My name is Dan Koch. Like many of you, I've been on a complicated faith journey for a number of years now.

And while I tend to find myself on the progressive side of Christianity, my goal is not to make liberal converts.

I want this show to be a resource for Christians to my right and to my left, as well as

former Christians and non-religious folks, anyone who finds themselves asking difficult questions

about God, science, prayer, fate, suffering, evangelism, and more. So many of us have been given bad answers to those good questions, often by people with

pure intentions.

I want to say that you have permission to take both Christianity and the modern world very

seriously.

And I hope to facilitate that by introducing you to people seeking God across

the Christian spectrum, engaging hard questions in a multitude of ways. Thanks for listening.

Laird, Edmund, thank you so much for joining me today. Oh, thank you for asking me. This is an honor and a pleasure.

You're the chair of the psych department at Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa for a little while longer before retirement.

And you've done a lot of work with Myron Penner, friend of mine, frequent guest on this podcast. And that's how I met you. And we've become

kind of buddies over the last couple years going to American Academy of Religion conferences

and stuff like that. So we've been meaning to do an episode for a while, and we're finally

here. And I'm very grateful. It's great to be here. Give us a little bit of your kind of general background story,

how you ended up studying psych of religion and cognitive science of religion.

I went to college as an undergrad.

I loved literature and I loved kind of thinking big thoughts.

And so I ended up with a double major in English literature and classical

languages. And then I went off to grad school at Notre Dame to get my PhD in English lit,

you know, focused in on 17th century British lit, really.

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