The Faith of the Millions (2nd Series)

George Tyrrell was a Jesuit priest who asked questions the Church did not want answered, and this collection of essays reveals why his work still matters. Written during the height of the Catholic modernist crisis at the turn of the twentieth century, these pieces wrestle with the tension between institutional religion and the living faith of ordinary believers. Tyrrell turns to the fourteenth-century mystic Mother Juliana of Norwich, whose radical visions of divine love and mercy he uses to interrogate the arid orthodoxy of his own day. The result is a book that refuses to let readers settle into comfortable certainty. These essays argue that faith must breathe, must struggle, must grapple with doubt or it becomes something less than belief. Tyrrell writes for those who have ever felt that the God they seek is larger than the doctrines that contain Him. His spiritual writings possess the rare quality of intellectual honesty married to genuine longing. They endure because the questions he asked about the relationship between institutional religion and personal experience of the sacred remain unanswered.