With or Without Me, Esther Maria Magnis
With or Without Me, Esther Maria Magnis
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With or Without Me
A Conversion

Author: Esther Maria Magnis

Narrator: Ewa Maria Wojcik

Unabridged: 6 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/22/2022


Synopsis

With or Without Me is an unsparing and eloquent critique of religion. Yet Esther Maria Magnis’s ire is merely the beginning of an exceptional journey toward belief and God—a journey punctuated by personal losses retold with intense immediacy. “Maybe God is a sadist,” she writes, “a big baby who had a terrible upbringing. If, as Christians claim, God is love, then it’s a kind of love I do not understand.” She dares to believe anyway, although her questioning won’t let up. She fiercely dismantles both the clichéd phrases she’s heard in church and the vague progressive pieties of her parents’ generation.

Esther Maria Magnis knows believing in God is anything but easy. Because he allows people to suffer. Because he’s invisible. And silent. “I think we miss God,” she writes, “I would never want to persuade anyone or put myself above atheists. I know there are good reasons not to believe. But sometimes I think most people are just sad that he’s not there.”

With or Without Me is a book for everyone—believer or unbeliever, Christian or atheist—who refuses to surrender to the idea that, just because there can be beauty and truth, there must also be clear answers to the big questions in life.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Marjorie on March 26, 2022

This was a rough read but well worth it. This women's spiritual journey was expressed openly and honestly. At each rough patch in her life, she questioned why God would allow pain and suffering, as all believers do at various times in their lives. I felt she was very blunt and held nothing back, whi......more

Goodreads review by Jessica on December 21, 2021

With or without is a statement of tension—“can’t live With or Without You,” the famous U2 song wails. We say it of habits we enjoy but know are bad for us in some way, or of people we love who nevertheless cause us pain. But what do you do when the object of this statement is yourself? This is one q......more

Goodreads review by Joseph on January 16, 2022

"I have to go...I have to go." Those were the last words my mother spoke to me, if she knew it was me, fighting to leave a hospice bed, throwing back the covers and showing strength in opposition to my hands trying to keep her in bed. "I have to go" echoes in the pages of this spiritual memoir by E......more

Goodreads review by Judith on April 24, 2022

WITH OR WITHOUT ME A Memoir of Losing and Finding by Esther Maria Magnis Auden’s ekphrasic poem “Musee des Beaux Arts” explores the meaning of suffering in reference to Brueghel’s painting where “everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster” of a boy falling to his death. Esther Maria M......more