The Middle of Things

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Meghan Florian. The Middle of Things

The Middle of Things

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Camp Kierkegaard

What About Breakfast at Tiffany’s?

Must Love Radiohead

A Few More Miles

Life Improvement

Pencil Skirts & Power Ties

Performance

Hers

Bibliography

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— Essays —

By Meghan Florian

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Long before I started reading the famous Danish Lutheran philosopher, known to some as the “father of existentialism,” I had begun a faith struggle of my own. Raised in the Christian Reformed Church by parents strongly influenced by Baptist and evangelical Christianity, and attending a small religious college in the west Michigan “bible belt,” my life had always been influenced by the church. Even as an adolescent, though, my busy mind had wrestled with big questions. In my high school Sunday school classes, while I reveled in—and sometimes struggled with—the language of the Heidelberg Catechism, my peers seemed bored, simply accepting the faith their families had practiced for generations. While others attended football games on the weekends, I was at home poring over C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. I scribbled ordinary teen angst in my journal, yet my prose was also peppered with thoughts on the universe and God and my place in the order of things.

Now, as a college student, I was in the midst of a crisis—a dark night of the soul, as theological types like to call it. I was taking courses on bible and religion and philosophy that stretched the boundaries of what I thought I knew, of what I was capable of knowing. I hadn’t given up on church, but I had a new set of questions, more skeptical than those of my C. S. Lewis days. In my Old Testament class we studied historical critical methods of interpretation, and as I learned more of the details of by whom and how the biblical canon was constructed, instead of lashing out like some of my peers did—denying this method if interpretation in favor of infallibility—I accepted it. But I didn’t know what to do with this new knowledge. The bible had not dropped from the sky in one piece. It contained contradictions, dare I say flaws, with which I did not know how to cope.

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