Why believe?

I was recently asked to serve my parish's bookstore ministry by writing a blurb in the church's monthly email newsletter in hopes of driving more foot traffic to the store after Liturgy on Sundays. For my inaugural effort, I did a high-level overview of Fr Andrew Stephen Damick's Orthodoxy & Heterodoxy: Finding the Way to Christ in a Complicated Religious Landscape. My "hook" was an assertion that Orthodox Christians in the deeply pluralistic West bear the burden of 1 Peter 3:15 much more heavily than do their brothers and sisters in historically Orthodox lands, and even more heavily than other Western Christians due to the rather exclusive nature of Orthodox historical claims. "Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you," urges the Apostle Peter to his readers. I've gotten to thinking in the days since writing the above blurb about how I might answer if thusly called to account, and this post is an effort to flesh out that account prior to being put on the spot. And frankly, I am prone to calling myself to account on a semi-frequent basis, so what follows is something of how I tend to answer the challenge.

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