What's the point of being a Christian? Father Timothy Radcliffe, O.P. answers this question in a book and this 2006 interview with U.S. Catholic. He followed this up with another book and a 2010 U.S. Catholic interview on why go to church.

Making a case for Christianity is not an easy sell nowadays, and no one knows that better than Timothy Radcliffe, O.P. Participation in church life in his native United Kingdom, like much of Europe, is nearing a dismally low crisis point, while the church in the United States suffers strong division between left and right.

Radcliffe, however, is nothing if not hopeful, pointing out that the Eucharist itself was born in a time of crisis for Jesus' followers. "The sacrament of community is given when the community is coming to bits. A sacrament that promises us the kingdom comes when there is no future."

Radcliffe draws further hope from his travels as leader of his order. When he asked a woman in a Zimbabwe slum why she started a school in her shack for mostly HIV-positive kids, she simply responded, "I love children."

"That's a sign," Radcliffe says, "like when Jesus in the face of death takes bread, breaks it, and says, 'I give myself to you.'"

Timothy Radcliffe is a Dominican of the English province. After teaching theology and serving as provincial of the English Dominicans, he led his order as master general from 1992 to 2001.

Your most recent book has the provocative title What's the Point of Being a Christian? Why did you choose it?

It came from discussions with a friend of mine who insistently asked me that very question. My reaction was to say that it's the wrong question. I'm a Christian because I believe Christianity to be true, not because it's got any particular point.

But it also makes sense to ask: What are the results of being a Christian? If the point of it is that it's true, what are the consequences? And I think some of the consequences of being a Christian should be that we are people with a certain happiness and freedom, with liberty to face the world and courage in the face of its challenges.

When you say that Christianity is true, what exactly do you mean?

I think it makes claims that are true: that Jesus Christ was the Son of God and fully human, that he died and rose from the dead, and that all of humanity will be gathered into God at the end of history. But many of the most profound claims that Christianity makes we don't understand.

Thomas Aquinas always said that God is good, God is beautiful, God is simple. But we can't understand fully what that means. When I claim that God is true, that God is good, I'm saying something that goes beyond any understanding of truth or goodness that I could ever have.

Is the idea that Christianity is true a hard sell in the world today?

Especially in Europe, perhaps more than in the United States, people are very nervous about religious truth claims because they're associated with fundamentalism. You've only got to look at the Middle East, and you see people battling over their allegiance to Jesus Christ or to the Quran or to the Torah. Very easily religion is associated with arrogance and intolerance. It is therefore important that we have the confidence to make truth claims but also have humility in the face of other people's truth claims, because God is larger than any truth that I can ever understand.

Is there a danger of being nervous about the very idea of truth?

I think you can drift into a simple relativism. We're often inclined to say, "Look, this is true for me. If you're happy with believing that God is a green rabbit, that's beautiful. That's true for you." I'm uncomfortable with that because the truth of something is greater than its relationship to me personally. Something is either true or false regardless of who believes it.