I am a former Marine and one-time evolutionary biologist and agnostic who was called by the grace of God to become a Christian and Reformed preaching minister. I have served churches in Oklahoma, New Jersey, and I currently serve as a preaching minister in Plymouth, Michigan. In terms of doctrine, confession, and practice, I am a confessional, Reformed Protestant, and I adhere to the
Westminster Confession of Faith, although I preach within a non-confessional, non-Reformed tradition.
My interests are in systematic theology, Protestant Scholasticism, the English and New England Puritans, and the works of Stephen Charnock and Jonathan Edwards. Here are some quick links where you can find out more about my work:
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| The Dowlings: Matthew, Rachel, Gabriel, Gideon, Trinity, and Abram |
Saul Bellow, in the foreword to Allan Bloom’s
The Closing of the American Mind, wrote: “
Tell me where you come from and I’ll tell you what you are.” OK, then. I am from a great variety of places and am many things—a husband, father, student, researcher, scholar, a former Marine, an Oklahoman—and above all else—simply Christian. I currently serve as the preaching minister in Plymouth, Michigan. The variety of my background experiences have tended to help me “become all things to all men."
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With a couple of my "friends" in Panama on Barro Colorado Island,
where I was working as an ant biologist in the summer of 2005. |
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| With an Azteca ant nest |
I have been blogging since 2004. My initial foray into the blogosphere was a science blog called "
Ontogeny." It was a blog mostly about ants, and that was really cool (note the photo on the left of me with an
Azteca "carton" nest in Panama). Talk about a niche market! I wrote mostly from within the culture of science in those days, sharing my experiences as an evolutionary biologist and myrmecologist. Those were heady days. That blog enjoyed a spirited following until I closed shop over there in early 2008. Why did I close shop? Because I had fallen in love with theology, after falling in love with God, and I wanted to write about it. This blog
is the result.
