Soul Searching

‘Maintaining Perspective on Everything’

Daniel Cochran ’08

As a boy, Daniel Cochran ’08 never questioned the literal stories taught in Sunday school at the United Methodist Church his family attended near their home in Portsmouth, R.I.

“After all, most kids believe in Santa Claus,” he says. “And the tooth fairy—I even imagined this castle she was building with teeth. So Jonah being swallowed by a whale didn’t seem far-fetched at all.”

By high school, where classes included biology, chemistry, and evolutionary history and theory, he began wondering whether he could call himself a person of faith. He still went to church every week, and occasionally played in a brass ensemble during services with his siblings, but it was a difficult time.

College brought even more questions—but also many answers. Over the past four years, Cochran’s interpretation of the Bible has changed radically, due in no small part to his major in religion. Coming to a realization as a freshman that passages can have wildly different meanings depending on their translation, he began learning Latin and Greek so that he could study the original texts.

“There’s just such a complex history of interpretation and misinterpretation,” he explains. “There have been a lot of changes. I really wanted to look at what the founding texts were, what they said, instead of what we have developed 2,000 years later. I’ve learned that the authors of the New Testament, and those in the Old Testament, had different ways of conveying messages to their audience than we do today.

“And that really has helped my faith grow. A lot.”

Cochran attends Sunday afternoon church services on campus and participates in Dinner Dialogues, a weekly series of casual faith-related discussions among Protestant students (and at times students from other faiths) over free home-cooked dinners. For his senior thesis, he explored the possibility that Paul has been historically misrepresented and how a “radically new interpretation” would affect the relationship between Christians and Jews today.

The intellectual, “thought-provoking” viewpoints he hears during the Dinner Dialogues and in classes, combined with spiritual teachings during worship, have allowed him to “mesh” what had long felt like two opposing forces.

Not that his religious challenges are over. As Cochran enters Harvard Divinity School this fall, in preparation for a career in the ministry and as a professor of biblical interpretation, he fully expects—and admittedly hopes—that his future education and life experiences will reveal new understanding of the ways in which God interacts with the world.

For now, he stands in awe of sunsets, appreciates a nice breeze while jogging along the Genesee River, and is moved by stories of people performing heroic acts to save strangers from danger.

“I think in our familiar and affluent Western culture, too often we—as faithful, agnostic, or atheist—lose sight of our place within creation,” he says, “of our responsibility to both our fellow people in other parts of the world and our responsibility to the Earth itself.”

Cochran quotes a scripture in Hebrew that translates into “Know before whom you stand.”

Keeping this passage in mind, he adds, “helps me maintain a certain perspective on everything.”