In thinking back on my days at Moody Bible Institute, part of my now-ambivalence has to do with not just what I learned (or more important, what I did not) but also about how the thinking process itself was handled.   That has both a downside and an upside, and I would like to say something about both. I should start by reiterating that I am simply talking about my own personal experience.  Everyone’s experience would have been, and was, different.  Still, my strong sense is that my experience was not simply a result of my personality, although it certainly was in part that, but also as a result to how education itself was approached at Moody.   How did one get good grades at a school like that?   By mastering tons of material.   Committing lots of things to memory.  Knowing exactly what a teacher taught and being able to reformulate it, without changing its substance, in one’s own words. What was not taught, so much, was how to think for oneself.   When one *did* get encouraged [...]

Here I continue with my reflections on my fundamentalist past. For me, as an inordinately gung-ho evangelical Christian teenager, passionate about learning about the Bible, Moody Bible Institute was the ideal learning environment.   More than just about anyone I knew, even there, I thrived on the academic side of the school.  Moody at that time did not give a bachelor’s degree.  It was a three-year diploma.   For a degree, one needed to transfer credits and go to another college.  That’s what I did after my three years, when I could transfer two of those years to Wheaton and graduate from there with a degree in English literature. There was no English literature to speak of at Moody.  In fact there was no liberal arts curriculum of any kind.   It’s not because they rejected the liberal arts as … too liberal.  (!)  It’s that the school simply wasn’t interested in the humanities, the social sciences, or the hard sciences.   Who cares about such things?  What matters is the Bible.   Hence the name of the school:  Moody [...]

Lately I’ve been thinking a good deal about my completely ambivalent relationship to my past, in particular in relation to my education at Moody Bible Institute.   In part my thinking has been set off by an email I received from my roommate and best friend at the time, and for years, who was the best man in my wedding and confidante and most closest male friend I had ever had.   He has remained a committed evangelical Christian all these years and continues in ministry.   We never have contact any more, but he reached out to me to say hey, and I’ve been flooded with memories and thoughts since. There is a very big part of me – probably the most noticeable part – that is deeply resentful toward my time at Moody.   But there is another part that occasionally arises to the surface, which realizes that in many ways those three years were very good for me.   Without them, I would not be who I have become and what I am.   Sometimes I forget that. [...]