Most people inherit their religion before they have chosen it — and what to do with an inherited tradition is one of the deepest questions a person can face. To live deliberately within a tradition is neither to accept everything uncritically nor to pick and choose in ways that reduce it to a preference catalog — it is to engage it seriously, to know its history, to argue with it from the inside, to let it make demands and to make demands of it in return. The examined faith is not weaker than the inherited one — it is the form that can survive the losses and complications of a fully lived life.
Each step builds on the last.