Bryan E. Dowd

I attended the Georgia Institute of Technology (Bachelor of Architecture, 1972), Georgia State University (M.S. in Urban Administration, 1976) and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D. in Public Policy Analysis, 1982).

I am a professor in the Division of Health Services Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.  My research focuses on health economics and health policy.

I was married to Susan Dowd in 1973 and we have a daughter Emily who currently is at St. Thomas University in St. Paul, Minnesota. I attend St. Stephen’s Church in Edina, Minnesota where I play the organ for the 8 AM service each Sunday.

My Personal Story

The apostle Peter tells Christians to “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15).  What I would like to do in a few paragraphs is to tell you a little bit about my background, and the development of my life with Christ.

I grew up on a farm outside Rome, Georgia, a small town in the northwestern part of the state.  My early world consisted of my siblings, parents, grandparents, the other families who lived on the farm, and a few close friends of our family.  It was a world in which children didn’t know many people, but they got to know them pretty well.  I saw adults from a variety of races and creeds spending long hours together in hard, productive work, and experiencing all the sorrows and joys, failures and successes, of the human condition.

The Loveliest Person I’ve Ever Met

I attended Georgia Tech (Bachelor of Architecture), Georgia State University (M.S. in Urban Administration) and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D. in Public Policy Analysis).  In 1973, I married the loveliest person I’ve ever met, and Susan and I celebrated our 31th wedding anniversary this year.  We had a daughter, Emily, in 1984. Emily was married in 2008 and now lives in Chicago with her husband. and currently she is at the University of St. Thomas. I am a professor in the Division of Health Services Research and Policy in the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota where m.  My research focuses on health economics and health policy.

Thanks to the strong faith of my parents and grandparents, I was immersed in the Christian faith since the day I was born.  Contrary to the assertion of many atheists, however, that was not enough to guarantee my ultimate acceptance of the Christian faith. I joined our church at age nine.  In my denomination, that meant making a public profession of my faith in Jesus Christ and being baptized.  Despite my young age, I still remember quite vividly the immediate effect that my baptism had on my view of the world and my place in it.

I understood then, as I do now, that good and evil were at work in the world.  I understood that I had publicly expressed (a) my natural inclination to know what is good and to choose not to do it; and (b) my belief that the Christ’s atonement for my sins was my only hope for remedying that situation and its effect – to separate me from God who loved me enough to die for me. consequences. I also realized that my choice would involve costs as well as rewards.

Over the years, my early profession of faith has been a source of inspiration, confidence, guidance and joy.  However, I found it necessary to reassess my commitment to Christ as an adult.  I have read articles recently about the life-crises that young people have around the age of 21, which apparently get much less attention than mid-life crises.

A Panic Attack

That certainly was my experience.  My crisis was not so much a crisis of faith, as a panic attack.  I had missed the Vietnam draft by only 3 numbers in the lottery and was facing life’s responsibilities, including the immediate need to earn a living.  However, there was an element of the panic attack related to my faith.  I believed at that time that I had reached the limits of the Christian faith’s ability to justify its core beliefs from any sort of intellectual perspective, and for me, any progress from that point on would just be a matter of “blind” faith.

In retrospect, this conclusion was somewhat ridiculous. both odd and unwarranted. I was fairly familiar with the Bible, but I had read virtually no modern apologetics, much less any of the great works of Christian scholarship written over the millennia.  I knew almost nothing of church history.  The limits I had reached were not the limits of the reasonChristian faith and scholarship, but the product of limits imposed by my own ignorance and hubris.

Weighing Alternative Worldviews

At that point and undoubtedly under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, that I began to weigh alternative worldviews.  Nihilism, both pure and the type embedded in a materialistic worldview, were non-starters for me.  I had seen the black depression in people who had convinced themselves that life had no transcendent purpose.  The eastern religions offered a more palatable form of purposelessness, but I knew that the joys and sorrows of life were real, not illusions.

I saw that there really was no choice to be made, or at least nothing that I rightly could call a choice.  On the one hand lay a meaningless an existence with no purpose beyond self gratification and glorification or at best, vague ideals with roots that probably could be traced to Christianity but were unjustifiable if those roots were denied. Down that road lay promising despair and depression.  On the other hand stood Jesus Christ with the promise of life triumphant and everlasting.  If that’s a choice, then I wish all of mine were that easy.