What you are going to read in this book is an attempt to confront the thorny religious problems of our day-the God-problem, the problem of what to make of Jesus, the problem of the Church's credibility and authority, the problem of the "churchiness" of the sacraments and the Church's worship-life, the problem of prayer, the agonizing problem of what the Christian thing really is in day-to-day living. In short, I have tried to face up to the crucial difficulties of being a Christian-especially a Catholic-today. It seems to me that the only morally and intellectually respectable approach to these difficulties is simple honesty-an honesty which, while making no claims to a final wisdom or truth, does not pretend that the difficulties do not exist or are only preliminary.