00 Book to blog

You may have heard of blog-to-book publishing. This is going to be the opposite.

In 2005 we published our book Paradigms on Pilgrimage: Creationism, Paleontology, and Biblical Interpretation. It tells the stories of our two journeys as a paleontologist and pastor/biblical scholar. It recounts how we were each taught a young-earth, ‘”scientific creationist” position in our younger years and how we eventually came to embrace understandings that are more modest, tentative and nuanced, but which we ultimately have also found more satisfying, durable and empowering. This was the result of a process that required years of study and reflection, and which included times of frustration and disillusionment as well as moments of liberating insight.

The book has now gone out of print and the rights have reverted to us. As a result, we are able to make the full text* available online to anyone who’s interested. We’ll be putting it out over the next several weeks in a series of blog posts of about 800-1200 words each. This will also give us the opportunity to present the photos and diagrams in digital form, and to add some new illustrations.

We invite your comments and questions on each post, and we will open things up for general Q&A and discussion about religion and science, faith and reason, after the whole book appears. (Comments may be edited for length, content, and tone.) Thanks for reading along, and we look forward to interacting with you!

Dr. Stephen J. Godfrey
Rev. Dr. Christopher R. Smith

*Because blogging is a more “popular” format, we won’t be including the footnotes from the book, which provide documentation especially for the scientific findings that Dr. Godfrey summarizes as he tells his story. If readers have questions about any of these findings, we’ll be happy to supply this documentation as part of the discussion.