What is The Layman?

I’m just a guy who loves to learn on a journey of learning how to live, and sharing what we learn is a valuable tool. I write to teach myself and correct myself along the way. You’re welcome to join the ride!

None of us has it all figured out, and we need help to grow in understanding. I’m grateful to anyone who uses any of their precious time reading here. If you have feedback of any sort, you can reach me in the comment sections of posts or privately at thelayperson@substack.com.

“Oh, the sins of passion and of the heart—how much nearer to salvation than the sins of reason!” — Søren Kierkegaard

About me

Professionally, I’m a forester in Tennessee, which is the land I love the most and where I’m grateful to be from. In terms of fancy degrees and accolades and reasons why my thoughts on the Bible are worth reading, I have none. All I can say is that my love for a disappearing land has had a huge effect on my reading of the Bible.

Other influences you’ll see pop up time and time again include people all over the Christian tradition: Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Wendell Berry, Jacques Ellul, Simone Weil, Dorothy Day, and so on. They may have never spoken to each other in this life, but there’s a rich discourse among them to delve all the same.

Ecumenically, I stand in the wake of the Stone-Campbell Movement, or “Restoration Movement” that swept through my little corner of the world in the 19th century and continues to ripple today. It’s a tradition I have great love and admiration for, and its high points are inspirational but in studying one’s roots and one’s present surroundings one inevitably discovers that the world is more complicated than our systems would like it to be. There are gaps in any discourse—I don’t presume to fill them, but I want to exist in them. Maybe it’s some way of compensating for the missing frontier in the physical world that my ancestors fell in love with.

So that’s what I’m doing here. I’m wrestling with the Bible, with God, and meditating on his Word. I’m interested in the physical world, in agriculture and silviculture and culture. The Bible is a beautiful text but it’s also scary. It forces us to wrestle with the notions of whatever society we find ourselves in. I’m probably wrong regularly here, but that’s inevitable in our pursuit of truth.

Here we explore various ideas that often make us uncomfortable. Things like philosophy, violence, ecumenism, anarchism, heresy, mysticism, politics, and so on. I’m interested in taking our analytical, systematic theologies and putting them on hold for a moment to explore the beyond before coming back and deciding whether our newfound ideas are reconcilable. Other thinkers who wrestled with God like Kierkegaard and Tolstoy are fascinating to me. If you grew up like I did, they might be dangerous territory. But being a Christian isn’t supposed to be easy or safe.