Mark Coppenger (BA, Ouachita; PhD, Vanderbilt; MDiv, SWBTS) retired in 2019 as Professor of Christian Philosophy and Ethics at SBTS, having also taught full time at Wheaton (IL) and MBTS and as an adjunct at Elmhurst. He’s been a pastor and an infantry officer, and he posts at markcoppenger.com. How did you get into philosophy? My dad (PhD, Edinburgh) was teaching Bible, theology, and church history courses in a small Christian college that needed a philosophy teacher. They drafted him to fill the gap, so he took some summer courses at GWU and UC-Boulder to get up to speed. The family accompanied him on these trips, and I began to pick up on intriguing references to “dialectical materialism,” “John Dewey,” etc. I admired my dad, and the bug bit, so I chose to major in philosophy when I got to college. Before long, I was getting acquainted with the Pre-Socratics, loving aesthetics, and stumbling through Sartre and Gide in French. Behind it all was the sense that this would be a good mission field in …