A man who lost the faith of his youth, and never stopped loving it. Five essays on doubt, on the God of Truth, and on why the books that couldn’t keep him still edify him.
“I like Christian books. They edify me… but my skepticism leaves me outside the fold.” — the position these essays circle, and the King Agrippa line they end on: almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.
Poor King Agrippa
The whole position in one essay: the Christian books he loves, the doctrines he can’t affirm, and Strauss’s “true myth” that lets him keep the meaning without the history.
24 August 2017
Augustine’s Folly
A careful, funny takedown of Augustine’s “we accept much on trust” argument: knowledge faces selective pressure that religious ideas don’t. Would 4th-century Augustine, born in the 9th, have argued the same for Islam?
14 July 2017
Some Quotes from a Book I Like
On David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1835) — and the lineage of “diligent stalwarts of the post-faith” he counts himself among. Some embedded quotations to be restored from the original.
21 June 2017
The War to End All Wars
The conscience of the whole project. After an argument that hurt friends he loves, he asks the honest question: what good is my mission, and what harm? One embedded quotation to be restored from the original.
4 September 2017
The Parable of the Farmer
A one-paragraph parable in the KJV register: an Evangelical sure of his salvation, a Chinese farmer who reads Micah once and goes and does likewise. At the Judgment, who enters?
22 August 2017