Loconte quotes a wonderful passage from C. S. Lewis, often quoted but worth hearing yet again: “Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off … is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.”

Book Review of:  The Searchers: A Quest for Faith in the Valley of Doubt; Author:  Joseph Loconte; Publisher:  Thomas Nelson; Release Date:  June 5, 2012; Pages:  240; Price:  $14.74

Forty-five years ago in a college English class, the professor was talking about literary genius. To illustrate a point, he told us about the poet John Keats’s notion of “negative capability,” which Keats had described in a letter to his brothers George and Tom: “at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason …”  

A student asked the professor for an example of the opposite of negative capability. The professor answered without hesitation: “Religious beliefs.” He smiled. It was 1967, and we all knew that religion was fading away.  

A lot has changed in the years since that classroom discussion. English professors don’t talk so much about genius nowadays, let alone Men of Achievement. Religion, it turns out, hasn’t faded away. But misconceptions about faith persist—especially the notion that religious belief functions primarily as a refuge for people who are desperately trying to escape from reality, from the dazzling and sometimes unsettling multiplicity of human existence, from uncertainty and change.  

In The Searchers: A Quest for Faith in the Valley of Doubt (Thomas Nelson), Joseph Loconte gives a very different account of Christian faith—not at all contemptuous of “fact and reason” but grounded in mystery, holding opposing truths in tension, alert to the limits of our knowledge but unhesitatingly affirming the hope that we share. This is a good book to give to someone who is looking at faith from the outside, but it will also be helpful to believers who have been led to expect tidy answers and neat resolutions and have come up hard against disappointment, absurdity, and loss.  

Loconte, who teaches at the King’s College in New York City, is best known for his commentary on foreign affairs and public policy, published over the years in The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, and many other outlets. He is a tough-minded observer, as you might gather from the title of a book he edited several years ago, The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler’s Gathering Storm, wherein he gathered pieces written by Christian leaders who argued against the United States’ involvement in the “European war” and juxtaposed them with pieces by Reinhold Niebuhr and others calling for the United States to engage.  

Grappling with Mystery  

The Searchers is a very different proposition. Here, Loconte’s point of departure is one of the most striking passages in the Gospels, the conversation on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35), quoted in full at the outset. From this episode, several recurring themes in the book unfold. The two followers of Jesus walking together toward Emmaus—disheartened by his death on the cross, hopeful yet confused by reports that he is alive—stand for all of us, grappling with a world in which so much is clearly awry.    Loconte is uncompromising in his accounts of the ways in which faith itself is so often perverted, from the tortures of the Inquisition to the deadly toll of Islamic radicals.  

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