The President of the Evangelical Theological Society, Francis J. Beckwith, has just returned to the Catholic Church. I was impressed with his argument that there's nothing in the ETS's mission statement that he could disagree with as a reverting Catholic. Of course it would be an even bigger miracle if he were encouraged to keep his job; instead, and prudently, he has resigned as president but remains an ETS member.
And yet Bill Cork, until recently Director of Young Adult and Campus Ministry for the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, has quit and returned to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church of his youth. Since I don't follow his blog and don't intend to start now, the only sense I could get of his decision was that he had ceased to "trust" the Magisterium. My hunch is that he's fallen into dat ol' "development-and-negation" trap that I work to help people avoid. Perhaps somebody out there who knows him can tell me more.
The lesson? Reversions, whatever the direction, are not all subjective by any means. But childhood memories seem to have a lot to do with it.
