Identity, Trauma, and Cultural Change in Sarah McCammon’s The Exvangelicals Sarah McCammon’s The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church is more than a memoir. It is a cultural document, a psychological case study, and a map of a movement that has no headquarters, no creeds, and no formal membership — only a shared ache. McCammon traces how a generation raised on purity culture, end times fear, and political absolutism has begun to unravel the worldview they inherited. Read alongside Daryl R. Van Tongeren’s Done: How to Flourish After Leaving Religion (2024), the picture becomes even richer. McCammon shows what is happening culturally and relationally; Van Tongeren explains why it feels the way it does psychologically. Together, they illuminate the inner and outer landscapes of leaving a totalizing religious system. A Childhood Formed by Fear, Love, and Certainty McCammon’s early chapters capture the emotional atmosphere of evangelical childhood: salv...
How Mercier and Sperber reframe reasoning as justification and argumentation in human interaction. Overview Mercier and Sperber’s The Enigma of Reason challenges one of the most entrenched assumptions in cognitive science: that reason evolved primarily to improve individual knowledge and decision-making. Instead, they argue that reason is best understood as a social adaptation, designed to justify our actions and persuade others. This reframing positions reason not as a solitary truth-seeking faculty, but as a tool for navigating the complexities of human cooperation and communication. Previous works such as Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), building on his collaboration with Amos Tversky, summarized decades of research revealing flaws in reasoning. Much of human decision-making relies on mental shortcuts or heuristics, characteristic of System 1 thinking, which depend in part on intuitions shaped by regularities in nature. Kahneman emphasized the slow and effortful work of Sy...