text: "The Case for Faith" is the weakest volume in a strong series. 
  
  Strobel's format is fun and engaging. I find his books as "un-put-downable" as any blockbuster page-turner. 
  
  Strobel holds a degree from Yale Law School, and he was an award-winning legal editor at the Chicago Tribune. He begins with a question: "Does historical evidence support the historicity of Jesus? Does current science support the existence of a creator God? Does it make sense to have faith in God?" and then travels North America, interviewing acknowledged, academic experts on the question at hand. 
  
  Some rather shrill and not entirely rational attacks on the web  protest: "But, Strobel's books aren't fair, because he only presents one side!" Perhaps these individuals missed the titles of these books, titles that appear quite prominently on the covers of the books. The first three words of each title is, "The  Case for..." No, Strobel is NOT presenting the case *against* his topic; he doesn't represent himself as doing so. Our Christophobic media and academia presents that case relentlessly; why should Strobel waste paper and time doing that, when that is obviously not what he purports to be doing? 
  
  Strobel's accounts of his interviews of the experts are always reader-friendly, but he never talks down to his reader. If you don't want to wade through the all too often alienating prose of too much academic writing, but want to get to the nub of the issue, Strobel is your man.
  
  These techniques worked excellently in "The Case for a Creator" and "The Case for Christ," but less well in "The Case for Faith."
  
  There are three remarkably strong episodes in the book; these episodes highlight what the rest of the book lacks. 
  
  In the introduction, Strobel interviews Canadian evangelist turned atheist Charles Templeton. Templeton presents a righteous, enraged case *against* God, and then, tearfully, admits how much he continues to adore Jesus, and, indeed, to miss him. This wrenching passage masterfully captures the dilemma of many who have a love-hate relationship with their creator.
  
  In a few brief pages that serve as coda to Chapter One, which  addresses the question of suffering, Strobel's friend Marc Harrienger talks about his own pain when his wife ran over their child with the family car. This very brief account is testimony to the power of faith, even in the face of profound suffering. 
  
  In another brief passage, Strobel tells of his friend Ron Bronski, who went from being a vicious criminal to being a Christian minister. 
  
  These highly personal passages are what I will remember best from this book; they were the most rewarding to read. 
  
  The formal interviews with the experts didn't do a lot for me, and some were alienating. Norman Geisler's treatment of the slaughter of the Amalakites alienated me with its coldness and divorce from human concerns. It may be true that in war, children are killed with their adults -- when the US bombed German and Japanese cities during WW II we killed children as well as adults -- but any attempt to address such killings would have to be delivered with more compassion than Geisler manages to convey. Too, there is doubt, if not complete disbelief, among archaeologists as to whether these wars of conquest ever took place (see Israel Finkelstein.) 
  
  The chapter entitled "Church History Is Littered with Oppression and Violence" was especially weak, compared to other treatments of the same material. Strobel's treatment of the witch trials could have been improved with insights from Lyndal Roper's work. Strobel doesn't handle understandings of Nazism as a Christian phenomenon well at all.
  
  The insistence that Nazism was a Christian phenomenon is revisionist and divorced from historical fact, and that should be made immediately clear as day in any discussion of the matter. Nazism was a Pagan and a Scientific phenomenon. The pagan swastika was to replace the Christian cross. Scientific approaches to what constitutes life worthy of life was to replace "weak" Christian ideas about humanity's unity as God's children and the value of all life. 
  
  This is not made clear enough in Strobel's account. 
  
  All in all, I have to say I've encountered better treatments of the question of faith in other books ... and yet, Strobel is such a good writer, and his technique is so engaging, that you could do worse than to read this book. Read the other two books in the series first, though.
  