The Accidental Apostate: Reports from the Uncertain Landscape of Freethought

This collection of essays on religion and spirituality are drawn from other, more general collections, in order to focus on a number of questions their author wrestled with during years in the Evangelical Christian church – as the son of a Fundamentalist pastor, as an inquisitive and curious thinker, and as a naturally progressive personality. The resulting conundrums were decades in resolution.

Though these essays fall into distinct categories – criticism of and disenchantment with the church, the embrace of cognitive science and the writings of Douglas Hofstadter, some straightforward autobiography, and the decades-long influence of the Baptist sociologist Tony Campolo – they are presented more-or-less randomly in the text, in an effort to let each thought presented stand on its own (to the degree that any of them do). The idea here is not to present a narrative, but to offer a broad series of emphatic (and perhaps unexpected) responses to the familiar posturings and screeds of the Evangelical Right.

There are also a few touches of humor, and hopefully some wistful fondness for a childhood lost. And, hopefully, some thoughts provoked…