DEAR DAUGHTER, DEAR DAD

...In fact, the hardest part of being a father is feeling, from the first moments in the delivery room onwards, especially with my daughters, utterly useless...

...But it is not as if the Jewish and Christian Bible doesn't confront that doubt head-on...

...Jana, however, does conclude with some optimism that she "will continue on the path" down which her father's answers have started her...

...He battled, often alone and sometimes in dangerous circumstances, the "liberation theology" that dominated Latin America, insisting—again, rightly—that the Christian faith is different from and deeper than a leftist economic program...

...respect for the sanctity of sex...

...respect for human life and liberty (including the freedom of the infant to choose, in time, for herself...

...He claims that he jumped at the opportunity to try to answer her questions...

...But he eagerly writes back, hoping to engage her in serious religious thought...

...You wouldn't want to turn to religion merely for comfort, security, or peace of mind (although that's what atheists say religion is for...

...In careful and thoughtful language, Michael Novak explains, The evils and horrors we see make us doubt either that God is omnipotent or that He is good...

...When Jana's questions in Tell Me Why shift from broad theological challenges to issues like abortion, her father stresses that the key word is respect: respect for mutual friendship...

...When asked, for example, to explain religion's relevance, he declares that it is important because it is true...

...And he replies, and she replies, and the result is Tell Me Why: A Father Answers His Daughter's Questions About God, a new kind of Christian apologetics for the 1990s...

...What I leave you, Jana, is the inner life of our faith...

...The elder Novak tackles one question after another with vigor and insight...

...The reader may not always be satisfied with his responses...

...Once the habit of such respect spreads throughout a population, people may be surprised by how different the visage of our culture will become: a culture of friendship...

...But Jana is even less satisfied and often insists that her father stop meandering and cut to the chase: "I like your comments so far," she writes at one point, "but at times you've been pretty abstract and, for me, haven't given a practical conclusion...

...The God of the Jewish Testament sent trials and afflictions upon everyone He loved, . . . Abraham, Moses, Job, David—all without exception...

...Because if religion isn't true, you wouldn't find peace of mind or comfort or security anyway...

...It has kept our family going through wars and peace for perhaps a thousand years, in the visible lustrous chain of God's love...

...Though our teachers had been well taught themselves, why should they bother teaching well in turn...

...it was easier to believe He must not exist, because to have Him exist and allow this misery was too much to comprehend...

...respect for the mysteries of a woman's body...

...One such twenty-something is a young woman named Jana Novak, who compiled a list of the most challenging and provocative religious questions of her generation and casually faxed them to her father...

...Of course, for Michael Novak, the exercise is more than just a stimulating conversation...

...Not all of my questions have been answered," she decides...

...At stake is a family inheritance of immense importance—the inheritance of belief...

...We are, for the most part, an astonishingly undereducated generation, calling ourselves Catholic—or "culturally Catholic," or "raised CathVictorino Matus is assistant editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...The father exhausts every line of argument, and still his daughter remains unsatisfied...

...She replies with ever more specific questions—some reaching down to such hot-button issues as gay marriage and sex, and some reaching up to the very existence of God...

...olic," or "Catholic, I guess"—with little idea of either the content of the faith we sometimes profess to hold or the discipline necessary to hold it...

...Then Pope John Paul II came along, and as a result, Vatican II became firmly integrated into the ancient teachings of the Church, a new catechism eventually appeared, theologians started to show a new seriousness, vocations to the priesthood began rebounding—and, though it took twenty years, a new spirit took hold among teachers of the faith...

...Why, when they lived in such exciting times, should they pass along archaic, pointless, and soon-to-be-extinct doctrines and dogmas...

...But, in fact, it wasn't quite that simple, for Jana's father happens to be the widely published neoconserva-tive Catholic thinker Michael Novak, author of The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, The Joy of Sports, and the bestselling Belief and Unbelief...

...And now, after he has influenced people all over the world and won dozens of international honors (among them, fifteen honorary doctorates, the million-dollar Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, and the Anthony Fisher Prize given by Margaret Thatcher), his own daughter has the nerve to ask him how he can think religion is so important...

...In the years after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, a great number of those who would become our teachers in the 1970s and '80s, responsible for passing along the faith to a new generation, seemed to imagine that the Roman Catholic Church was about to disappear—that the reforms of Vatican II were not ends in themselves, but were rather pointers to the eventual dismantling of everything ever believed before...

...Each reply my father gave made me think of several other points I was curious about...

...One suspects the elder Novak could have become apoplectic...

...But it was, in many ways, too late for my own middle generation of twenty- and thirty-somethings...

...With father representing the older tradition and daughter arguing on behalf of confused youth, Tell Me Why presents the clash of generations—one generation firmly grounded in the principles of its faith, the other drifting on a sea of confusion...

...It is this handing down of religious tradition that epitomizes the true dilemma facing Jana's poorly catechized generation...

...She puts the classic "problem of evil" sharply and well, describing a friend who lost her faith while visiting poverty-stricken Haiti: "She told me that if God existed, He couldn't let people live in such horrible conditions...

...He dedicated his life to theological insight, only to have his own child asks him why he bothered...

...This is not, one should observe, entirely our fault...

...Look at the sufferings of Job and the "suffering servant" in Isaiah (Chapter 53)—look at the Son of God bleeding on the cross, nails in His hands and feet...

...During the 1970s, Novak fought fiercely against communism, insisting— rightly, as it turned out—that the troika of Catholicism, capitalism, and democracy could triumph over the Soviet Union...

...DAUGHTER, DEAR DAD Michael and Jana Novak Talk About God By Victorino Matus When it comes to American Catholics now in their twenties and thirties, the words "well grounded in the faith" do not spring immediately to mind...

...There is something almost mythic in this exchange between one of the leading Catholic thinkers of our time and a daughter whose questions and notions so accurately reflect the confused state of the younger generation...

...The two classic twentieth-century works of Christian apologetics are G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy and C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, and if Tell Me Why doesn't belong with them, it is primarily because there is little in the Novaks' exchanges that will seem of interest to a genuine non-believer...

...What will come of those of us like her remains hard to say...

...As he puts it, "A father dreams of this...

...But for the lost generation of half-believers, unsure of what it means to believe, Jana and Michael Novak have composed a helpful book...

...This book could have stretched to a thousand pages and I probably would not have been satisfied...