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 I specialize in the work and theology of Stephen Charnock (1628-1680). I am a ThM student in historical theology at
Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids. 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.
