Testimony / Conversion Experience
You could say that I have been around the theological block a few times. I’ve converted to and from a number of things. Baptized Catholic and raised Episcopalian, I ran through nondenominational groups in my teen years and then was off to the Reformation. I went through some philosophy degree programs and left the Reformation […]
We will never finish with his confessions because they will not finish with us” (12), Robin Lane Fox writes in his new five-hundred-page biography of St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. Lane Fox, a historian of the ancient world, endeavors to tell the story of Augustine’s life from his birth in Thagaste in 354 to the […]
Growing up in evangelicalism, I was one of those kids who felt mediocre at meetings where ex-drug addicts gave their "testimony" of suddenly losing their craving for LSD. My grandmother used to speak of two groups of Christians: those who were "saved," and those who were "gloriously saved." Everything a good, clean Baptist youth is […]
D. G. Hart's essay "The Evangelical Narrative: Getting Rid of the Church" (Modern Reformation, November/December 2008) is an insightful study of the nature of evangelicalism and its relationship to Reformation Christianity, and an incisive critique of what Hart sees as evangelicalism's resulting weakness in ecclesiology and approach to ministry. I find Hart's history plausible, his […]
To question conversion is not the same thing as favoring dead orthodoxy or nominalism. A middle position may actually exist between my original essay, "The Evangelical Narrative: Getting Rid of the Church" (Modern Reformation, November/December 2008), and Donald T. Williams' gracious response, "Getting Rid of Conversion?" That position answers one of Williams' concluding questions with […]
Alan Jacobs lifts the title of his book from Hamlet, but it could just as easily be a description of the Roman god Janus, whom Ovid invokes in his poem "Fasti": "Two-formed Janus what god shall I say you are,/ Since Greece has no divinity to compare with you?/ Tell me the reason, too, why […]
You may have noticed that I'm not using my name in this article. It's not (total) cowardice, but when you tell others that you have spent over 20 years in a cult, you imagine some perplexed reactions. There must have been something very wrong with you or, if not, you must have suffered terrible mental […]
The bright young student in the first row looked up at me with surprise: "C. S. Lewis was an atheist?" Several undergraduates in the class nodded and audibly confirmed my statement. "I had no idea," he muttered wide-eyed as he jotted down some notes. Indeed, C. S. Lewis ("Jack" to his friends) considered himself an […]
