At Crandall University, we take great pride in our faculty and their continued successes in academia, and we are always eager to share when a member of our faculty releases a new publication. This fall saw the October release of Prof. John G. Stackhouse Jr.’s latest book, Can I Believe: Christianity for the Hesitant.

Published by Oxford University Press, Can I Believe discusses the Christian Story provocatively for believers and inquirers alike, and it attempts to deal with a number of important questions at the root of Christianity. “I earlier envisioned a book that would set up all the hard questions I could think of and then knock them all down,” said Dr. Stackhouse. “But I realized eventually that that wasn’t what I ought to do.”

He instead endeavored to tackle some of the most basic questions:

• By what path would someone come to a responsible conclusion about religion in a world of bewildering options?
• What is the essential and actual teaching of Christianity, free of cultural stereotypes and bad church lore?
• Why do two billion people find this unlikely story to be the best way to explain God, the universe, and everything?
• How do reasonable Christians deal with the two most common objections to Christianity: its insistence on Jesus being the only way to God, and its trust in God in the face of abundant and terrible evil?

Can I Believe is by no means Stackhouse’s first book (it’s his tenth), but this entry is different from his others in its target audience: “I have wanted to write a ‘general apologetic’ that I could give to interested friends and family,” he recounted, “but I didn’t have quite the right book at hand for acquaintances who were fairly sophisticated readers.” So, he set out to write a book that would “truly connect with the intelligent reader who is interested enough in Christianity to read a whole book about it and who expects to be met at his or her level of cultural awareness.”

Hans Halvorson, Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, says this: “John Stackhouse offers a refreshing combination of intellectual rigor and personal courtesy, conceptual clarity where possible and commendable humility at the limits of our understanding. We all live at the nexus of knowledge, faith, doubt, and decision. John Stackhouse provides for us an
invaluable guidebook to that vexed territory.”

Congratulations to Dr. Stackhouse on this latest book. If you’re interested in reading Can I Believe, it can be found at the Crandall Bookstore as well as other major book retailers.

Crandall University is Atlantic Canada’s leading Liberal Arts university rooted in the Christian faith, offering undergraduate degrees in Arts, Science, Business Administration, Organizational Management and Education, and Graduate degrees in Education and Management. For more information, visit https://www.crandallu.ca/ or call 1-888-968-6228.