Asking: Inquirers in Conversation

Too much communication in the world of religion is one-way: from clergy to lay persons who, if ever respectfully engaged, would become serious inquirers. The most desirable means of effective engagement is the give-and-take method of eliciting and clarifying questions and then drawing the questioner into the answering process. That, combined with the intellectual rigor of Enlightenment thinking in the formation of beliefs, will go a long way toward making contemporary religion a here-and-now enterprise, thus saving it from hopeless irrelevance.

Harry T. Cook is an Episcopal priest whose primary area of research is first century CE texts of both Jewish and early Christian origins. He is the author of Christianity Beyond Creeds: Making Religion Believable for Today and Tomorrow (1997); Sermons of A Devoted Heretic: A Priest Offers Messages of Hope to Faithful Doubters (1999); Seven Sayings of Jesus: How One Man's Words Can Change Your World (2001); Findings: Lectionary Research and Analysis, Commentary on the Sunday Gospel Readings (2003); and A Life Of Courage: Rabbi Sherwin Wine and Humanistic Judaism with Dan Chon-Sherbok and Marilyn Rowens (2003).