Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions For the World's Largest Religion

This book was the Christianity Today's book of the year for 2020. The Gospel Coalition also gave it an award in 2019. Someone also mentioned to me that I probably would like this book. As the subtitle of the book says, this spends a chapter on the modern hot button issues in Christianity. You could probably guess most of them. There is a chapter on morality, religion causing violence, women, homosexuals, slavery, suffering, science, hell etc...

Unlike other apologetic books like I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist this defence of the Christian faith wasn't really in the form of a premise, argument, supporting evidence and conclusion. It was more along the lines of Tim Keller's Reason for God or Making Sense of God. It was trying to show that Christianity is satisfactory and fulfilling. There was not much formal philosophy or logic involved, more just common reasoning using some examples and general articles.

I thought the main strength of this book was when it was in the field of sociology, and you can kinda tell by the topics dealt with in this book. I thought it was interesting that the world is going to get more religious, not less over time, due to world demographic data and birth rates. The tone of this book was reasonably gentle. While Christians are probably going to read this, an outsider looking in, probably wouldn't put down this book claiming the author is "arrogant" (usually this is said when an author is overly confident and dismissed other views - sometimes it is valid, sometimes it is said because they don't have a reasoned response to their truth claim).

I thought some of the points in the book could have been hit harder and with more force, but instead, they were kinda mentioned and then moved on. I also found some of the supporting examples were a little anecdotal or based on personal conversations and experiences that were then extrapolated out. (Don't get me wrong there were also footnotes citing studies and articles as well to make their point.) The author was honest in her previous struggles with the topics raised in this book, like women roles and her own same-sex attraction. This was a nice personal element to an apologetic book. In today's climate, individual personal stories can be more convincing to the experiential person.

I didn't think this book was as hard-hitting as other apologetic books, but it was perhaps more personal and engaging. Maybe a little bit of a soft sell in parts. This may not have presented watertight arguments in some areas, but more sparked the imagination about what things might look like if it were true. This book was saying that within the Christian worldview, it is coherent and it has good responses to common objections.