Barbara Brown Taylor

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Barbara Brown Taylor was up there right along side Billy Graham and other famous preachers. She lived in the north Georgia Mountains which is an unlikely place for a world famous preacher. But she is more than a preacher. She is a writer and a best selling author. Both atheists and the religious enjoy reading her books. She has written about her faith and her doubts. In my opinion she is an honest woman. In her book "Learning to Walk in The Dark" she chronicles her journey from a religious preacher in the mountains to her doubts about religion and her life's journey searching for the spirit. She denounces the religious belief that darkness is scary and evil, and that light is good. Scripture notes that light is holy and darkness is condemned to hell. But Taylor thinks otherwise. She believes that darkness is a cure for a lot of what ails us, and that there's much to be learned from the dark. She writes that we pay a heavy price for shutting out the dark, and that our ability to tolerate sadness is weak, the death of a child, a loved one suffering from cancer. She concludes that we need darkness as much as we need light. She writes that her loss of faith was devastating and she cannot be sure when her ideas about a God began to slip away, but she says where she used to carry a big chest of theology, the big chest is now smaller than a shoe box. Nowadays she sees God as the universal Spirit and much harder to understand. She writes that her place in the faith spectrum is hard to describe. Taylor hopes her books help people to follow their own personal way. She writes, if you find yourself in the dark, it doesn't mean you have lost your way, but its the way life of the spirit goes.