(Last updated 05/14/2021)

 

I am a wife, homemaker, mother, emeritus home schooler, and scholar. (My youngest daughter has recently graduated.) My husband is Timothy McGrew, full professor in the Department of Philosophy at Western Michigan University and a well-known scholar and apologist. As a scholar, I’m an analytic philosopher with a fairly hefty publication record in such areas as testimony, independence, probability theory, etc. More recently my work has extended to New Testament studies. Here is my curriculum vitae.

 

My undergraduate degree was from a Bible college, without much literature background, so I prepared myself to apply for graduate studies in English by self-teaching. That work paid off, and I received a Department of Education fellowship to take a graduate degree. I received my PhD in English Literature from Vanderbilt University in 1995. Subsequently I began publishing in epistemology (the theory of knowledge) in co-written works (articles and a book) with my husband, Timothy McGrew, after he was teaching at Western Michigan University. Tim and  I branched off on my own and continued building my publication record with peer-reviewed articles written alone in both classical and formal epistemology. This was the second scholarly field that I “broke into” without taking formal courses, but my publication record, continued up to the present, speaks for itself.

 

Around 2013 to 2014 Tim introduced me to the argument from undesigned coincidences, which he was reviving as part of his work on the history of ideas—specifically the history of the deist controversy and responses to David Hume’s argument against miracles in the 18^th century. As it happened, I “ran with” that argument and wrote a book-length manuscript on it on my own, though I learned of it originally from Tim. In 2017 I published a book on the argument from undesigned coincidences, which supports the reliability of the Gospels and Acts. Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts was released in the spring of 2017 by DeWard Publishing. This was the beginning of my move into a third field of scholarly work, once again carried out in a non-traditional manner. In December, 2019, I published The Mirror or the Mask: Liberating the Gospels from Literary Devices. In March, 2021, I published my third book in New Testament studies—this one on the Gospel of John: The Eye of the Beholder: The Gospel of John as Historical Reportage. See the main page of this website for samples of this third book and for its endorsements. I hope that these three books will be used by laymen and scholars alike.

 

I’m very interested in the intersection of issues in biblical studies and epistemology (theory of knowledge), and there are many ways in which knowledge about independence, testimony, and evidence can be helpful in biblical studies. This sort of crossover work is desperately needed in a field such as biblical studies that has become, unfortunately, rather inward looking. I’m doing a lot more of this at my Youtube channel, which I began in the summer of 2020 and which passed 1,000 subscribers in the spring of 2021.

 

I am (as readers of my various blog posts and my Facebook posts know) politically and socially very conservative. The murder of the innocent, born and unborn, seems to me a crux of our time. Another crux is the sanctity of marriage, the nature of male and female, and the nature of human sexuality, and on those issues, too, the skies are very dark in the West. I have also been extremely concerned during 2020 and 2021 about the loss of civil liberties and religious liberties resulting from government responses to Covid. I think it’s very important for Christians and conservatives to be willing to speak up for what we believe and stand for.

 

I’m an entirely traditional and theologically conservative Christian—deity of Christ, resurrection, the whole works. Raised a fundamentalist Baptist, I’m now a member of a continuing Anglican church. Continuing Anglicans use the 1928 Prayer Book and do not ordain women. Hymnody is also one of my interests. I’ve had the enormous privilege of learning most of the hymns found in any old-fashioned Baptist hymnal and, since I’ve been in the continuing Anglican church, adding to that many wonderful Anglican hymns that I’d never known before.

 

 

I'm on Facebook, and you are welcome to follow my public content here. I accept only a limited number of Facebook friends for my private content but publish announcements of new posts and some other content set to “public.” Here is my Facebook author page, which I limit to posts about my books or topics related to the topics of my books. Don’t forget to subscribe to my Youtube channel if interested in my content.

 

I also do a lot of e-mail correspondence, so feel free to write me with a specific, focused question at lydiamcgrew [at] gmail [dot] com. Be sure to introduce yourself if you write.

 

 

Random fun facts:

 

I love horses, though I have never owned one and though I'm not a very good rider. My idea of a great outing is going somewhere where I can pat large draft horses and their foals.

 

I was a music major for a while in college before chickening out and becoming a missions major. I love to sing and still play the piano, though not nearly as well as I did when young.

 

I was adopted as a baby and have since then learned the story of my birth by getting in e-mail contact with my biological mother.

 

I like to make bad puns and persecute my friends and family with them from time to time, interspersing them with lame jokes that I think are funny. The only ones that are really funny are generally the puns I make by accident.

 

In recent years I have taken up square dancing and contra dancing as a hobby.

 

I hold a hymn sing at my house for homeschooling families and other Christian friends every other month.