Claim OwnershipRecovering Evangelicals
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A podcast for people who were once very comfortable in their Christian faith … until the 21st century intruded and made it very hard to keep on believing.
And for those who are intrigued by science, philosophy, world history, and even world religions …. and want to rationalize that with their Christian theology.
And for those who found that’s just not possible … and yet there’s still a small part of them that … … won’t let it go.
And for those who are intrigued by science, philosophy, world history, and even world religions …. and want to rationalize that with their Christian theology.
And for those who found that’s just not possible … and yet there’s still a small part of them that … … won’t let it go.
203 Episodes
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The Dual-Inheritance Model explains so much about the emergence of religion in Homo sapiens millions of years ago, as well as the persistence (growth?) of atheism in a world dominated by religious humans. This week, we bring you the second half of our conversation with Dr. Will Gervais. We return to the kitchen table where […]
It took billions of years and billions of life forms, but religion eventually emerged in one species, and filled the globe; and yet disbelief persists? Today’s guest — Dr. Will Gervais (Brunel University, London UK) — has recently published an exceptional book: Disbelief: origins of atheism in a religious species. In it, he addresses two […]
… on science, religious belief, and the meaning of life. Our guest — Dr. Philip Clayton — is an exceptionally credentialed and highly acclaimed philosopher, speaker and author standing at the interface between science and religion. In this book, he teamed up with a non-theist — Claudia Pearce — to write a book which addresses […]
Do we burn them all, or can we redact the problematic parts? Or do we take the path that involves his confession, repentance and restoration? Last week, we explored our own responses, as well as those of nine anonymous listeners/friends, to the sex scandals involving Christian authors and theologians. This began as a direct response […]
We begin with a really hot-potato topic, one that blew up the Evangelical Christian community a few weeks ago! Recovering Evangelicals are back from hiatus! When we took a break from podcasting last summer, we wondered if there even would be a 7th season … and if we did return, whether we needed to re-brand. […]
Divine dictation of fully-formed books, or a gradual evolution of texts at the hands of authors, editors, interpreters, redactors, copyists, collectors, ……? This will be the first of several episodes we’re hauling out of our Podcast Archive that are related to how we came to have this collection of books we call the Bible. This […]
A new understanding of the ancient story of Israel’s exodus out of Egypt leads to a whole new understanding of the Passover … and of the crucifixion! In this episode, Scott and Luke look back on the two recent re-releases — both challenging the traditional “Sunday school version” of the Exodus story — to address […]
Science now makes the Sunday School version of this story 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 […]
Although the origin story for Jews, and the foundation for much of Christian theology, many scholars will ask: did it really happen (that way)? 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 […]
Last week we said this “mind-virus” could end up destroying the planet; this week we explain the three biggest reasons why/how. Last week’s episode title claimed “Dispensationalism” could end up destroying our planet, but we never really fully explained how: here, we fill in that fundamentally important gap. Our guest is the perfect expert for this. […]
Very few have heard of “Dispensationalism,” and fewer could give a paragraph-length definition of it, and yet it saturates Evangelical thinking and influences much of what is in the news headlines today Are you aware of the common thread that ties together the following diverse list of things: All of these are connected by one […]
A retrospective on how well we achieved our goals for this season, and pondering whether we need to do some re-branding before the next!? August is a busy time of year for us: vacations … road-trips … and getting ready for the return to teaching responsibilities at the university. And for that reason, we have typically gone […]
Although Christians may say that “Jesus was fully human and fully divine,” many of them tend to slow-pedal the first half of that fundamental tenet. A fundamental Christian belief is that Jesus was fully human and yet fully divine. But for many, including us at Recovering Evangelicals, this tenet raises all kinds of questions and […]
It’s time to revise our picture of human origins, and the theology built up around the one handed down to us by authors and church fathers who knew nothing about our hominid cousins. This is the final episode of our miniseries looking at the impact that scientific discoveries over the past couple centuries of our […]
A committed secular humanist, two Christians (and a Jewish rabbi) compare perspectives on their agreed claim that human morality has been on the upswing. A year ago, we did an episode with a Jewish rabbi and scholar — Dr. and Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson — exploring the claim that human morality has been trending upwards, […]
The questions “who was the first person to speak English?” and “who was the first human?” are equally ridiculous and unanswerable, and for the same reasons. For many Christians, the many recent discoveries of our ancient hominid ancestors have raised uncomfortable questions. Some of them will cope with this by just trying to avoid any […]
Christianity’s response to discoveries of ancient hominids today is exactly the same as their response to previous discoveries of “non-Adamic” people in the Americas … “they’re not human!” Christianity today is not handling well the recent discoveries of ancient hominids. A lot of denial and dismissal; very little excitement or enthusiasm. One shouldn’t be surprised […]
Do we need to update our theology in light of Christian-bigotry toward our genetic cousins? During the millennia that Biblical characters were living out their lives, Biblical authors were writing their texts, the early Christian church was forming, and the medieval Church fathers were constructing a Christian theology, nobody had any idea that humans had […]
The anniversaries of two pivotal legal cases brought by evolution deniers got us talking to the National Center for Science Education about their work 2025 is the 100th anniversary of the infamous Scopes Trial (aka, the “Monkey Trial”), in which a high school teacher in Tennessee was convicted of violating a law that banned teaching human […]
Time magazine’s pick for “most influential Evangelical in 2015” tells his own story of leaving behind traditional Evangelicalism. Over the past five years, we’ve interviewed many people who are “Recovering Evangelicals” … people who were handed an Evangelical/Fundamentalist faith that they eventually found they had to reject. As they explored their faith from different angles, […]
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