Early Life
In an autobiographical chapter in Flynn's 1993 "The Trouble with Christmas," Flynn stated that he was born in 1955 in Erie, Pennsylvania, the only child of a moderately conservative Catholic family. He believed zealously in the teachings of the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church, beginning to question its teachings only after many church doctrines and practices were revised in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, which affected parish life when Flynn was a young adolescent. He earned his bachelor's degree at Xavier University, the Jesuit university in Cincinnati, Ohio, where the school's emphasis on philosophy and theology gave him the tools he needed to pursue his religious questions at a more serious level. Over several years of inquiry he rejected his Catholicism, then his Christianity, and ultimately his theism. Acknowledging that he had become an atheist in 1980 while residing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he visited Milwaukee's downtown library, looked up "atheism" in the card catalogue, and found the so-called Dresden Edition of "The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll" on the open stacks. Reading Ingersoll's florid Gilded Age speeches in defense of agnosticism and atheism confirmed him in his identity as an atheist and kindled his desire to become a public activist for unbelief.
Read more about this topic: Tom Flynn (author)
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall
But they are gone to early death, who late in school
Distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl.”
—Richard Eberhart (b. 1904)
“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world. Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental.”
—Max Weber (18641920)