Recovering Evangelicals

“Why not just throw the worship service out the window, and re-think what it means to be a Christian community?” Most Christians today have nestled into, or hopped between, a very standard modern expression of Christian faith, one that involves meeting for an hour on Sunday and having an unchanging mixture of songs, scripture reading, […]

Four particularly toxic ingredients make it especially hard for some (many?) Evangelicals to maintain their belief system beyond a few decades. Christianity, in the West at least, is certainly experiencing a “great falling away”: churches closing, memberships dropping, people leaving the faith entirely. Some might conclude they’re leaving in order to better enjoy “sex, drugs […]

A traumatic experience while serving in a church led to a complete deconstruction of her Christian faith: she’s still “a hopeful Christian agnostic” who finds Jesus’ message “beautiful and life-giving” Another one of our listeners tells her story. Rachel Sanders also grew up in a conservative Evangelical home, and went to a Southern Baptist church, […]

Her spiritual journey was going perfectly well, until life circumstances blind-sided her and the “body of Christ” failed her, putting an end to her journey. This week, another long-standing member of the podcast discussion group drops into our “studio” and shares her spiritual journey. She was perfectly comfortable for the first few decades with her […]

Another listener tells his story of navigating a long and meandering path through Evangelicalism: many detours, but the same destination. This week, we talk to an old friend of both of ours: Paul Almas. Paul played a key role in Luke’s reconstruction journey, was someone that both Luke and Scott looked up to 20 or […]

Getting to know one of our listeners, and his very unique and thought-provoking path into and out of Evangelicalism. We talked to Doug, one of our listeners, to learn a bit about his very unique story through Evangelicalism: from Fundamentalism, through progressively more liberal churches, eventually going back to Bible Seminary as an atheist to […]

Science now makes the former no longer tenable, leaving three options for believers: ignore the problem, reject the Bible, or revise one’s theology. The story of “the Exodus” has traditionally been seen to involve millions of Israelites following Moses out of Egypt: this image is derived from a literal reading of the Old Testament, with […]

Although the origin story for Jews, and the foundation for much of Christian theology, many scholars will ask: did it really happen? Moses leading the newly-born nation of Israel out of slavery in Egypt, wandering through the desert for 40 years, and taking possession of Canaan is an iconic story. Not only is it the […]

A scholar’s perspective after decades of research: “we’re talking about a whole network of politicized ideals that has used the bodies of adolescents to gain political power … Purity Culture has become rape culture.” This movement seems to be anything but what it appears to be. Evangelical leaders compelling adolescents to be sexually pure (Purity […]

Too often, the Christian response to questions about human sexuality is to point to Leviticus, and similar Biblical passages. Like other religions, Christianity has a few laws, taboos, and prohibitions about a variety of life issues (diet; holidays; technology; money; dead bodies). But when it comes specifically to human sexuality and gender, Christians have come […]

The typical modern Christian reflex response to sexuality is to point to the Old Testament Levitical laws: so let’s look more closely at those. The ultimate goal of this mini-series of episodes on sex and gender is to get the Christian / Evangelical perspective on why this is such an important and sensitive topic. But […]

The first in a series of episodes on this question, this one being a scientific perspective from an ex-Mormon social psychologist This is the first in a multi-part series of episodes that focuses on that very question. It will NOT get into sexual ethics, morality or normativity. Instead, we’re exploring why it is that religions […]

Words without spaces or vowels and multiple manuscript versions with different words are only the beginning of the problem! Have you ever wondered why there are so many different versions of the Bible: the King James, the Revised Standard Version, the New Revised Standard Version, the English Standard Version, the New English Bible, the New […]

A Baptist pastor and Yale theologian tells how he finds additional depth for his Christian faith by learning from other world religions. Our previous two guests — Philip Yancey and Frank Schaeffer — told us how they recovered from the toxic Evangelicalism that they grew up with. The former found it possible to recover an entirely different […]

Comments/questions from our listeners and members prompt this deep-dive into this most important of Christian holidays It’s always tempting to do a blog or episode every year on Christmas and on Easter. They’re both such easy, ready-made topics, with many obvious angles and discussion points. Bloggers and podcasters find them hard to resist. In almost […]

A potpourri of our own ideas and perspectives on a variety of comments/questions sent in by our listeners. It’s been months since we looked through the boxes full of comments and questions that our listeners have sent to us through our web-sites, Facebook, emails, and podcast providers. Last week, we abstracted from our short list […]

Piecing together what the previous four episodes showed us about the End Times and Christ’s second coming. After four weeks of talking to experts on various aspects of “End Times” theology, this episode is our chance to put together many pieces of the puzzle into a coherent picture. In part, this means we have to […]

A close look at apocalyptic literature written before Jesus (and with which he interacted), and long after him (including John’s book of Revelation). In this fourth and final episode of our miniseries on “the End Times”, we talk to Dr. John J. Collins (Prof. Old Testament; Yale Divinity School) about ancient Apocalyptic literature … a […]

A historian takes us on a journey through two millennia of evolution of Christian understanding about “the End Times”. In last week’s episode, we compared two pictures of “the End Times”: one drawn by modern day Evangelicals, and the other drawn by Jesus while he was teaching in Palestine. And we found that those two […]

The latest sequel to a long series of books and movies just hit the cinema!? Yes, you read it correctly … yet another sequel in the Left Behind / Thief in the Night franchise of books and movies has come out. As if the previous ones which began coming out as far back as the […]

Trying to find a silver lining in a very dark cloud: does it take an esoteric literary tool to redeem this classic Sunday School story? Remember the story of Noah’s Flood from when you were a kid in Sunday School? The pictures of a smiling Noah stepping off a cute little ark with happy animals, […]

In giving up or changing so many core “traditional” Christian beliefs, how can we still call ourselves “Christian”? In an episode two weeks back, one of our guests challenged us to look at what now defines our Christianity This was in response to us listing one traditional Christian tenet after another which we were now […]

How long will it be before AI becomes one of the staff members at your own church? How long before AI is generating sermons for the pastor? Image from the Religious Studies Project Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a household word, but many people don’t appreciate how pervasive it is in our society. We’re all […]

Is prayer really a vending machine to get stuff? Or instead an introspective, meditative discipline to find out how you yourself can be the solution? Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay. Let’s face it. The experience of many believers, particularly listeners of this podcast, is that prayer doesn’t work. Ask for stuff — a physical healing […]

A sordid story of “divinely-sanctioned” violence in the Old Testament … which seems to be anything but that. There are many stories in the Old Testament of carnage and slaughter, perpetrated by the nation of Israel, which are presented as divinely-sanctioned. In fact, the claim is that God / YHWH not only condoned them, but […]

Having children intensifies the deconstruction process, and can even re-start a whole new round of wrestling with long-dead questions. Deconstruction is difficult enough on its own. But doing so while having young kids gives that process a whole new level of peril and fear. Even those who have deconstructed quite a while ago and have […]

Our listeners … and we ourselves …. raise some questions about the previous two episodes and the whole ideological motive behind asking “who is Adam?” Over the last two weeks, we’ve been perusing scholarly works on the subject of “Who was Adam?” [note: a pet peeve of mine … Eve is almost always left out […]

A geneticist unpacks the genetic evidence for human evolution, and critiques one recent proposal that “Adam” can be traced back 750,000 years to Homo heidelbergensis This week, we speak to Dr. Denis Alexander, a scientist who is as committed to his life-long Christian faith as he is to the theory of evolution. We first took […]

A medical scientist who fully affirms human evolution and common ancestry with the apes shows that science can’t rule out a recent Adam&Eve. There are many who believe in a historical Adam&Eve as recently as six thousand years ago, based on a direct, surface-level reading of the first couple chapters of Genesis. And then there […]

Our responses to a flurry of comments and questions to two recent episodes: one on Open/Process Theism, and the other comparing theology and science as legitimate avenues in the search for Truth. Two of our recent episodes both evoked a tremendous response from our listeners, in terms of comments left at our two Facebook sites […]

An amazing story of a journey into an utterly bizarre worldview, and what it took to come back to reality. Do you ever look back on the things that you once believed with conviction, and now shake your head, asking yourself: “How could I have believed that? It’s so obviously not true.  I just don’t […]

Luke asks two theologians to convince him that theology is a legitimate avenue for coming up with robust models of our reality Science and theology are both human endeavours seeking to explain our past, our present reality, and possibly also the trajectory of our future. Both build elaborate ideas on the foundation of previous scholars, […]

A brief introduction to two forms of theology that are as old as the Bible itself, but have labels that are only a few decades old. One of the biggest problems in Christian theology arises out of the simple belief that God is all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful. The problem? … why, then, is there so […]

An expert gives us his insight into this disturbing, embarrassing … and growing … problem in the 21st century church. Spiritual/clergy abuse has been much in the news as of late. Some of the names that have filled religious and secular news feeds in the past few years include large organizations like the indigenous residential […]

Our understanding of Hell has been evolving for thousands of years … and we’re the ones making all the changes! Dr. Meghan Henning (Associate Professor of Christian Origins; University of Dayton, OH) gives a scholar’s view on the historical evolution of JudeoChristian thinking about this … “place?” … state? …. concept? For thousands of years,the […]

A look forward at the ideas and episodes we’ve been working on for this new season. After a four month hiatus, we’ve come back! In this inaugural episode, we briefly re-introduce ourselves to the audience, explain the four month hiatus, talk about our modus operandi, reaffirm the mission or vision of our podcast and our […]

Was this religion dropped onto a unified nation that had just marched out of Egypt, or did both the nation and its religion evolve over the course of millennia? We’ve been looking at hominids over the past couple hundred thousand years, paying particular attention to the evolution of cognitive abilities which contributed to the emergence […]

Hypersensitive agency detection and promiscuous teleology in human brains make a powerful religion-making machine Millions of years of evolution have produced a powerful neural reflex within animals: we immediately assume there’s a being behind every rustling in the grass. We see faces in puffy clouds and random patterns on the ground. If we hear a […]

Signs of symbolism, abstract thinking, compassion, and even a religious streak becoming visible in hominids hundreds of thousands of years ago. We talked to Dr. Marc Kissel (PhD, Anthropology) about his work looking at the evolution of higher cognitive functions in ancient hominids — our ancestors  — hundreds of thousands of years ago. They were a […]

An update on Darwinism and the origin of species. Last week we heard about the mechanisms going on inside the cells … at the molecular level … to produce new species. This week, Dr. Jeffrey Schloss tackles the same subject, but comes at it from more of a whole organism level. We explore general themes […]

A brief overview of genetics as most know it, and why many don’t buy the Theory of Evolution. Next week, we plan to wade into the deep water of genetics in order to understand the origin of species. So this week we thought it would be good to first give a brief Genetics 101 to […]

Is there a transition of power in play within the YEC movement? Think about Young Earth Creationism (YEC), and you probably immediately conjure up a mental image of Ken Ham: he’s been the figurehead of that movement for decades. One can critique his scientific credentials and his way of interpreting anything scientific through his dogmatic […]

Global warming, pollution, biodiversity loss, and humans. . It seems like every week there’s another record-breaking weather event: never-seen-before temperatures, rains, or winds. Weather-related devastation at scales or in places that were unprecedented. Floods, droughts, tornadoes, wild-fires. Earth is developing a fever. Even the ocean is getting warmer and more acidic. Dr. Adam Fenech (PhD, […]

How did inorganic chemicals eventually become you and me? For the past three weeks, we’ve been talking about “the cosmic egg” that exploded and produced the space-time continuum of our universe. Out of all that energy, quantum particles were formed, which eventually became the matter that coalesced into stars and planets. Earth itself seems to […]

. . . Dr. Robert Mann (PhD, Astronomy and Physics; U. Waterloo) shares with us his understanding of what evolved out of the “cosmic egg” that we’ve been talking about over the past couple of weeks … our universe. He has spent his career working on quantum physics and gravity and how they create Black […]

Once again, a re-release from the past in anticipation of new episodes starting next week. Here, we look at one idea of how the universe came into existence. This is how we summarized it when we released this over a year and a half ago … When we read a paper1 published a couple years […]

Are certain cosmological constants “too good to be random or coincidental”? . We’re repeating this episode in anticipation of a couple new ones that will be released in two weeks, after the holiday season has passed (we didn’t want those to be eclipsed by the distractions of the holidays). Those two new episodes in January […]

Some ethical/theological perspectives on public responses to the pandemic, and how to prepare for what’s in store . We begin with a look at the public backlash against the authorities who are simply trying to save humanity from this existential threat: Even if we can collectively get on board fully with the scientists and health-care […]

Myths, misconceptions, and conspiracy theories surrounding COVID-19 image from Pixabay, adapted . Last week, we focused on the science around COVID. Today, we’ve got pseudoscience in our cross-hairs. The misinformation, myths, science denial, and conspiracy theories that are put out by internet trolls and circulated through social media. Or which are simply a product of […]

The first in a series of episode exploring the strained relationship between the church and science . The church has long had a reputation for being anti-science, even though it was people of faith who built the foundations of the scientific enterprise for millennia. Even in the story of Galileo being tried by the church […]