Audiobooks by Ross Douthat

Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious

Do you ever wish you had more faith, but struggle to make religious belief fit with modern assumptions about the world and human life? With a rare combination of empathy, open-mindedness, and persuasive argument, Ross Douthat offers a blueprint for thinking one's way from doubt to belief. As a columnist for the New York Times who writes often about spiritual topics for a skeptical audience, Ross Douthat understands that many of us--whether we are agnostic, somewhat religious, or longtime believers--want to have more faith than we do. But we think we can't believe the way our ancestors did, knowing what we know now--can we? With clear and straightforward arguments, Believe shows how religious belief makes sense of the order of the cosmos and our place within it, illuminates the mystery of consciousness, and explains the persistent reality of encounters with the supernatural. Douthat argues that in light of what we know today it should be harder to not have faith than to have it. With empathy, clarity, and rigor, Douthat explores: - Why nonbelief requires ignoring what our reasoning faculties tell us about the world - How modern scientific developments make a religious worldview more credible, not less - Why it's entirely reasonable to believe in mystical and supernatural realities - How an open-minded religious quest should proceed amid the diversity of religious faiths - How Douthat's own Christianity is informed by his blueprint for belief Highly relevant for our current moment, Believe offers a pathway for thinking your way from doubt into belief, from uncertainty about our place in the universe into a confidence that we are here for a reason.

Ross Douthat (Author), Ross Douthat (Narrator)

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The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery

In this vulnerable, insightful memoir, the New York Times columnist tells the story of his five-year struggle with a disease that officially doesn't exist, exploring the limits of modern medicine, the stories that we unexpectedly fall into, and the secrets that only suffering reveals. "A powerful memoir about our fragile hopes in the face of chronic illness."-Kate Bowler, bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason In the summer of 2015, Ross Douthat was moving his family, with two young daughters and a pregnant wife, from Washington, D.C., to a sprawling farmhouse in a picturesque Connecticut town when he acquired a mysterious and devastating sickness. It left him sleepless, crippled, wracked with pain--a shell of himself. After months of seeing doctors and descending deeper into a physical inferno, he discovered that he had a disease which according to CDC definitions does not actually exist: the chronic form of Lyme disease, a hotly contested condition that devastates the lives of tens of thousands of people but has no official recognition--and no medically approved cure. From a rural dream house that now felt like a prison, Douthat's search for help takes him off the map of official medicine, into territory where cranks and conspiracies abound and patients are forced to take control of their own treatment and experiment on themselves. Slowly, against his instincts and assumptions, he realizes that many of the cranks and weirdos are right, that many supposed 'hypochondriacs' are victims of an indifferent medical establishment, and that all kinds of unexpected experiences and revelations lurk beneath the surface of normal existence, in the places underneath. The Deep Places is a story about what happens when you are terribly sick and realize that even the doctors who are willing to treat you can only do so much. Along the way, Douthat describes his struggle back toward health with wit and candor, portraying sickness as the most terrible of gifts. It teaches you to appreciate the grace of ordinary life by taking that life away from you. It reveals the deep strangeness of the world, the possibility that the reasonable people might be wrong, and the necessity of figuring out things for yourself. And it proves, day by dreadful day, that you are stronger than you ever imagined, and that even in the depths there is always hope.

Ross Douthat (Author), Ross Douthat (Narrator)

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The Decadent Society

From the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bad Religion, a powerful portrait of how our turbulent age is defined by dark forces seemingly beyond our control Today the Western world seems to be in crisis. But beneath our social media frenzy and reality television politics, the deeper reality is one of drift, repetition, and dead ends. The Decadent Society explains what happens when a rich and powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline creates a strange kind of "sustainable decadence," a civilizational languor that could endure for longer than we think. Ranging from our grounded space shuttles to our Silicon Valley villains, from our blandly recycled film and television—a new Star Wars saga, another Star Trek series, the fifth Terminator sequel—to the escapism we're furiously chasing through drug use and virtual reality, Ross Douthat argues that many of today's discontents and derangements reflect a sense of futility and disappointment—a feeling that the future was not what was promised, that the frontiers have all been closed, and that the paths forward lead only to the grave. In this environment we fear catastrophe, but in a certain way we also pine for it—because the alternative is to accept that we are permanently decadent: aging, comfortable and stuck, cut off from the past and no longer confident in the future, spurning both memory and ambition while we wait for some saving innovation or revelations, growing old unhappily together in the glowing light of tiny screens. Correcting both optimists who insist that we're just growing richer and happier with every passing year and pessimists who expect collapse any moment, Douthat provides an enlightening diagnosis of the modern condition—how we got here, how long our age of frustration might last, and how, whether in renaissance or catastrophe, our decadence might ultimately end.

Ross Douthat (Author), Ross Douthat (Narrator)

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To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism

A New York Times columnist and one of America's leading conservative thinkers considers Pope Francis's efforts to change the church he governs. Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 1936, today Pope Francis is the 266th pope of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Francis's stewardship of the Church, while perceived as a revelation by many, has provoked division throughout the world. "If a conclave were to be held today," one Roman source told The New Yorker, "Francis would be lucky to get ten votes." In To Change the Church, Douthat explains why the particular debate Francis has opened-over communion for the divorced and the remarried-is so dangerous: How it cuts to the heart of the larger argument over how Christianity should respond to the sexual revolution and modernity itself, how it promises or threatens to separate the church from its own deep past, and how it divides Catholicism along geographical and cultural lines. Douthat argues that the Francis era is a crucial experiment for all of Western civilization, which is facing resurgent external enemies (from ISIS to Putin) even as it struggles with its own internal divisions, its decadence, and self-doubt. Whether Francis or his critics are right won't just determine whether he ends up as a hero or a tragic figure for Catholics. It will determine whether he's a hero, or a gambler who's betraying both his church and his civilization into the hands of its enemies.

Ross Douthat (Author), Jonathan Todd Ross (Narrator)

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Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics

As the youngest-ever op-ed columnist for the New York Times and the author of the critically acclaimed books Privilege and Grand New Party, Ross Douthat has emerged as one of the most provocative and influential voices of his generation. Now he offers a masterful and hard-hitting account of how American Christianity has gone off the rails-and why it threatens to take American society with it. In a story that moves from the 1950s to the age of Obama, Douthat brilliantly charts traditional Christianity's decline from a vigorous, mainstream, and bipartisan faith-which acted as a ""vital center"" and the moral force behind the Civil Rights movement-through the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s down to the polarizing debates of the present day. He argues that Christianity's place in American life has increasingly been taken over, not by atheism, but by heresy: Debased versions of Christian faith that breed hubris, greed, and self-absorption. Ranging from Glenn Beck to Eat Pray Love, Joel Osteen to The Da Vinci Code, Oprah Winfrey to Sarah Palin, Douthat explores how the prosperity gospel's mantra of "pray and grow rich", a cult of self-esteem that reduces God to a life coach, and the warring political religions of left and right have crippled the country's ability to confront our most pressing challenges, and accelerated American decline. His urgent call for a revival of traditional Christianity is sure to generate controversy, and it will be vital listening for all those concerned about the imperiled American future.

Ross Douthat (Author), Lloyd James, Lloyd James (Narrator)

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