Page |121 well as apparent accidents of fortune like rather something one feels all the time car crashes and the weather. Though simply in virtue of the beliefs one holds retaining personal characteristics such as about God and the world. Given a love or anger, God operates less like an particular construal of those beliefs—a individual human person with limited relatively impersonal one, I argue— reach and partial interests, and more like simply having those beliefs in mind, light, air or gravity do—quite with some awareness of their quite pervasively and constantly. obvious presuppositions and Usually one side or the other implications, makes clear one is never : ‘at alone, never a self-sufficient operator. In comes to the fore in the way Christians : . contrast to the understanding of God as feel connected to God: for some . ye wg ge aor ; . friend, here God’s invisibility does not Christians the personal side of God is . ; . . threaten to interrupt a sense of God’s central; for others, the more impersonal. . ; le presence and influence. God’s Thus, some Christians expect God to be Ne age ' , . invisibility to the contrary enables the very much like a human friend, offering ; . . . | xi sense of God’s presence and influence to companionship and good advice.” As P ; T . be the routine backdrop of all one’s anya Luhrmann explores in her essay, ; ; so eoaihie ' experience, to constitute a general their religious lives often revolve around : : _— outlook on the world, no matter what the the internal sensory or imaginative . t experiences that make a God of that sort CIFCUNISTANCES. seem real to them--the sense that God is Belief in Creation as a Backdrop to in the room with them, that God speaks the Whole of Life to them, and so on. They work to F I Itivate a prayer life that heightens the a SNAP, @ Common oun ; Christian construal of the belief that God vividness of those experiences and . . is the creator of the world makes it thereby allays doubts about the actua