Joel R. Sanford – Who I Am

I consider myself a life-long student of religion and philosophy, and I have an impossible amount still to learn in both areas. I am a die-hard skeptic and pessimist married to a die-hard (Christian) believer and optimist, from whom I derive much joy and comfort. I frequently find myself playing devil’s advocate (at times quite literally), and I am probably too often worried about the point of it all to fully enjoy some of the ephemeral pleasures life has to offer. When I’m not agonizing over how to solve and/or transcend the problems of the world, I enjoy board games, classic video games, trips to the woods and the beach, and all types of music, but especially metal. I live with my wife, Emily, and our two children in Michigan, USA.

In terms of background, I was born into a conservative Protestant Christian family and raised in the tradition of my parents. In undergrad, I attended a Christian college where I first truly began to love Christianity and to own my faith. Shortly after graduating, a variety of experiences led me into a crisis of faith in which I still find myself. For the first time, I began to seriously consider age-old philosophical, theological, and historical questions and problems related to Christianity. Through this process, I realized just how little I understood of my own religious tradition, let alone the traditions of others. From that time on, I have been more or less obsessed with questions about the human condition and with understanding the many ways people have answered them in the past and continue to answer them today.

I have never been too comfortable with existential doubts, and eventually I decided my questions were important enough to pursue full time. So, I went and got a MA in Comparative Religion. Through my studies I was able to better answer some of my questions, while some remain open, and other new questions have arisen. At this point, my existential crisis has gone on long enough to be more of a personality trait than a true crisis, but it continues to orient many of my life’s pursuits. Currently, I would describe myself as something of a liberal Christian with many unanswered questions, though by popular standards, it might be more accurate to say that I fall somewhere between an Agnostic and a Christian.

What this Blog is About

I am concerned in life and in this blog with the truth about the real world and our place in it as human beings – what it is we ought to be doing in our time here and how we ought to go about doing it. The “we” here is significant. While these concerns are certainly very personal to me, this blog is not merely or even primarily about my personal “spiritual journey,” but about questions and problems that concern us all whether we realize it or not. For a long time now I have been convinced that the ways we live our lives as individuals and the ways we interact as a society are influenced in significant ways by the beliefs we hold about the fundamental nature of reality – what it is that we consider ultimately most good, valuable, permanent, and/or real. It seems to me that in discussions about politics and social norms, the role and impact of such beliefs is too often trivialized, overlooked, or simply ignored. This is one area that I hope to shed some much-needed light on in my writing. To that end, much of what I write here will be in response and in reference to current events or hot button issues, but always with a view to how these particular issues are connected to more general underlying trends in thought and practice.

By the title of the blog, “All Things Matter,” I mean a couple things. In one sense, this simply means that everything in the world and in our lives is connected to every other thing, that nothing is ever completely separate from anything else. Put just so, this might seem like either a pointless truism or just abstract nonsense, yet I mean something by it that I believe is both inadequately acknowledged and of real practical consequence for our lives. I am struck by how often we seem to think and talk as if aspects of our lives are (or at least should be) separated into distinct categories. So it is that we separate the religious from the secular, the personal from the professional, and the private from the public. In my view, such separations exist as ideals only, in practice never complete – often not even close – and that rather than describing the world as it is, they serve to obscure important connections within and between each of us. It is my hope to draw out some of these connections in my writing.

In another sense, what I mean by “all things matter” is that everything there is – every person, event, object, and entity, no matter how seemingly trivial or mundane, is of real significance or importance even in the grand scheme of things. This is a notion of which, admittedly, I am not completely convinced myself, but it is something I hope is true and that I choose to believe. And, it is the driving force behind this blog. I hope and I choose to believe that our interaction with each other through this medium matters – affects important change in us – and that our lives themselves and the decisions we make are of importance for more than just us.

So much for lofty goals. If you continue reading, I hope that you will find much here that is not just of theoretical interest, but of relevance to your actual life. To be clear, I do not at all intend to solve any of the world’s difficult problems outright, or to fully answer any of life’s enduring questions. While I have some relatively advanced knowledge in some of the subjects I will touch on, I am not an expert in anything, nor do I claim to be. Rather, I am well aware of the limits on my perspective and ways of thinking. My hope is that as a person with a unique perspective and set of experiences, I may have some insight, even perhaps some wisdom, worth sharing and that even if I don’t have anything truly novel to say, it may be expressed in a novel way or it may reach someone it would otherwise not have reached. I would like to stress that this is also an exercise to help me learn. Please do not hesitate to correct my mistakes or otherwise engage in dialogue with me through comments.