What It Is Like to Be Dying, with Jeff Schloss

Against persistent fear of death, mortality avoidance, and the vices that emerge from terror management, this episode offers a personal testimony of a Christian experience of dying.

With scientific precision, disarming honesty, and immense gratitude for life, biologist Jeff Schloss offers an intimate, firsthand account of his recent diagnosis of an extremely rare terminal neurological disease: multiple system atrophy (MSA).

His doctors put the prognosis plainly: “It is terminal, it is incurable, and it’s rapidly progressive.”

A longtime and beloved Westmont College biology professor and senior scholar at BioLogos, Schloss offers speaks directly to the experience of dying—as he encounters each new week of this rapidly progressive disease.

He reconsiders the meaning of a "good death": increased gratitude and awareness of gift, the reality of pain, the loss of surfing and guitar-playing, the sacredness of family, and the surprising nearness of Christ as everything else falls away.

A profound witness to Christian attitudes about life and death, Schloss seeks not a hero’s death, but a daily, humble life-giving commerce with Christ.

Schloss revisits a life that began in a nonreligious Jewish refugee family and pivoted through a dramatic conversion as a college-dropout surf bum in Hawaii. He traces what has changed, and what hasn't, now that death is no longer an abstraction but a daily fact in his body.

With pastoral care and hope, Mark Labberton explores with Schloss what it means to experience dying rather than simply anticipate it, the grief of losing fifty years of surfing and guitar-playing to pain and paralysis, the gift of Simone Weil's writing on suffering, the Heidelberg Catechism’s opening words on “our only comfort in life and in death,” and the difference between the thrill of surfing and the sacredness of family and commerce with Christ.

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Episode Highlights

• I knew from the second grade that I wanted to be a scientist. I was out collecting butterflies and dragonflies and looking through microscopes at all sorts of things that I couldn't believe were there.
• As we were talking, it just occurred to me ... he either had what I wanted, or he was clinically crazy.
• It is terminal, it is incurable, and it's rapidly progressive ... the process of dying I find it fascinating ... It's not fun, but it is fascinating.
• She wasn't sad just for herself, I'm gonna lose you. And she wasn't sad empathetically just for me, so sorry for you. It was a joint sadness that the life we had hoped to share together, we are not gonna have.
• The things that are most life giving are out of reach ... I've come to see it's actually not true. The things that have been delightful are out of reach ... the thing that is most life giving, and that is commerce with Christ.
• I think it was the single most thrilling day of my entire life ... I said, no, those weren't thrilling, those were sacred.
• I don't want to market this season. I'm not looking for a hero's death, or any kind of publicly attended death.
• I would have never guessed that in this home stretch, my son and wife could carry me up the slopes of Yosemite Valley.

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About Jeff Schloss

Jeff Schloss has spent four decades at the intersection of evolutionary biology and Christian theology. Now retired as Distinguished Professor of Biology at Westmont College, he continues as senior scholar at BioLogos, working alongside Francis Collins for more than fifteen years. He co-edited “The Believing Primate: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Reflections on the Origin of Religion” and “Evolution and Ethics: Human Morality in Biological and Religious Perspective,” a Templeton Science-Religion Book of Distinction winner. He has lectured at Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard.

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Helpful Links and Resources

• Jeff Schloss’s page at BioLogos, where he serves as senior scholar: https://biologos.org/people/jeffrey-schloss
• Finding Faith: An Evolutionary Biologist Shares His Story, Schloss's own video testimony for BioLogos: https://biologos.org/resources/finding-faith-an-evolutionary-biologist-shares-his-story
• Tackling the Divide Between Science and Faith, Westmont Magazine's profile of Schloss's career: https://www.westmont.edu/magazine/spring-2025/tackling-divide-between-science-and-faith
• The Believing Primate: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Reflections on the Origin of Religion, Schloss's co-edited volume: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-believing-primate-9780199597086
• Evolution and Ethics: Human Morality in Biological and Religious Perspective, Schloss's Templeton Award-winning co-edited volume: https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802826954/evolution-and-ethics/
• Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, source of the Augustinian science concept Schloss references: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/where-the-conflict-really-lies-9780199812097
• Heidelberg Catechism, Lord's Day 1, the confession Labberton reads to close the episode: https://www.heidelberg-catechism.com/en/lords-days/1.html
• Multiple System Atrophy overview, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke: https://www.ninds.nih.gov/health-information/disorders/multiple-system-atrophy

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Show Notes

• Childhood in a nonreligious German Jewish refugee family
• Grandfather taken by the Gestapo, relatives lost in the Holocaust
• Early love of butterflies, dragonflies, and microscopes
• A sixth-grade encounter with Confucius sparks a love of philosophy
• College philosophy major searching for purpose and for God
• Dropping out, becoming a surf bum in Hawaii
• A stranger's dinner invitation becomes a turning point
• A late-night prayer of surrender met by an unmistakable presence
• Grad school pairing biology, philosophy, and the study of altruism
• Alvin Plantinga's Augustinian science and reading creation with a map
• Decades as senior scholar at BioLogos alongside Francis Collins
• Why church and science drifted apart over vaccines and politics
• Science as a reliable path to facts, not truth itself
• A new diagnosis: rare, terminal, rapidly progressive neurological disease—multiple systems atrophy (MSA)
• Doctors estimate an average of three years, with wide variation
• The difference between studying death as a biologist versus the real-time experience of dying
• A spouse's grief for a shared future that will not happen
• Losing surfing and guitar-playing as an unplanned kind of fasting
• Pain described as systemic, exhausting, disorienting
• Cognitive decline and dark humor about it
• Distinguishing what is thrilling from what is truly sacred
• The ache of no longer being able to research and create
• A flicker of despair met by a choice not to despair
• Wanting a real death, not a hero's death
• A wish to thank former students and colleagues before the end
• Not wanting to become a burden to family
• Giving God all of one's heart, without earning salvation by it
• Bonhoeffer's costly grace versus cheap grace
• Gratitude over entitlement as the ground of faith
• Simone Weil on suffering as a place grace can work
• A closing blessing and the Heidelberg Catechism's opening words
• Carried up the slopes of Yosemite by a son and a wife

#ConversingPodcast #MarkLabberton #JeffSchloss #FaithAndScience #BioLogos #MultipleSystemAtrophy #Mortality #ChristianFaith #Westmont #Gratitude

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Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.