS plague”) represents the future of sexuality writ-large, one not defined by the consequences of childbirth or the institutions of marriage but laid finally open to the vistas of positive probation.

You have to defend sex because we still have no better model than the actual, concrete sexual relation for a deep intuitive process opposed to domination. We have no better model for a bodily process that, fundamentally, is free and universal. It does not produce (there is no experiential remainder but pleasure) nor consume. It is cooperative (within the relation of the lovers) and, in that relation, seems to forbid competition. It makes you love people, and accept the look and difference of their bodies.

Doesn’t such economic logic just turn you on? Most of us have learned some way or another that sex has rather more to do with money than we might prefer to admit. Yet Greif, in his celebratory sexual economy, harbors hope that it actually could be otherwise.

“Sex without consequences” becomes the metaphor for cooperative exchange without gain or loss. For basing life on the things that are free. For the anticapitalist experience par excellence.

The Kreutzer Sonata harbors a quite opposite sexual anthropology. Tolstoy, fresh from his discovery of “original” Christianity, deems sexual appetites and their consummation to be fundamentally base. The story tells of a man driven by lustful jealousy to murdering his wife. Tolstoy meant it as a condemnation of his aristocratic contemporaries, whose doctors prescribed intercourse and whose marriages seemed chronically lost to adultery.

In his reading of Jesus Christ (which meant overlooking a few key biblical texts) Tolstoy found a different kind of ethic, one that sought after a condition of ideally permanent abstinence, seeking “to replace sexual love by the pure relationship of brother and sister.” He cast himself as defender of women who, naturally pure and abhorring sex (or, as Doris Lessing suspects, “Tolstoy was no good in bed”), become lifelong victims to the endless sexual appetites licensed onto their husbands. Though the father of thirteen children himself, the writer preached the mortification of sexual relations in favor of cleaner, better, higher expressions of love for one’s neighbors.

Though more than a century apart, the two offer themselves as the opposing poles to which the sexual side of spiritual utopianisms have eternally rushed. In one, we become great by declaring conquest over our animal urges, sublimating those powers into Promethean accomplishments of progress and benevolence. History—as Tolstoy assumed—drives toward the perfection of chastity, first through the civilized strictures of marriage and then into true celibacy. If we’re to be on the right side of history, we’d best gird our loins for the journey. In the other corner, Greif preaches the gospel of liberation (“New forms, new forms,” as Tolstoy’s friend Chekhov would have a character exclaim), in which finally, now, we are free to touch each other at will and, in the process, even the economic crisis will duly dissolve in the gooey acid of free love.

Marriage, that irrepressible bogeyman which rears its head somehow in human societies across the world over and time immemorial, wins out in neither scenario. Still they venture quixotically in pursuit of it: the more omnipresent an enemy, the higher the ecstasy of its eradication. We unfortunately do live in a time in which marriage is celebrated with such idolatrous fervor that the truth can only be served by getting out our crowbars to smash it (I once found myself in an evangelical service in which all the married people were called to the front, blessed, and then asked to turn to the rest of us and pray that the rest of us might not tarry long before also entering their condition). Yet lowercase marriage is, at least, an arrangement of negotiation, of consolation, of sentimentality, of rest, of compromise, and of choice, things which neither of these mighty authors want to permit us.

I say this as so much an enemy of capitalized Marriage as the next guy: let folks marry, for goodness sake. Or let them live alone, or as brother and sister, or as tireless bachelors, as they must. Let them fuck if also, indeed, they must. And, if they must, let them repress. Let us repress. We can’t have everything, and we hardly have what we need. Clinging to what precious little we find, and being kind to it, may require us to place some limits on ourselves, whether they be on our Tolstoyan ideals or our Greifian liberation. If all other things be in service to our most abstract aesthetics, let our blessed relationships, at least, be as they must be, as they can be, whatever it takes.

As I write, my new phone has just arrived in the mail. Social life returned to me—no less than by the salvific promise of my first iPhone—I will put aside these questions again and, in the sea of anomie, take what buoyant driftwood I can get.

I read your blog on Anselm; quite interesting.
Your name sounds Jewish, and although you said you are Catholic, do you have Jewish ancestry?
What do you know about Rashi, the great rabbi that lived in northern France at the same time as Anselm?

We went on to have a friendly exchange in which he invited me to visit him in Israel and, further, suggested that Anselm might have learned his concept of God from Rashi, the 11th-century Jewish commentator Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki. I was of course suspicious—it reminded me a bit of when my grandfather came home from a class at the synagogue thinking that Kant was a Jew—but it really wouldn’t hurt me to be less ignorant of the history of Jewish thought. Despite a year of Hebrew and a few classes in college, I know painfully little about the intricacies of the faith of my father’s fathers.

Providentially, I caught word that Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize-winning author of Night, has a new little book called, precisely, Rashi. So I found myself a review copy and, in the last few days, got around to reading it.

From the first, I let myself fall happily into Wiesel’s nostalgic mood. He remembers the companionship of Rashi’s text in his childhood (read: before the Holocaust), his ancestor, who it seemed to him then “had been sent to earth primarily to help Jewish children overcome loneliness.” There is nothing sweeter to a scholar’s heart than the thought of little Jewish boys pouring over their ancient books, searching for meaning and a place in life through the scribbles of the sages. As I read, I began jotting notes for a future essay on the meaning of ancestry.

We then descend into a sequence of Rashi’s interpretations, from creation to Joseph. Wiesel shows, line by line, how Rashi pulls open the biblical text, expands it, and exposes it. The tendency of modern interpreters (and those in the thrall of Greek rationalism, from Origen to Hegel), when they don’t quite know what to do with a passage of scripture, is to abstract it, to look outside, and understand it in terms of a foreign logic. (For instance, how one might use evolutionary theory to claim that the six days of creation really each represented millions of years.) But, for someone like Rashi, the interpretation of a text lies in the text itself, to be found between the lines, to be summoned in imagination. One of many examples:

“So Esau returned that day on his way unto Seir.” [That’s the biblical passage.] Rashi wonders why the verb is in the singular. Because he [Esau] was alone. One after the other, the four hundred men who had been with him, deserted him.

It is a wonderful process to follow, and Wiesel delights to guide us through.

As the book goes on, however, it grows darker. Like Wiesel, Rashi lived through a tragic period for European Jews, one full of brutality and suffering at the hands of Christians. And crusades. Rashi, therefore, has reason to be unapologetic in his disdain for the goyim:

A general rule: whenever he can, Rashi chooses passages in the Midrash that can be interpreted as arguments against “the other nations.”

When interpreting biblical stories, he protects the sanctity and holiness of the Israelites whenever possible, even blaming the manufacture of the Golden Calf at Sinai on foreigners among them. Wiesel attempts to qualify:

Rashi believes, following all the Midrashic literature, that the people of Israel live and act at the center of the history of men and of nations. A feeling of superiority? No, of singularity.

He even ends by claiming Rashi for cosmopolitanism:

Furthermore, Rashi taught his disciples to engage in open discussions including polemics with the Christian world.

But of such universalism he offers scant evidence. For the horrors inflicted on Jews—and indeed on Wiesel himself—the outcome is certain knowledge of the community’s righteousness: this, I can’t help but think, is as much a delusion as that which motivated the violence that, in the first place, inspired it.

For my own part, as paternal half-Jew and accidental apostate, I cannot possibly accept the singularity, justified by suffering, of the Jewish people on whose impossible margin my bloodline lies. (Notwithstanding, “If you’re Jewish enough for Hitler,” a childhood friend used to say, “you’re Jewish enough for me.”) It is a lineage I would like to inhabit and claim for my own, but only on the terms of my marginality, even my apostasy, which implies the denial of its basic categories. Despite Wiesel’s qualification, I shudder at his acceptance of Rashi’s formula: the chosen people, rightful denizens of the Holy Land, the bearers of humanity’s divine burden. The warmth, the imagination, the scholarship, yes. But, thanks to the horrible logic of history, it is all a package deal.

Just as Rashi has only good things to say about the people Israel, Wiesel can bring himself to say nothing ungenerous about Rashi. One must admire the gesture of respect for the teacher, for the elder:

it is incumbent on a student to respect his Teacher. To avoid embarrassing him, the student should withhold questions that the Teacher might not be able to answer, and then seek a new Teacher.

That being the case, out of respect for both author and subject, I wish Nextbook and Schocken had, when publishing this slim hardcover and charging $22 for it, bothered to assemble with something more resilient than glue and perfect binding. Sewn signatures, please. When my children’s children discover the book in some dusty attic of the future, and pages fall out like autumn leaves, I can only hope they’re the ones that divide us along uninhabitable lines.

The only explanation that makes any sense, though, is that I actually see them all. My eyes catch every plate that’s convenient to see. They send the signal to some quiet corner of their brain, some place where secrets, if necessary, will be kept. There, the images can be processed. The tri-states are filtered out, as are all others that have not been old homes. When a plate switches the nostalgia subroutine, yes, bing, pow, the plate seen becomes a plate noticed. And I’m overcome by the sense that home isn’t so far away and, hey, maybe this is home too.

My grandfather collected license plates. He’d lived in dozens of places, but by the time I came around, his were mainly from Colorado. Once he gave me one or two, and I loved them. I guess I probably got this funny little license plate brain department from him.

What its leading lights envision is something at once quaint, radical, and practical: end the practice of factory farming that makes misery for animals and pollution for the planet on an enormous scale. They want to encourage a gentler, more sustainable kind of animal agriculture, one carried out by family farmers who live on their land and take pride in their animals. And they’ve got help.

In the article I explore the sensation of being around do-gooding celebrities, what they can do for animals, what Farm Forward means for the animal welfare movement.

I’ve been actually quite inspired by Aaron’s work—both his advocacy at Farm Forward and his scholarship in the religious studies department of UC Santa Barbara, where we met. Conversations with him and with Bryan Farrell, who joined me at the event, have actually been leaning me toward a very modest inclination to veganism. Well, to be honest, the people really pushing me there are my mother and uncle. Stay tuned (perhaps for a long time) for their fantastic upcoming cookbook. If there’s any desire, maybe I’ll start posting recipes from it on the blog! Let me know.

• tourist drum circles
• roosters, 24 hours
• rapping hammers of construction workers
• blasting ranchera music from one place or another
• children
• dogs barking
• a crying animal that has lost a fight
• the loudspeakers of the water delivery trucks
• engines of cars and trucks and motorcycles of all ages and conditions
• bird tweets
• announcements through unintelligible loudspeakers
• unexplainable loud booms
• noisy chains dragged behind the gas delivery trucks
• church bells (fireworks may be imminent)
• fireworks during holidays, large and small, day and night

I don’t make it seem to sound overly noisy. Look up to the stars at night and everything seems to fall silent. Goodbye, city!

Now, debates about population have taken off in new directions. They have been reconfigured to fit into two timelier culture-war boxes: climate change and the family. Often with Ehrlich in hand, environmentalists fear that the human population has reached unsustainable levels; if we were all to have an acceptable standard of living, the draw on Earth’s natural resources would be far too great. Unfortunately, since most of the world’s demographic growth is happening in the poorer countries and wealthier countries tend to have very low fertility rates, this often means that affluent activists are in the position of telling destitute others not to reproduce so much. On the other side, social conservatives see those falling first-world populations as a harbinger of demographic doom, often to the extent of sounding like a klaxon call for the rescue of the white, Christian race. More to the point, they believe that the answer lies in the nuclear, stay-at-home-mom family with piles of kids. They construe the social science to insist that this is how people should live or else pay for it with the consequences.

After walking through the ruins of a Mayan city here in Mexico, which many believe fell into decline for demographic reasons, I’ve been thinking about how this contemporary debate is shaping up. For the moment, I’ve found that quite a bit has already been said. Here is some of it. Let’s keep an eye out for stones still unturned.

• “Missing: The ‘Right’ Babies” – An article from The Nation in February of this year. Mainly a mudraking expose of the religious organizations trying to push the family agenda through demographic data, particularly with an eye to Europe. Includes a good catalog of the players and why they are offensive to political correctness, though offers no robust alternatives.
• “The Demographic Winter and the Barren Left” – A response to the Nation article above by Steven Mosher, who was mentioned in it. Criticizes “Missing” for being afraid of the demographic data.
• Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population – Columbia historian Matthew Connelly explores the ill effects of attempts to control the world population; “uncovers the cost inflicted by a humanitarian movement gone terribly awry and urges renewed commitment to the reproductive rights of all people.” An important tool for self-criticism on the left. (NYRB review here.)
• “Faith Equals Fertility” – A short and not really conclusive piece from Intelligent Life, but it raises the interesting question of whether larger families actually cause more religiosity.
• “Under the Spell of Malthus” – A critical review of Jared Diamond’s Collapse, which powerfully argues that population biology is at the root of civilizations’ extinctions.
• Demographic Winter – Saved the best for last. A very slick documentary from earlier this year produced by a Mormon team that is the Inconvenient Truth of the pro-family movement’s demographics wing. Odd, though, to speak of “the decline of the human family” at a time when the world population is growing faster than ever before.

But despite the horrid memories that these words evoke, something else lurks at the bottom of most of the pages. There are little boxes with tiny text. Some mention the features and benefits of Cable pianos. Others simply offer moral, upbuilding quotations from notable people. It is as if righteousness were so appealing to the people of 1922 that there was no better way to attract their attention.

Take the box under “Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground,” a song written by a white man about slaves wailing over the death of the person who claimed to own them:

Courtesy is the eye which overlooks your friend’s broken gateway, but sees the rose which blossoms in his garden.

Today I had lunch with a friend sorely concerned about the direction of the social order and the family and so on. Afterward, looking around the city, it was hard to blame him. Especially as far as little things go, which hint toward things more troubling. Hearing guards at the magnificent 42nd Street library saying bad words nonchalantly to each other while checking the bags of tourists; similarly bad words scrawled along the pedestrian path on the Williamsburg Bridge, which always has families walking on it; a condom lying in the stairwell of my apartment building. When one turns off the blinders that one develops living in New York, these things really can add up. What kind of world are we creating? Certainly not one that says, as The Cable Company does:

Music washes away from the soul the dust of every-day life.

The beautiful is nothing else than the visible from of the good.—Plato.

Be not simply good—be good for something.—Thoreau.

Soldiers remember—”He that ruleth his spirit” is greater “than he that taketh a city.”—<em>Prov. 16: 32</em>.

These are fabulous. I could go on forever. There are many more. And of course, stuff like this is mixed in:

Economy in buying a piano consists in getting the best instrument that can be made for the price you pay. You expect to receive the full equivalent of your money. That principle is the basis of our selling policy.

Today, rather than upbuilding quotations, advertisers attract our attention with boobies and innuendos. (The demise of this form of advertising, which treats the buyer as a rational, essentially decent person and replaces “him” with a base, id-driven subconscious, is the subject of part one of Adam Curtis’s documentary The Century of the Self.) I am tempted to agree with my friend—the world has gone to, dare I say on what has always been a blog you can bring the whole family to, shit.

But every time I go back to my favorite Stephen Foster songs in there, I’ll remember, “Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground.” Those were days when, in this same country as mine, people couldn’t stand to share a drinking fountain. It is an odd kind of decency, a broken gateway that’s hard to ignore on the way to the blossoming rose.

Human societies seem to work this way. Where there’s righteousness, there’s a cruelty it ignores. And where there’s filth, at least we have music to wash our souls of it.

For the last few months I’ve been playing around with this article for a popular (and rather self-helpy) religion website. The editor has stopped returning my messages, so I figure the deal is dead (this happens sometimes). So I sez to myself, why not share it with my Row Boat friends? It is more of a friend-thing anyway.

According to a 2008 study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, almost half of Americans claim a different religious affiliation from the one with which they were born. Today’s world is a bustling marketplace of spiritualities that compete for our attention and our faith. For many people, the toughest questions arise during the volatile teenage years.

I know about this first-hand. Starting when I was seventeen, questioning hit me like a tidal wave. Within a year I had signed up for a new religion and explored several others: flabbergasting my father, running circles round my mother, and saddening my grandparents. All the while, I was so immersed in my journey that only later could I stop to realize what all their fuss was about. And wonder if maybe they had been right.

Looking back on those years, I am amazed by my family’s lessons in love and openness. We made it through all right. These ten suggestions come straight from my parents’ and grandparents’ quivers. I hope what I learned from them can help transform this challenging experience into an opportunity for you and your family to grow.

1. Remember That Questioning Is Natural

You and your child are not alone. Teenagers in particular are ripe for exploring new ways of being, and during that time almost everyone begins questioning vital assumptions. Venturing into unknown territories, as questioning forces us to do, is a valuable and necessary part of growing up. When I began my exploring, it came like a force of nature, restless and resolute. As time passed and my curiosity became satisfied, the restlessness quieted down.

Whatever you do, she or he will probably question. Try to swim with this inevitable tide rather than against it.

2. Trust Your Child

I began my questioning just before moving away for college. As I look back on it, doing so was inseparable from moving away from home, making a new life, and the rest of it. Recognizing that, my parents left the decision up to me as an adult, even if I didn’t always act like one. As they soon realized, I was off on my own and they didn’t have much choice.

Learning to trust the person who has trusted in you so completely is not an easy reversal. But by questioning his or her faith, your child is declaring independence. You are still the parent, entitled to trust and respect from your child. Increasingly, however, there are limits to what you can control.

3. Don’t Feel Betrayed

Though it might seem otherwise, his or her reasons for questioning your faith may have nothing at all to do with you. Resist the temptation to take doubting personally. Whether it is about you or not, trust means letting go of feelings of guilt or betrayal. When my Jewish grandparents learned that I was going to be baptized, they felt as if I was rejecting them. Learning of this, I was completely surprised. Like most teenagers, I was so absorbed in myself that how others might react didn’t occur to me.

Soon after, when my grandmother was near death and unable to speak, I sat by her bed and tried to explain through my tears. I didn’t mean to do anything to hurt her, I tried to explain, however it might have looked.

4. Assume the Best of Your Child’s Instincts

Recognize that, even if you believe he or she is making a mistake by doubting, there are good instincts and desires behind the doubts. Probing questions about faith usually arise, deep down, out of a desire to address life’s most important questions for oneself and to be part of a supportive community.

In our conversations during that time, my parents focused on these aspects of what I was doing, the ones they could understand. My mother, for instance, assured me she was glad that I had undertaken a spiritual path at all rather than ignoring that part of life completely. She was always eager to meet my new friends and, for the most part, she liked them.

5. Ask Questions and Listen Carefully

Believing in someone’s good intentions makes it much easier to listen. Ask questions about his or her doubts and listen carefully, trying not to let your own ways of seeing the world lead you to misinterpret theirs. Not having your experience to draw on, your child probably thinks about faith in surprisingly different ways than you do.

I wanted so much to have everything figured out, and I wanted to be listened to. My mother and my aunt were particularly good at asking and asking and asking, as if there was real value in what I was saying. Doing so helped me trust them and, in turn, listen to what they thought about it all.

6. Be Open About Your Experience

One summer while I was in college, my father and I went on a road trip for a few days in our home state of Virginia, making up the route as we went. Along the way, we passed the headquarters of a famous psychic and decided to stop for a while. When he was younger, I learned, my father had been attracted to people like this. As we spent an afternoon going through the exhibits and testing our ESP, he told me about his explorations. It all seemed wacky to me, but also familiar. It became harder to assume that my father didn’t understand what I was going through.

Be open about your own encounters with faith and doubt. Rather than treating such exploring as wrong or strange, recognize that it is an inevitable part of life. For both you and your child, recalling what you have been through will make questioning seem less threatening.

7. Draw Lines

This is what many parents think to do right off the bat, but it works better if you try these first six suggestions first. Inevitably there are genuine dangers that your child can wander into without knowing it-drug use, violence, and commitments that are hard to escape. My father was particularly worried that I would enter a monastery for life and end up regretting it. Not an unreasonable concern at the time! The night after he came to see me baptized, showing in every other way his patient support, he insisted that I not take that extra step and explained, based on all he knew, why.

I listened to him only because he had trusted me this far. He had earned the right to make demands. I cooled it about monasticism and am glad I did.

8. Don’t Expect to Get Through It Alone

Chances are, no matter how much you know about your faith, you don’t have all the answers your child is looking for. As teenagers learn to think for themselves, advice from parents tends to be the last thing they want. Offer what help you can, but don’t assume that it will be enough.

Gently encourage your child to find trustworthy adult mentors and friends their age who they can bring their questions to, especially questions they might be uncomfortable bringing to you. Don’t demand reports from others, but respect your child’s right to a confidential ear.

In many respects, my parents were spectators. Among the most decisive people during those years were a college chaplain, an uncle, and a handful of friends who would to stay up all night talking in the dorms. All my life I had been hearing from my parents. This was my big chance to learn what others could teach me.

9. Be Willing To Learn

After my grandmother died, my grandfather, who had never been very religious, began attending synagogue. All of a sudden, he was delving into the most basic spiritual questions just like I was. Even though the traditions we probed were different, we had much to share with each other over cross-country phone calls. After coming home from an exciting Bible study, he would call and tell me about it. Seeing him as a fellow-traveler in this way made me begin to wonder if I had been too quick in writing off the traditions I had inherited. Both of my parents also evolved in their relationships to spirituality during that time, and they shared the experience with me as they did.

Without getting too much in the way, treat your child’s questioning as something you do together. His or her doubts can be an opportunity for you to broaden your mind and your faith as well. Try to sympathize with the doubts and wrestle with them as if they were your own. You might find that, in fact, they are.

10. Be Patient

Monica, the mother of the 4th century North African Augustine of Hippo, was a model of parental patience. She waited for decades as her son sampled philosophies and religions before finally becoming, as she was, a Christian. Later, in his Confessions, he celebrates her loving endurance and her trust in him. Whether or not he had finally adopted her faith, she would remain a saint in her own right for these things.

A few years ago, without planning it, I found myself on the same cliff in Tunisia where Monica had stood to watch her son depart for Italy. While he was away, just when she thought she had lost him for good, he ended up finding the faith he was looking for. Standing at that spot, I was filled with gratitude for my family’s patience. As time passes, I try to listen to all of them as best I can, carrying on in myself the faith each had shared with me and had in me.