Today’s post is the third in a series exploring fundamentalism from a variety of angles in light of the centennial of Harry Emerson Fosdick’s May 1922 sermon, Shall the Fundamentalists Win? The first installment can be read HERE and the second HERE. The series continues by looking at shifting definitions of “fundamentalist” and “evangelical.” Next week, I’ll be exploring fundamentalism as a global phenomenon. In the late 1970s, I was a student at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, an evangelical Christian liberal arts college.

Editor’s Note: In the next few weeks, we’ll be posting the audio from a 6-part course on biblical imagery. If you’d like to join the upcoming course on deconstruction, sign up here. The new course starts on September 4. I came across a helpful way to picture the way the Bible references itself in Richard Hays’ book, Reading Backwards. Writing about the way the book of Luke deals with the Old Testament, Hays uses the analogy of a theater:

People often ask me what my favorite hot dog stand is, or what the best hot dog is in the United States. Impossible to say. There are too many deserving candidates. And, too, there are so many different regional styles of hot dogs that such a proposition would be akin to comparing apples and oranges. But, if the proverbial gun was held to my head, I might say Gene & Jude’s in Chicago.

For every idea that becomes an essay or column or unhinged rant (take your pick) that I complete and gets posted I probably have three ideas I start, but never finish. But I don’t want to abandon those partially-completed projects because I never know when I’ll need the germ of an idea so I’ll tuck those unfinished thoughts into a Word document and then totally forget about them until the Word document gets way too big and unwieldy to remember what’s in there, so then I’ll start another Word document.

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