About Joe Minich
Greetings! Please allow me to introduce myself. I’m Joe Minich, a husband of Rebecca, a father of four children, a recent Ph.D graduate in humanities, and (now!) a Davenant Fellow. What is that? Basically, I craft Christian education products for The Davenant Institute. Let me tell you a little about what Davenant does and what I do with them.
The Davenant Institute exists to recover and re-appropriate the wisdom of the classical Protestant tradition for the sake of the contemporary church. By this, we do not mean that we aim to regurgitate old talking points, but rather that we engage in dialogue with forgotten ancestors (and their living heirs in both spirit and letter) as we face modern intellectual and moral challenges. The genius of Protestantism is not the label “Protestant” or one of its sub-branches (“The Presbyterians”). It is rather the project of uniting classical catholic orthodoxy with a spirit of continued renewal and maturation--rendering the church ever a pilgrim church.
What will I be doing with them? In addition to organizing local book groups, teaching online courses, and doing some online writing that helps us to reframe some of our disputes, I will also be putting a lot of my effort into crafting an online multidisciplinary conversation that puts (mostly) evangelical theologians and pastors in conversation with one another on various topics. Basically, we have difficult questions before us. And it is my judgment that we will best address them in collaboration. My method of accomplishing this will be to engage in open-ended interviews with a host of persons on various dimensions of a difficult topic via our new Pilgrim Faith podcast. In aggregate, the goal is to develop a video/audio resource for Christians who are thinking through difficult issues (the meaning of Genesis 1-11, Christian political thought, etc) that helps them to scratch multi-faceted intellectual and existential itches. This will take time to craft, but I think an enormous blessing to many Christians.
In addition to this, and perhaps most distinctively, I will be developing the rhetorical approach begun in my little book, Enduring Divine Absence, in order to create an open-ended series of videos that help doubting insiders and curious outsiders to the faith to work through their intellectual or spiritual crises with the aid of a fellow traveler and brother. The goal is to walk through the various points of the Christian faith, or various difficult questions, in a way that takes the vantage point of doubt (or various common reactions to bits of our faith) very seriously. But what I aim to do with this is to present Christian teaching in its grandness and beauty by means of addressing these things rather than by dismissing them. The aforementioned book has already been used with Christian college students to excellent effect. I think this is a peculiar gift I have to give, and I look forward to the opportunity to give it more.
It would be a great joy to me (and I think to you) if you would consider supporting me in these efforts for the sake of God’s kingdom and name. You will see a suggested list of donations above. I fully understand if this (or any amount) is not in the cards for you, but I would especially ask all who are willing to both pray for me and to please send the material to those who might benefit from it. And if you know of anyone who might be interested in supporting me, please do forward this page onto them!
With sincere gratitude,
Joe Minich