The Mind on Fire: A Faith for the Skeptical and Indifferent

Blaise Pascal the remarkable seventeenth-century mathematician physicist and religious thinker rigorously refutes the belief that to become a Christian you must first commit intellectual suicide. He wrote to communicate the Christian faith to the skeptical to the indifferent to the hostile. Many regard him as the greatest of French prose writers. After his conversion at the age of thirty-one Pascal records how his mind blazed with the burning conviction of being overwhelmed with light. For many years he had examined God merely as a series of concepts. Now he stood before Gods presence and the reality of God Himself the same God who had appeared to Abraham Isaac and Jacob. It was this that now gave him joy joy joy tears of joy. The Mind on Fire contains Pascals Pensées a systematic and uncompromising defense of Christian belief along with selections from his Letters to a Provincial his own description of his conversion and a prayer for the proper use of pain in his life. Dr. James M. Houston editor of the Classics of Faith and Devotion series is a highly acclaimed scholar and pioneer in the field of evangelical spirituality. He came to North America from England in 1968 to lead Regent College in Vancouver Canada a worldwide center of spiritual formation.