Welcome

Welcome to The Faith Between Us dot-com! This will be our first, slightly longwinded, blog post. We hope you enjoy it.

Before we really begin, though, a little history...

Several years ago, when Peter’s wife, Amy, was pregnant with their son, Sam, and Scott was finishing divinity school, we met. We were both writing a lot for online magazines (esp. this one) and small literary journals. Scott was even publishing one. Liking what the other had to say (er, write), we began corresponding and soon became friends.

As new friends do, we talked about music and books and relationships, our families and our backgrounds. Peter had recently become a birder and was taking very slowly to Stephen Malkmus’s first solo release after Pavement broke up. Scott was working on a novel about poor children and, time and time again, failing with women.

Privately, though, Peter was spending afternoons searching for the perfect Jewish prayer book; Scott was teaching the Catholic catechism at his local church. Peter and Amy were beginning to celebrate Shabbat as a family; Scott’s obsession with religious discipline shaped his eating and his sex life and manifested itself in a facial tic. Nervous to be known as believers, we kept quiet. Neither of us said a word. At least not right away...

Slowly it happened, though. Growing more comfortable with each other and asking each other more questions, each of us decided to let things slip.

“What is it you love about birds, Peter?”
“They’re part of creation that fascinates me, blows me away!”

“What are you reading these days, Scott?”
“I can’t put down Dorothy Day’s Long Loneliness. It’s amazing.”

“Why did you go to divinity school, Scott?”
“Probably the same reason you did: to see what belief really means.”

“What was it like when your mother died, Peter?”
“As if God had torn the roof off!”

Finally:
“Do you believe in God?”
“Um, yes.”
“Yeah, me too. Sort of.”

Our book, The Faith Between Us (Bloomsbury, Nov.), is our “coming out” story. It shows how, through our friendship, we've come to have faith in God's creation, which to us means a faith in the world. Placed side by side, with essays alternating one after another, our individual stories are meant to interact, to carry on a conversation of faith like the ones we've had since that day we both, with trepidation, admitted to believing in God.

With the book, we hope to have captured some of the literary beauty and wonder of the religious language we love. The essays draw on entire lives of faith, from our first encounters with God to the ongoing struggles we still face together today, and explore our dealings with love, loss, drugs, sex, food, music—even our neuroses and neuralgias.

We've been telling each other these stories for years now. Our hope is that starting this blog, in appearing in public as faithful friends, we might begin to hear other stories – your stories – and, through our “comments” section, carry on more conversations about belief, disbelief, hope, doubt, and the longing to find the meaning of God.

We’ll use this blog to introduce themes we take up in the book; to talk about articles we read, people we meet, songs we hear, and events we attend; and to share our thoughts about what it might mean to believe.

In his “Foreword” to Faith, Freakonomics author Stephen J. Dubner asks:

“Where are all the sincere, wise, good-hearted people who live each day in quiet pursuit of answers (or perhaps questions) as to how we should live on earth, and to what measure that life should include some sort of God?”

Without taking ourselves too seriously, we hope that this blog can be one of the places where sincere, good-hearted people can gather. We hope you’ll join us.