CHOOSING THE ARENA: When I was confirmed in the Catholic Church, there were lots of things in Church teaching that I struggled with. And that’s true today, too. The Magisterium surprises, guides, and provokes my intellect (that’s one of the points I make in my most recent column for the Register), but on some issues it also baffles or frustrates me.

And so I sympathize with people who want to get everything nailed down (so to speak…) before committing to a particular institution or vision of the world. But I think they are destined to be disappointed, and are cutting themselves off from a rejuvenating source of challenge and surprise. If you are considering whether you should accept Christ, I would not advise waiting until all your questions are answered–you’ll be waiting a good long time. No matter what worldview you accept, you will be faced with that worldview’s characteristic tensions and hard questions; we tend to only notice those tensions when the worldview has a name, like “Christianity,” and ignore the tensions and tough questions inherent in the various varieties of agnosticism, for example. I entered the Church because I was convinced that this was the arena in which I should fight; this was the framework that posed the questions I needed to answer; this was the compass by which I could guide my life, even if I need to do an endless amount of “faith seeking understanding” in order to understand why the compass points the way it does. To wait until I had all the answers before entering the Church would be to accept a vision of Church membership and Christian life that precludes questioning–why would I do that? It is neither Biblical (cf. Abraham, Job) nor philosophically attractive.