Author

The Dowlings: Matthew, Rachel, Gabriel, and Gideon

Please contact Matt via email at this address, replacing DOT and AT appropriately: 

matt (DOT) dowling (AT) oc (DOT) edu

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 worship and minister within the Churches of Christ, of the American Restoration Movement and the Stone-Campbell Tradition. I currently serve as the education minister at Alameda Church of Christ in Norman, Oklahoma. Readers of this blog might quickly note that I am neither captive to this tradition nor in reaction against it. I am trying to be a scholar, not a polemicist. The variety of my background experiences have tended to help me “become all things to all men." More often than not, these rich variety of experiences have tended to make me a better minister, but it is important to note that they have also resulted in quite a bit of cognitive dissonance from time to time. That's a good thing. Thinking is hard work to begin with, and it becomes doubly so when you put yourself in the position of being around people who think very differently than you do. I don't avoid that opportunity though, and I'm of the opinion that life will be better for it.

With a couple of my "friends" in Panama on Barro Colorado Island, where I was working as ant biologist in the summer of 2005

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, and from my experiences as an evolutionary biologist. 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. Desposyni is the result and I began posting here in December 2007. In many ways I'm late to the blogging game in the theological corners of the blogosphere. This hasn't really stopped me though. After all, blogging is the ultimate self-indulgent exercise, and you can kind of do what you want. New bloggers start blogging everyday. 

So what what type of blog is Desposyni striving to be? Basically, it's a blog record of my transition from the world of science to the world of academic theology. As you can imagine when you begin to inhabit a new field, everything is new and interesting. Thus, if you look at my earliest posts, I was just simply taken with being a radical, sold-out follower of Jesus Christ. I haven't changed in that sense too much, except now I tend to focus on issues that likely appeal more to the academic than those who are pursuing how to live missionally within the world. So, here's what I am interested in:

Particular topics of interest to me are science and theology, systematic theology, biological evolution, ecology, Christian spirituality, philosophy of religion, christian nonviolence, and the cultural and theological directions of the Churches of Christ.

With Dr. Walter Brueggemann, October 2011

With William Lane Craig, November 2010

The home office, April 2012