Category: Pivot Point Feature

A Parental Gift Barbara Lynne Conroy I was raised Catholic “light.” When I was a child, my family attended church only on Sundays and “required” holidays. I attended Catholic school until I completed fourth grade. I lobbied my parents hard to let me go to public school. When I was twelve years old (this was …

Simon Blackburn, Think Scott Cullen-Benson Before I can write about my pivot point, I must say a little about what came before. I was raised a Lutheran (in one of the more liberal synods) in a very small Midwestern town. My experiences were for the most part positive, because my mother emphasized the humanistic aspects …

The Animals Question Sam Bellotto Jr. Many decades ago when I was a child in grade school, my parents colluded with the local Catholic diocese to make sure I attended religious indoctrination classes regularly. They referred to them as religious instruction classes. It was a struggle. Every Tuesday afternoon, we Catholic kids got excused from …

I Put My Life on the Line Margaret Neate In the 1930s in my country town in Australia, most families professed allegiance to one of the several Protestant churches or the Catholic one. I attended the state primary school, where each class heard Bible stories once a week. We were not taught about non-Christian religions …

From Mennonite to Atheist Gordon Martin I was born in 1943 to a Mennonite farm family in Waterloo County, Ontario, home to Canada’s biggest concentration of Mennonites, who moved from Pennsylvania in the mid-1800s. I was third in line after a brother who died at five months old. I remember from very early on being …

A Theological Radical Paul Heffron I describe my pivot point in my piece in Free Inquiry, “My Theological Quest Ended in Secular Humanism” (FI February/March 2018), an installment in the “Faith I Left Behind” column. Studying radical theological trends led to a pivotal moment in which I said over and over, “God ain’t doing a …

Lightning Didn’t Strike J. P. Chasse   My pivot point came early! I was about twelve or thirteen, an altar boy, and quite rebellious. One morning in the early 1960s, I was serving at the convent across the street with our head priest. That morning, he got quite caught up in his sermon to the …

Is This All There Is? Kathleen Corcoran   I should have written this down years ago. Thanks for being the impetus! I was a Catholic school-child—a six-year-old first grader, I think—when I first thought, a bit like Peggy Lee, Is this all there is? I’m not sure what prompted that thought. I have a memory …