Facing my finitude
When I retired from Missouri State University after twenty-five years of teaching religious studies, holding one graduate degree in the confessional study of religion, and two graduate degrees in the academic study of religion, I decided to ask myself what I as a twenty-first century human being thought about the verities of religion and Christianity in particular. I determined to wrestle with its truths, if any, in the public eye through an online blog.
Last month (August, 2026) I published a second book of my findings with Pickwick Publications, a publishing arm of Wipf and Stock, Publishers, entitled What the Church Doesn’t Tell You. Pondering Christian Tradition. It is a record of my personal odyssey critically pondering aspects of my own religious faith, and how I went about engaging the boundaries between the faith I had been taught and human reason.
From the Back Cover
This book “is aimed at curious readers wanting to explore how the rise of modern critical thinking since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment impacts Christian faith and belief today. The Enlightenment, a philosophical and scientific movement in Europe and America, gave birth to the critical method and witnessed the rise of reliance on human reason, both of which have continued to threaten a revealed religion and the hegemony of Christian belief based on ideas of the supernatural…”
Table of Contents
There are six chapters consisting of brief essays of two to three annotated pages each on topics related to: The Nature of the Universe, Life and Politics, Christian Beliefs and Experience, The Bible, The Nature of God, Jesus and Christology, The Church. The essays, written in the period from 2019 to 2026, appeared first on my blog, entitled “Wry Thoughts about Religion,” then revised for print media, and published in the present volume of essays.
The book was not planned out in the abstract but grew out of my personal engagement with life. Thus, ideas for the essays emerged from newspapers, the evening news, sermons I heard from my pew at the back of the church, a personal reading of the Bible, comments made to me by others, and its chapter titles emerged from the diversity of subjects that I had addressed over time in the essays.
From the Introduction
In ecclesiastical traditions writing generally serves the purpose of reaffirming faith. The present collection of essays, on the other hand, belong to what I would call a “gadfly” tradition. Encountering gadflies in nature is a completely negative experience, but in society they can be either positive or negative. The earliest and perhaps the best-known social gadfly was Socrates. According to Plato, “Socrates refrains from expounding complicated views of his own, preferring instead to question those who claim to have such views themselves.” The Athenians charged him with impiety. In his defense Socrates argued that God had fastened him upon the city as a gadfly to urge them toward virtue. The trial ended in a sentence of death for Socrates (4–5).
From the Epilogue
The American Theologian Robert W. Funk wrote “at what point does the discrepancy between what I know, or think I know…and what I am willing to say publicly become so acute that my personal integrity is at stake.” He goes on to describe how he had dissembled and attempted to avoid asking difficult questions and/or answering them candidly by shifting from the parish ministry to the academic world and then from seminary to the secular university. Along the way he discovered that the fundamental issue is the nature of faith itself. He found that what he knew or thought he knew undermined the original affirmations he had received from those who had preceded him both in faith and the scholarly guild. This book poses the question, “What does one do then?”
Order the Book?
Charles W. Hedrick, What the Church Doesn’t Tell You. Pondering Christian Tradition (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2026).
The book may be ordered from Wipf and Stock Publishers. $51.00; 384 pages.
199 West 8th Ave, Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401–2960
Tel 1-541–344–1528
orders@wipfandstock.com
Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University
