People Who've Read It

I'm beginning to get the first emails from people who have actually read "The Conservative Soul." Here's one person's response:

"I am a 19 year-old East Mediterranean history student studying at Birmingham University in the UK.

The last book I read before yours was 'The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins. In it, Dawkins lumps all religious people together - fundementalists, conservatives and liberals. This was a view I wholeheartedly shared. As far as I was concerned, religion was all utter nonsense from beginning to end.

Your book, whilst not converting me, has opened my eyes. Your reasonable, practical and undogmatic faith seems to me a far more accurate reflection of the faith most people hold. I may not agree with you that God exists, but your nuanced reasoning and humanistic approach to your faith has done much to open my eyes with regards the plurality of opinion within the religious world. And I do agree with you that the fight back against all types of fundementalist religion will come principally from liberal and secular religious people like yourself, not militant atheists like Dawkins. All Dawkins wil succeed in doing, it seems to me, is throw more petrol onto the fire."

The book is in some central respects an attempt to describe a non-fundamentalist Christianity for our fundamentalist times. Far from being an attack on faith, it's a defense of it - against the arguments of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Check out some other actual reader reviews at Amazon here.