Recovering Evangelicals

In this episode, Luke goes out to do “on-the-street” interviews, asking people three questions about what it means to be human. Since the three main words used by the Bible in this context are heart, mind and soul, he asked students during Frosh Week, people from my church, and professors at the university their ideas on those three words. Not surprisingly, he found a complete mish-mash of ideas. One might think that a clear answer to “what is the soul and what does it do?” would be found in the Bible. Think again. Boyd and Luke talk briefly about how that’s just not the case … how “sometimes it takes 90 degree turns, and sometimes even 180 degree reversals.” And those changes in direction always seem to occur when the writers of the Bible come into contact with a global superpower. We’ll explore that in a lot more detail in the next few episodes. If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit!) Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

#4 Boyd’s story Boyd Blundell describes his journey through Christian faith, including the experiences which seriously challenged the traditional form that he grew up with, and which now motivate him to present a faith that evolved through facing those challenges. In particular, he found an intellectual rigidity within Christian communities as well as within intellectual/academic circles in the university setting which he found stifling and hypocritical. He also describes a formative period in his university life at a Christian College in which questioning of his belief system was encouraged. Surprisingly  — or perhaps not so, looking back in hindsight  — this did not threaten his faith, but greatly strengthened it. If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit!) Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

#3 Luke’s story – Reconstruction In this second half of his story, Luke describes why he didn’t go the whole way in becoming an atheist when his Christian faith became too uncomfortable to hang on to, but instead found a new Christian faith that was much more compatible with the 21st century. Part of the solution came from giving up on the idea that the Bible is essentially a direct dictation from God, and therefore inerrant and infallible; the Bible never makes any of these claims, but many Christians have long insisted on these points. Another part of the solution came from understanding that divine inspiration does not mean divine dictation/utterance (the same point made above), but can also include God inspiring humans to search and ask questions and share ideas. What’s more, those humans don’t only have to be those within the JudeoChristian camp …. God can also reveal truth through other surrounding cultures (in a later episode, we’re going to see the profound influence that Greek philosophy had on JudeoChristian thinking). Other reasons for not going full-atheist include scientific ones: our pathetic inability to fully grasp all the information that would allow us to declare there is no God … our limitation to only three dimensions (when many more are “out there”) … fine-tuning of the universe … and the completely unexpected beauty and elegance of the reality we live in. If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit!) Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

#2 Luke’s story – Deconstruction Luke describes the first half of his journey in which three things kept eroding his Christian faith to the point that it finally became too hard to hang on to it. The first of those three eroding influences was science: a Fundamentalist world view that forced a six thousand year time-line on the origin of the universe, of the world, and of humans, just became too difficult to embrace. Adding to that was a growing discomfort when he read certain stories in the Bible — especially in the Old Testament — that just had too much slaughter of innocents, offensive laws that dealt with the “proper” treatment of slaves, women, and children, and values which just didn’t feel right from a 21st century Western perspective. Finally, encounters with believers of other faiths who I had been taught to demonize and see as “all going to hell,” but who I came to see were genuinely good people trying to understand God from the perspective they grew up with. Something had to give. Either I continue to close my eyes to those problems and compartmentalize my belief, or give it up. Or maybe there was another solution? … maybe I could reconfigure or reconstruct it (see next episode). If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit!) Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

#1 Inaugural episode This is the unveiling of our new Recovering Evangelicals pod-cast. In it, we introduce you to the hosts — myself and Boyd Blundell — and tell you our motives behind teaming up to give you this, our academic credentials, and history, and a bit of a sneak peak into the two series of pod-cast episodes which will follow this one. Enjoy! If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit!) Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page