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Will James is the author of Greatly Disappointed: A Memoir of Inherited Faith, a memoir about growing up Seventh-day Adventist and confronting the unraveling of an inherited religious certainty.
He is an attorney and the voice behind Altar’d Thoughts, a growing platform where fellow sojourners follow his honest and often humorous reflections on Adventism, deconstruction, and the uneven road toward spiritual clarity. What began as a personal attempt to process his own story has resonated widely with others navigating belief, grief, and the spiritual mystery.
A lifelong Seventh-day Adventist, Will served as an ordained deacon, worship musician, and contract estate planner in both a regional and state conference context, immersed not only in the theology but in the structures that sustained it. His debut memoir, Greatly Disappointed, chronicles that immersion and the slow excavation out of it: the cost of cultivating certainty and the courage required to release it.
By day, Will practices law, having worked in both criminal defense and transactional practice; two fields that require clarity, nuance, and the ability to hold competing narratives at once. That tension informs his writing about fear, perfectionism, identity, and what it means to let go of a God shaped by anxiety.
He lives in Edmond, Oklahoma, with his wife, two children, a dog, and a turtle.
Still recalculating
Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite
In Greatly Disappointed, Will James revisits the Seventh-day Adventist faith inherited in childhood, when belief in an imminent Second Coming made certainty part of ordinary life. Decades later, questions about teachings once accepted as Truth send the author back to the church’s beginnings, tracing the beliefs inherited there. Reading Scripture beside Adventist history changes the way familiar doctrines look, especially as certainty begins giving way to questions about interpretation. What starts within one denomination gradually reaches a larger philosophical question about how any person decides that inherited belief is true. The memoir follows that reconsideration through adulthood as the author examines what remains when religious certainty no longer supplies every answer, searching for a way of understanding faith where questions can exist beside what remains meaningful.
Will James’s Greatly Disappointed is an exceptional philosophical memoir, and the author writes about inherited religion with honesty that keeps every question connected to lived experience. I loved the childhood story of sharing leftover communion wafers with his friend Maurice during a long Sabbath service, where two hungry boys become a thoughtful way to examine what grace meant in the church that raised them. That ability to make difficult religious ideas understandable continues through the philosophical discussion. The author puts legal training to excellent use when explaining the Investigative Judgment through a parole board deciding whether a person already judged guilty is safe to release, turning an unfamiliar Adventist doctrine into something easy to picture. Well-written and inspiring, readers looking for philosophical memoirs about inherited religion will embrace this.
