Recovering Evangelicals

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 […]

An informal but deeply personal conversation with renowned Evangelical and ExVangelical author Frank Schaeffer. Last week, we looked at a high-profile Evangelical author who grew up in the Evangelical world and fully embraced that worldview until reaching an age where he could assert some independent thinking and autonomy. By then, he had encountered a few […]

One of the most recognizable Evangelical authors today; and yet you won’t recognize the self-portrait that he gave us in this conversation! Philip Yancey is one of the most recognizable Christian authors in Evangelicalism today. He has written dozens of books over the past five decades. 15 million English copies have been sold, and they’ve […]

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 […]

The “Left Behind” series of books and movies have sown seeds of fear, doubt and anxiety, with life-changing and life-long psychological impact. We’ve already heard in the previous two episodes that many people who grew up in the era of the “Left Behind” series of books and movies were negatively impacted by those forms of […]

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 […]

Five exvangelicals compare notes about our decisions to either reject or reconstruct a faith system that just wasn’t working for us. Image by Sunny Sunflower from Pixabay Picture a gymnasium full of “kids” celebrating their 30-year high school reunion. After graduating from the same school, they all took different paths through life. Joined completely different […]

We look at some of the common ways that believers [mis]understand this, and share some other perspectives on the how’s, who’s and what’s behind it. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay Is the Bible divinely-inspired? Often the first thing that Evangelicals will do when asked that question  — after voicing a very vigorous “YES!”  — […]

A close look at the history, science, and theology behind this strange practice, and what it all means for us today. image by 愚木混株 Cdd20 from Pixabay Most Evangelicals will have encountered the phenomenon of “speaking in tongues”, if only through reading about it in the New Testament. But I’m guessing very few of them […]

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 […]