Charles Murray's new book, "Taking Religion Seriously," in which he elaborates his reasons for trading atheism for a heterodox form of Christian faith, is a bit of a curious reading experience for me. This year I published a book arguing that it should be possible to reason one's way from skepticism to belief and trying to unspool some threads of argument that the doubter might follow across the threshold of religious faith.

What I proposed is what Murray's book explicitly embodies. It's an intellectual memoir in which the author, over many years of reading and arguing, thinks his way into religion, and it follows many of the same signposts that I recommended as guides for the traveler--from scientific discoveries to supernatural evidence to New Testament interpretations.

While promoting my book, I was asked more than a few times whether I really thought someone starting from outside religious faith could make this kind of journey intellectually; whether argument alone could really convince anyone of religious claims. Now I can hand them Murray's book and say triumphantly "yes"--with of course the proviso that Murray, a famous conservative policy thinker with a Quaker wife whose professional life brought him in contact with an unusual number of religious intellectuals, is probably a slightly idiosyncratic case study.

But rather than just discuss the convergences between our arguments, I thought it might be more fruitful to talk about how reading Murray's book and agreeing with so much of it also made me ponder the inevitable resilience of skepticism.

Christmas is a good time for that contemplation, insofar as Christmas itself is an argument for religious belief. Here is this profound and magical-seeming event, the obscure birth of an infant in the provinces of a powerful and cruel empire that radically redirects 2,000 years (and counting) of human history, that........

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