Sentence of the day

“Oh, you can’t go through seminary and come out believing in God!”

That’s from Preachers Who Are Not Believers, a fascinating paper in the journal Evolutionary Psychology by Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola. The abstract begins:

There are systemic features of contemporary Christianity that create an almost invisible class of non-believing clergy, ensnared in their ministries by a web of obligations, constraints, comforts, and community. Exemplars from five Protestant denominations, Southern Baptist, United Church of Christ, Presbyterian, Methodist and Church of Christ, were found and confidentially interviewed at length about their lives, religious education and indoctrination, aspirations, problems and ways of coping. The in-depth, qualitative interviews formed the basis for profiles of all five, together with general observations about their predicaments and how they got into them.

You can download the PDF here – it is the last item listed in Issue 1, 2010. There is a discussion about its implications at the Washington Post here: participants include big names such as Julia Neuberger, Richard Dawkins, John Shelby Spong, Deepak Chopra.

Monitor: Penny Wise via Marginal Revolution