In response to Jay Goldmintz's query on resources on faith and doubt, I find education professor Peter Elbow's idea of a "believing game" and a "doubting game" to be interesting food for thought.
He writes that "What especially interests me in true methodological doubting is not just the need for act of intellect, but also an act of effort or will. No one can make me doubt something I want to believe (for example, the efficacy of freewriting). It won’t happen unless I actually try. The good news is that we’ve built a culture of critical thinking--at least in the academy--that makes me feel that I’m not thinking carefully unless I do try to doubt what I want to believe. This is good. My argument is that we need to build a richer culture of rationality--richer than mere doubting or critical thinking--so that people will feel that they are not thinking carefully unless they try to believe ideas they don’t want to believe."
You can read the whole piece here: [
scholarworks.umass.edu]
Jeffrey Kobrin
