Loren Paulsson

Scott Harrison has been my friend since we were classmates at the ELS Seattle CELTA course. He and another classmate and mutual friend have since found their respective ways to Saudi Arabia to take jobs using the skills we learned there, teaching English. Could you start by describing your growing up experience and the steps from where you grew up to where you are now? With regards to religion, I grew up in a Southern Baptist family. My dad was a Sunday school teacher. During my late teens, I stopped going to church on Sundays, but I went on Wednesday evenings because it was "youth night." (Like many, I went there for the girls.) After reading about so many horrible things in the news (murders especially), I began questioning why the world is full of such injustice and crime. Working as a security guard at the time, I convinced my partner to leave his bible with me during my graveyard shift as I wanted to "return to Jesus" that night to find some answers for why the...

"Reason, Faith, and Revolution" is based on lectures Terry Eagleton gave at Yale in 2008, and he begins his criticism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens—or “Ditchkins” as he refers to them together—by asserting the atheists have made an error of genre. For Christians God is not a “mega-manufacturer” but “the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever.” God needs nothing for his own existence and creates the world out of nothing. Creation is the ultimate act of an almost reckless generosity. “Because there is no necessity about the cosmos, we cannot deduce the laws which govern it from a priori principles, but need instead to look at how it actually works. This is the task of science.” The scientist starts not only with matter but with the assumption of intelligibility, which means science isn’t talking about the same stuff Christianity is talking about. In a metaphysical sense, science does not go back far enough to explain existence. For Thomas Aquinas, by co...