Readers approaching Flannery O'Connor's work without knowledge of her Catholicism may find little evidence of it in her fiction. Yet readers who come to O'Connor's work with a prior awareness of her faith (as evidenced, for example, in her essays and correspondence) believe that her Catholicism suffuses every sentence of her fictional canon. Writing against God explores the difficulty of reconciling O'Connor's private and public insistence on the importance of Catholicism in her work with the fiction her readers encounter on the printed page. O'Connor's linguistic choices often move her fiction out of her control, producing a message in conflict with the one she stated she intended. Through a detailed examination of O'Connor's language in her two novels and in short stories that span her career, McMullen exposes a pervasive spiritual environment often in opposition to the Roman Catholic tenets O'Connor professed. Blending a reader-response approach with linguistic analysis, Writing against God offers explanations for the mysteries surrounding and the mysteries within O'Connor's fiction.

This book helps to ask questions about God no matter what you believe. Who is God? Where do I go when I die? Is God even real? This book answers none of these questions, but it asks them all! It is a thoughtful book that enforces no views but stresses the importance of a healthy dialogue, curiosity, love, and wonder.

What you believe about God sets the foundation of the person you will become. In God Has a Name, pastor and New York Times bestselling author John Mark Comer invites you to rethink many of the prevalent myths and misconceptions about God and weigh them against what God actually tells us about himself. After all, what you believe about God will ultimately shape the type of person you become. We all live at the mercy of our ideas, and nowhere is this more true than our ideas about God. The problem is many of our ideas about God are wrong. Not all wrong, but wrong enough to form our souls in detrimental and disheartening ways. God Has a Name is a simple yet profound guide to understanding God in a new light--focusing on what God says about himself in the Bible. This one shift has the potential to radically alter how you relate to God, not as a doctrine, but as a relational being who responds to you in an elastic, back-and-forth way. John Mark Comer takes you line by line through Exodus 34:6-8--Yahweh's self-revelation on Mount Sinai, one of the most quoted passages in the Bible. Along the way, Comer addresses some of the most profound questions he came across as he studied these noted lines in Exodus, including: Why do we feel this gap between us and God? Could it be that a lot of what we think about God is wrong? Not all wrong, but wrong enough to mess up how we relate to him? What if our "God" is really a projection of our own identity, ideas, and desires? What if the real God is different, but far better than we could ever imagine? No matter where you are in your spiritual journey, God Has a Name invites you to step into a fresh and biblically rooted vision of who God is that has the potential to alter your life with God and shape who you become.

A Passionate, Profoundly Funny First Novel from "the Best Literary Critic of His Generation" (Adam Begley, Financial Times) Thomas Bunting, the charming, chaotic, and deeply untruthful narrator of James Wood's wonderful first novel, is in despair. His marriage is disintegrating and his academic career is in ruins: instead of completing his philosophy Ph.D. (still unfinished after seven years), he is secretly writing what he hopes will be his masterwork, a vast atheistic project he has privately entitled "The Book Against God." But when his father suddenly falls ill, Thomas returns to the tiny village in the north of England where he grew up and where his father still works as a parish priest. There, Thomas hopes, he may finally be able to communicate honestly with his father, a brilliant and formidable Christian example, and sort out his own wayward life. But Thomas is a chronic liar as well as an atheist, and he finds, instead, that once at home he soon reverts to the evasive patterns of his childhood years—with disastrous results. The story of a husband and wife, a father and son, faith and disbelief, and a hero who couldn't tell the truth if his life depended on it, The Book Against God is at once hilarious and poignant; it introduces an original comic voice—edgy, elegiac, lyrical, and indignant—and, in the irrepressible Thomas Bunting, one of the strangest philosophers in contemporary fiction.

A discussion of more than twenty leading writers who challenged God, exploring the nature of their quarrel with God and how it takes shape in their work.

Christopher Hitchens, described in the London Observer as “one of the most prolific, as well as brilliant, journalists of our time” takes on his biggest subject yet–the increasingly dangerous role of religion in the world. In the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris’s recent bestseller, The End Of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope’s awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix.

"A devastating attack upon the dominance of atheism in science today." Giovanni Fazio, Senior Physicist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics The debate over the ultimate source of truth in our world often pits science against faith. In fact, some high-profile scientists today would have us abandon God entirely as a source of truth about the universe. In this book, two professional astronomers push back against this notion, arguing that the science of today is not in a position to pronounce on the existence of God—rather, our notion of truth must include both the physical and spiritual domains. Incorporating excerpts from a letter written in 1615 by famed astronomer Galileo Galilei, the authors explore the relationship between science and faith, critiquing atheistic and secular understandings of science while reminding believers that science is an important source of truth about the physical world that God created.