Robert Langan
Robert Langan

About the work

What this is, who is doing it, and why it is built the way it is.

Now airing
Before Ruin
Sundays at 11:00 PM on the Now Network
The Work

A teaching series and the research under it.

Before Ruin is a weekly half-hour on the Now Network. Each episode takes a single question in the biblical text and follows it as far as the evidence goes — naming the sources, showing the original language, and marking plainly where the claim stops.

Behind the broadcast is a search tool at beforeruin.app that anyone can use to check the same texts I am working from. That is deliberate. A teaching that cannot be checked is a teaching you have to take on the teacher’s word, and the whole point of this one is that you should not have to.

Every episode is built so that a viewer with an ordinary Bible and an internet connection can go and verify it without asking me anything.
Who
Robert Langan
Robert Langan

A retired electrician who kept asking.

I spent a working life as a union electrician. That trade taught me the one idea everything else here rests on: a thing operated outside its design does not argue with you, it just fails — later, and somewhere else. I have never found a place that stops being true.

I am currently completing a BS in Interdisciplinary Studies at SUNY Empire State University, in a concentration of my own design: bridging science, religion, and cognition. The research behind the series comes out of that work.

I am not ordained, I am not selling a doctrine, and I do not represent a denomination. I am a researcher who reads the primary sources and shows the work. What I claim, I source. What I cannot source, I say so.

Method

How the work is governed.

Seven working rules constrain how I am allowed to reach a conclusion, and six things I will not do regardless of how convenient they would be. Both are published in full — not as a statement of belief, but as something you can hold me to.

Read the method →