Challenging and Inspiring

Robert Klitgaard makes a tantalizing promise: to blow open mental doors shut tight by muck, offering fresh ideas about how to live life well and fully. Starting with Annie Dillard’s wonderful reflection on the rich diversity behind assumed values, Klitgaard guides us through an array of intellectual, moral, and spiritual challenges, some engaging and some tough, that are bound to set minds and hearts in motion.

--Katherine Marshall, Georgetown University

In this readable and rewarding collection, Robert Klitgaard gathers diverse thinkers—historians, philosophers, artists, scientists—to answer the most demanding questions of human experience through serious engagement with the Christian religion. The essays collected here are not apologetics in any flat or formal sense. Rather, they are serious and critical reflections that recognize Christianity as a complex, living, inspiring, and sometimes troubling tradition, and which persuasively invite their reader to do the same..

--Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals, Harvard Divinity School; Minister of Harvard Memorial Church

The great Wordsworth wrote of Imagination as Reason “in her most exalted mood.” Robert Klitgaard’s judicious and sagacious collection and commentary of texts fires the imagination and challenges the intellect. There is much to reflect upon in these pages: perfect for an inquiring spirit of any age!

--Douglas Hedley, Professor of the Philosophy of Religion, University of Cambridge

Many young people feel there is an incompatibility between faith and reason, and so they must choose between the two. In Christianity for Young Intellectuals, Robert Klitgaard masterfully shreds this notion, showing that religion and the intellect not only can co-exist; they are incomplete without each other.

--Arhtur C. Brooks, Harvard University and #1 New York Times bestselling author.

I had a wonderful time reading this much needed book for Christians intellectuals and for intellectuals, young or old, who are attracted to Christianity but have stopped short of crossing the threshold of faith.

—George Varghese, Postel Professor of Computer Science at UCLA and member of the Internet Hall of Fame

Are you young, smart, successful in much that you do and yet have a deep sense that your education, vocation, and relationships still leave a void? If so, then Christianity for Young Intellectuals is a quick yet profound investigation by some of the world’s great intellectuals, who found hope in looking deeper into this peace-filled story of Jesus.

—Jack Jackson, President, Foundation for Evangelism

A must-read for anyone curious about the deeper questions of science, philosophy, and faith. Klitgaard’s talent for weaving together bold and reflective narratives from historical and modern thought makes this book a compelling invitation to rethink Christianity’s relevance in today’s intellectual landscape. A call to action for young thinkers to re-examine their beliefs.

—Zachary Swanson, Ph.D. candidate in Psychology, Claremont Graduate University

Christianity for Young Intellectuals took me aback. Much of what passes for apologetic material these days is clear and straight-forward but bland and two-dimensional. The essays in this book, however, expand the apologetic to include voices critical of the faith and others that suggest a literary, artistic approach to faith. The final essay, written by Paul Kingsnorth, is worth the price of admission. I challenge the reader to hold off reading it until the end of the book.

—Rick Mattson, Evangelist/Apologist, InterVarsity, 

Christianity for Young Intellectuals: is the challenge, provocation, and practicality that you didn’t find in Sunday school classes or preacher sermons, and won’t find in Christianity as it’s presented by mass media. 

An intellectual's Christianity is not filled with comfortable certainties, but the complexities that fill every aspect of an intellectual’s life. These are exercises for a nuanced, adult engagement with one of history’s most influential belief systems.

—Michael Muthukrishna, London School of Economics and author of A Theory of Everyone