I write about what happens when the stories we build our lives around begin to fall apart. Faith, identity, power, doubt, love, community—these are the questions that have followed me from conservative Christianity and seminary classrooms into agnosticism, fiction, and whatever comes next. My work tends to live in the uncomfortable space between certainty and rejection, where people are forced to decide what remains when the answers they inherited no longer work.
My name is Joel Borofsky, though I write fiction as J.R. Borofsky. I was born June 24, 1983, in Wichita, Kansas, into a family with a somewhat complicated religious history. My father was born into an Orthodox Jewish family, which converted to Christianity when he was six years old—Southern Baptist Christianity, specifically. My mother came from a Protestant background and took Christianity much more seriously than my father did. So I grew up Southern Baptist, but not quite in the way that phrase usually suggests. Religion was there. It just wasn't always the center of the house.
That changed when I was about ten. My mother became heavily involved in church again and started taking my brother and me with her. A couple years later, my father rededicated his life to Christ and became serious about his faith. Soon our family moved to a more conservative church, and suddenly Christianity wasn't simply something my family believed. It became the world I lived in.
I hated that world at first. I was thirteen or fourteen when we joined the new church, and I had very few friends there. I was picked on constantly. At the same time, I had been homeschooled from fifth grade through the beginning of ninth grade, which meant there really wasn't anywhere else to go. My church, my school, my friends, my social life, and the people telling me what the world was like were largely drawn from the same conservative Christian community. When that community rejected you, there wasn't an alternate one waiting on Monday morning.
Then, halfway through my freshman year, I went back to public school. I loved it. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who didn't think like me. I became friends with kids from different religions, different backgrounds, and different ideas about the world. Some challenged my Christianity directly. Others probably couldn't have cared less what I believed. More importantly, I discovered something embarrassingly simple: different people weren't dangerous. Sometimes they were kinder to me than the people who believed all the correct things.
None of that made me abandon Christianity. If anything, I dug in. I discovered apologetics and devoured books by Josh McDowell and just about anyone else explaining why Christianity was intellectually defensible. I read the Left Behind novels and became convinced Jesus was probably returning soon. I worked and volunteered in churches. As a teenager, I even tried organizing Christian events. Somewhere along the way I became convinced God was calling me to ministry, and once I believed that, I began constructing my entire future around it.
I had doubts. Plenty of them. By eighteen, I had read most of the Bible, although 'read' and 'understood' are two very different things. There were passages that didn't fit neatly together and theological answers that seemed to create more problems than they solved. But doubt wasn't a reason to leave. Doubt was a problem to solve. I believed Christianity was true, and if it was true, there had to be answers.
I would spend the next decade looking for them.
After high school, I floated around for a while. I wasn't a particularly good student and hadn't exactly built the sort of academic record that inspires universities to throw money at you. I worked sales jobs and eventually made my way to Dallas Baptist University in 2004. I started in history and moved toward philosophy, where I found the questions that would dominate much of my twenties. I also began noticing things about Christianity as an institution that bothered me. At DBU, someone once explained to me quite openly that a worship service was a performance, that, of course, it manipulated emotion, and that there was nothing wrong with that because the manipulation was being used for the right purpose. That answer stayed with me.
I left DBU because I ran out of money. After spending a year working as an assistant debate and forensics coach, I ended up at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary's undergraduate program in Texas. In 2006, I also started a Christian website called The Christian Watershed, which I would run until 2018. I wrote about Christianity because that was what I did. I had been writing stories since childhood—mostly terrible Star Wars fiction when I was young—but theology, philosophy, and apologetics had become the subjects I couldn't stop thinking about.
At Southwestern, I worked as a research assistant to intelligent design theorist William Dembski. 'Research assistant' sounds somewhat grander than the reality. I helped around the house, maintained his website, moderated online discussions, and did whatever needed to be done. But it put me close to the intelligent design movement at a time when I genuinely believed in it. It also gave me one of my earliest serious confrontations with the difference between defending an idea and defending an institution.
During the fight over evolution in Kansas, I said publicly that the anti-evolution effort was, in part, a backdoor attempt to introduce intelligent design. This managed to piss off people on both sides of the debate, which is usually a good sign that you've stumbled onto something interesting. What disturbed me wasn't that people disagreed with me. It was realizing that people I thought possessed the truth were willing to be less than transparent about how they advanced it. That made no sense to me. If we had the truth, then say it. Why would truth need a marketing strategy that hid what we were actually doing?
Academically, Southwestern was rigorous. In philosophy courses, we didn't simply read someone explaining Plato. We read Plato. We read Aristotle. We worked through primary sources and learned how arguments were constructed. The program was intended to ground us deeply in the Christian faith, and for a while it did exactly that for me. I became better at apologetics. I learned the arguments. I could defend what I believed against most objections thrown at me. Unfortunately, learning how to ask better questions also meant I got better at recognizing when the answers weren't working.
The institutional side became harder to ignore. I watched sincere people get pushed aside while people with the right families, connections, personalities, or appearance found doors opening for them. One church promised to help pay for my education and, when the bill arrived, decided instead that they would pray for me. Prayer, unfortunately, was not among the payment options accepted by the bursar. None of these experiences proved Christianity false. I knew that. Christians behaving badly is not an argument against the existence of God. But I was beginning to see an uncomfortable distance between the Christianity I was studying and the institutions claiming to embody it.
Eventually I transferred to Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, where I graduated in 2014 with a degree in Christian Studies focused on philosophy of religion. By then, however, my faith had already changed dramatically. While living in Dallas, I had worked for an Eastern Orthodox family who treated me with a generosity and kindness that made me curious about their faith. I began reading the early Church Fathers. By the time I reached Southeastern, I had worked through translations of many of the earliest Christian writings and found myself drawn further and further toward Orthodoxy. In my final year at a Southern Baptist seminary, I converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. If evangelical Christianity couldn't answer my questions, I thought perhaps I simply needed to go further back.
So I did.
I was Eastern Orthodox from roughly 2013 to 2016. For a while, it gave me somewhere to stand. The historical continuity, the liturgy, the Church Fathers, and a theology less obsessed with reducing salvation to a formula answered some of the problems I had with evangelical Christianity. But the questions kept coming. The problem of evil became increasingly difficult for me to reconcile with the God I believed in. Orthodoxy itself seemed to be becoming more politically conservative, and Christianity more broadly was aligning itself with Donald Trump and the American far right. I had spent years being taught that truth and character were non-negotiable. Watching Christians discover that both could apparently be negotiated in exchange for political power did something to me.
I moved to New York in 2016 for work. And then, somewhat anticlimactically, I stopped going to church. There wasn't a dramatic confrontation. Nobody threw me out. I just didn't want to go anymore. The last proper Christian service I attended was Pascha in Raleigh in 2016. In New York I worked at a bank in finance, made friends, traveled, met some famous people, and got to experience a life much larger than the Christian world in which I had grown up. Meanwhile, the theological questions continued quietly underneath everything else.
I returned to Wichita in 2019 for a business opportunity. In 2020, my father was diagnosed with Stage III esophageal cancer, and whatever plans I had made disappeared almost immediately. I moved in to help take care of him. He fought cancer for four years. He went into remission, survived complications and surgeries that very nearly killed him, and continued fighting through one medical crisis after another. In May 2024, he died from complications related to the treatment.
Somewhere during those years, I stopped believing in God. I can't give you the date because there wasn't one. There was no dramatic night when I shook my fist at heaven and declared myself an unbeliever. There was just an accumulation of suffering—personal suffering, suffering I saw around me, suffering throughout history—and eventually I could no longer reconcile it with the God I had spent most of my life defending. The problem of evil finally became a problem I couldn't apologize away. That doesn't mean I've concluded there can be no God. Today I consider myself an agnostic, a pluralist, and a humanist. I'm open to God, spirituality, an afterlife, or realities we don't yet understand. I'm simply no longer willing to pretend certainty where I don't have it.
For much of my thirties, I also stopped writing fiction. I had always been a writer, but after leaving Christianity, there was a period when I wasn't sure what I had to say anymore. The Christian Watershed ended in 2018 after twelve years. I coded websites, worked in sales and customer service, took whatever work I needed to get by, and lived through several years in which survival tended to take priority over creativity. The stories were still there. I just wasn't writing them.
Years earlier, while visiting friends in Florida, I had come up with an idea for a novel about a young seminarian whose carefully constructed Christian world begins collapsing after he becomes friends with the kinds of people he'd been taught to save. I sat on the idea for years. Then, in 2026, I finally opened a document and started writing The Dirty Mermaid. About three weeks later, I had a novel. I followed it with The Wrong Kind of Revival, a novel about a Southern Baptist church planter whose congregation begins to thrive precisely as his understanding of Christianity becomes less orthodox. The books had apparently been building somewhere inside me all along. Once I started writing again, they poured out.
That is the place I write from now. I don't write about Christianity because I spent a few years around Christians and decided I didn't like them. I was one. I believed it. I worked in churches, studied apologetics, attended Christian universities and seminaries, worked inside the intelligent design movement, read the Church Fathers, changed traditions, defended the faith, doubted it, tried to rebuild it, and finally watched it come apart over a process that lasted roughly twenty years. I know what it is like to believe, and I know what it costs when belief stops working. My fiction lives somewhere inside that tension. I'm less interested in telling readers what they should believe than in writing about people trying to be honest when the answers they've inherited are no longer enough. Because after spending most of my life searching for certainty, I've become much more interested in what we do when certainty is gone.