I've started a short thread on the issue of how the problem of suffering affected my Christian faith.  To explain the matter further, here I quote from a section of my book God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer our Most Important Question:  Why We Suffer.   The book is mainly about the variety of answers you can find in the Bible about why God allows or even causes suffering.  But I begin the book by talking about why it has long been such an important issue to me personally. ****************************** Eventually I felt compelled to leave Christianity.  I did not go easily.  On the contrary, I left kicking and screaming, wanting desperately to hold on to the faith I had known from childhood and had come to know intimately from my teenage years onward.  But I came to a point where I could no longer believe.  It’s a very long story, but the short version is this: I realized that I could no long reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of life.  In [...]

When the new blog site launched a week ago I decided to start off with five of my favorite posts from each of the first five years of the blog.  And then someone asked me: why just the first five?  Why not the more recent four?  And I replied:  I don’t know – I didn’t think about it!   But now I have and have decided: why not? So here is number six of five favorite posts, this one from 2017.  It’s more of a personal topic, but it’s one that I know a lot of you can resonate with: the struggle involved in moving from being a person of faith to becoming an agnostic. ****************************** I started feeling the tug toward agnosticism sometime during my Ph.D. program.  I remember clearly a particular moment, and it was, somewhat ironically, while I was serving as the pastor of the Princeton Baptist Church. Even though I was incredibly busy at the time (I was taking a full load of graduate seminars, preparing to take my PhD exams, serving [...]

I've been concerned for the past months (among many other things, of course) about PhD's trying to get teaching positions in colleges and universities. Even when there is not an economy-busting pandemic, it's hard. Very hard. Many years ago when I was on the market, I had an awful time trying to find a job . Oddly enough, I see now, I posted on this very topic, on this very date during the first year of the blog (2012). Here's what I said then. *********************************************************************** My students are alternatively comforted and chagrined to learn how hard it was for me to get a teaching position. It makes them feel good that they are not alone, but bad that they too might have a hard time – even harder. I was on the job market while I was writing my dissertation.. And even though there were job openings, I couldn’t get an interview to save my soul. Part of the problem was that my PhD was from a theological seminary, and a lot of the jobs [...]

Here's a post I made six years ago, when just starting to think about what I would do in my book How Jesus Became God, where I recount a rather emotional experience of starting to doubt my faith. ************************************************************************************************************ When I attended Moody Bible Institute in the mid 1970s, every student was required, every semester, to do some kind of Christian ministry work.   Like all of my fellow students I was completely untrained and unqualified to do the things I did, but I think Moody believed in on-the-job training.   And so every student had to have one semester where, for maybe 2-3 hours one afternoon a week, they would engage in “door-to-door evangelism.”  That involved being transported to some neighborhood in Chicago, knocking on doors, trying to strike up a conversation, get into the homes, and convert people.  A fundamentalist version of the Mormon missionary thing, also carried out two-by-two. One semester I was a late-night counselor on the Moody Christian radio station.  People would call up with questions about the Bible or with problems in [...]

Breezing through some old posts today from nearly six years ago, and came across this interesting little anecdote.  I'd forgotten I had written about it.  A funny personal story about something that actually became important for me. *******************************************************************************   My first serious girlfriend was Lynn, whom I met when we were starting our sophomore year in high school.  She was funny, personable, attractive, intelligent, and Jewish.   I’m not sure I had ever known a Jewish person before her. I don’t recall that we ever talked about religion, and looking back I suppose it’s a bit surprising.   She and her family certainly weren’t observant Jews and my uninformed sense is that they were completely secular.  I don’t know if they went to synagogue or kept any of the holidays, but I kind-a doubt it.  In any event, at that point in my life religion wasn’t really my main concern when it came to a girlfriend. We were a hot item for months, and then at the end of my sophomore year, disaster struck.  Her mom got [...]