Faith traditions come with all sorts of special vocabulary to try to articulate our rituals and our intangible beliefs. But Rev. Mark Schaefer says it seems there’s one word that people of faith increasingly try to avoid at all costs: uncertainty. Schaefer is the university chaplain at American University in Washington DC and before that served for years as AU’s United Methodist Chaplain. He says in that time he saw many of his students struggling with doubt - thinking that they were doing something wrong or weren’t faithful enough if they showed any signs of questioning. But Schaefer says uncertainty and doubt are crucial to a well-examined spiritual life.

Rev. Mark Schaefer, university chaplain at American University and author of the forthcoming book The Certainty of Uncertainty